The Violet Light Technique is the simplest practice I teach. 5 minutes. No equipment. No belief required. Just intention and a colour your nervous system already responds to.
Why violet. The colour sits at the highest visible frequency of light. Spiritual traditions across the world associate it with transformation and clearing. Whether or not you accept the spiritual framing, the practice works because it gives your attention somewhere steady to go. The colour is the anchor.
That last sentence is the whole mechanism, so it is worth slowing down on.
Attention goes somewhere whether you direct it or not. Left alone it goes to the unfinished conversation, the thing you said in the meeting, tomorrow morning.
A visualisation does not empty your attention. Nothing empties your attention. It gives it a job that is simple enough to actually hold.
A colour is a very good job. It has no words in it, so there is nothing to argue with, and it is vague enough that you cannot get it wrong.
The practice. Find a chair. Close your eyes. Imagine a soft violet light beginning at the crown of your head and slowly moving down through your body. As it passes through, it dissolves anything that is not yours to carry. Other people's stress. Today's residue. The thing the colleague said that you have not let go of. Let it move all the way through to your feet and into the ground.
Do this for 5 minutes. Once a day, ideally morning. More if the day is heavy.
A few practical things, because this is where people quietly give up.
You will not see violet. Most people do not see anything, and the ones who do often see it for a second and then lose it. Seeing is not the point. The intention to move something downward and out is the point.
If you cannot picture a colour at all, use the sensation instead. Warmth moving down. Weight moving down. Your hand resting on the top of your head and the idea travelling from there.
Downward matters more than the colour does. Most of us spend the day with everything pulled up into the head and the shoulders. The direction of travel is the instruction.
Your mind will wander, repeatedly, and that is not a failure. Noticing it has wandered and bringing it back to wherever the light had got to is not an interruption of the practice. It is the practice.
If 5 minutes feels long, do 2. A short one you finish is better than a long one you abandon.
Where it fits in a day. Morning, before anything has been read, is best, because you are setting the tone rather than repairing it.
But the version I use most is the unglamorous one. In the car before going in. In the 2 minutes between a difficult call and the next thing. Standing at the sink with the tap running.
It is also the only thing I know of that is useful at the end of a day spent with other people's difficulty. You can be perfectly fine and still be carrying the residue of a room, and going to bed with that still on you is how you wake up tired after 8 hours.
What gets in the way. Usually 2 things.
The first is deciding it is too simple to be worth doing. A practice with nothing to buy and nothing to learn feels like it cannot be the real one. It is.
The second is trying to use it on something enormous. This is a daily clearing, not a tool for the hardest thing that ever happened to you. Point it at the ordinary accumulation, which is what it is for, and let the big things have their own time and the right support.
What you might notice. The first week, possibly nothing dramatic. By the second week, often a subtle shift in how easily things settle. By the third week, you may find you reach for it the way you might reach for water when you are thirsty.
The shifts people describe are small and specific rather than sweeping. The shoulders come down without being told. A conversation that would have stayed with them all evening is finished by about 7. They notice they have stopped rehearsing.
I would not promise you any of those. I would say they are the ones that come up most often, and that noticing is the skill, not achieving.
The other thing worth saying is that this does not require you to believe anything. Several of the people who have got the most out of it began by telling me it was nonsense and doing it anyway because it took 5 minutes.
Scepticism is not an obstacle here. You can hold the whole frame at arm's length and the practice still does what it does, because what it does is give your attention somewhere to go and your body a direction to send things.
If you want a way of telling whether it is working, do not look for the practice itself to feel powerful. It almost never does.
Look at the hour afterwards, and specifically at how long it takes you to get irritated by something small.
That gap is the most honest measure I know of, and it widens before anything else does.
And if a fortnight goes by and you have not done it, do not start again on Monday. Do it now, for 1 minute, standing up, with your eyes open if you are somewhere you cannot close them.
This is the foundational daily practice in my 3-month coaching programme. It is also a perfectly complete practice on its own. Start with it. Build everything else around it.
More like this
Building a daily practice that you'll actually do, including the times you won't. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/building-a-daily-practice-that-you-ll-actually-do-including-the-times-you-won-t
Energy clearing for the sceptics, 3 things that work even if you don't believe they will. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/energy-clearing-for-the-sceptics-three-things-that-work-even-if-you-don-t-believ
The Nervous System Decoder, what it is and why it is free. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/the-nervous-system-decoder-what-it-is-and-why-it-is-free
If you want to talk about where this fits, I'm at anna@annalouoflondon.com or on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/447738470156.