I caught an article in the local paper about the growing popularity of adult coloring books. At the time it was written the number one and two best sellers on Amazon were adult coloring books.

This made me smile.

Perhaps because for me there is nostalgia attached to the act of coloring. Seems I wasn’t the only one! But who knew that this was something that’d been re-designed for adults?

I bring up this topic today because I joined in this craze and picked up an adult coloring book: Balance (Angie’s extreme stress menders volume one) off of Amazon.

I admit that I was pretty excited for it to arrive. When it did, I ripped open the padded envelope and flipped through the array of kaleidoscope images and immediately my mind filled with color.

Unplug & Get Creative

I got to work pretty much right away and was hooked. Everything else seemed to drift away. All the worries I’d been harboring lost focus.

It was easy for me to see why this is a growing trend. Such a great stress reliever! In case you missed it, stress is a big endo flare factor. So the more stress relieving activities we can implement, the better.

One of the first psychologists to apply coloring as a relaxation technique was Carl G. Jüng in the early 20th century. When coloring we stimulate different parts of our brains that are involved with creativity and relaxation.

Coloring helped me unplug, get quiet, get creative and tuned into the moment. The act of coloring took me back to being a child, before all the stress and worry of the world filled in.

The different combinations of colors stimulate different energies inside of us and can very much reflect our moods. If you’ve ever dug deeper into the logistics of chakras then you know that those energies translate to colors.

When our chakras are out of balance then focusing on certain colors can help. When we are drawn to certain colors then this could be a subconscious message of what we need to focus on to regain proper energetic flow and healing at a greater level.

Interestingly, I’m finding that I’m continually drawn to oranges and yellows – chakras very much related to digestion and reproduction (areas very much impacted by endometriosis).

In Stillness Comes Inspiration

While I let my mind rest from the clutter and junk of the day and stimulated my senses with different colors and balanced patterns, I found that new creative thoughts started to fill my brain.

I bought a new journal to spew out the words that have been beautifully flowing from my pen to paper. And I’ve got nearly 7,000 words into my novel 🙂

See… coloring took me back to the time of childhood where my primary focuses were on creating things. And that included books!

From a very early age I wrote books and gave them to the members of my family for their birthdays or Christmas. Some of the early ones are hilarious, but I tell ya they were remembered, LOL. I was just talking about one with my Mom on Mother’s Day and we were just cracking up.

On the Positive Side?

My point, is that writing has been flowing through me since I was very young, but outside of my weekly posts here I realized that I haven’t been doing it enough. I believe that my stress in the weeks preceding my coloring book arrival were due to the fact that I wasn’t creating enough.

Once I took the time to express my creative energies and drift back to childhood, I just wanted to stay in this space. I wanted it to grow.

So into the novel my energy goes. I’m writing a supernatural love story. Excited to see where it goes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to coloring 🙂

Are you addicted too? Would love to hear from you…

Much Love,

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