I think Rumi best captures the very nature of The Yellow in this simple sentence: “The soul is here for its own joy.”

But of course, if the word “joy” said it all for this essential energy, we wouldn’t need to call it The Yellow. You can get closer to the meaning when you consider that we experience The Yellow through our wonder and delight. We open to it when we say “I wish” or “I want” with a light and playful heart. We engage it through our curiosity and by following our heart’s desire.

The Yellow inspires any creative process, provides enthusiasm on any real adventure, and shows up as our own open presence in any Lucid Moment.

Getting Curious About The Yellow

The best way to begin to understand the subtle energies of The Yellow is to fasten your wide-open mind onto a small child at play. Watch her explore her world. She knows what she wants with her whole heart, and she goes right for it. A child knows Joy up close and personal because she knows the pure pleasure of enjoyment from the inside out.

On the way to becoming adults we lose contact with wonder, delight and heart’s desire. We get conditioned to see things in certain ways, and we build a lot of self-protecting mind locks that become barriers to the subtle energies.

Some of the specific blocks to The Yellow include our attachments, our fear of disappointment, all the ways we hold our feelings back and our fear of self-expression. One of the biggest blocks to The Yellow is ordinary old garden-variety doubt.

How to Invite The Yellow Back

Essential states pour into the open spaces that invite them. In other words, we can’t force Joy to show up. But we can open ourselves to The Yellow, and some ways to do that include:

• Practicing being present to the moment.
• Engaging our curiosity as a way to dissolve blocks to The Yellow.
• Rediscovering our true heart’s desire.

What’s your experience with The Yellow? Are there ways you know you block joy?

It seems that when Magellan sailed the coast of South America into the straits that now bear his name, the natives didn’t see him coming. Mind you, the heroic Portuguese explorer took five ships crewed by 260 seamen on this epic voyage that crossed the last great unknown ocean. How could five ships be invisible?

Well, the natives didn’t see the ships because it was the early 16th century and they’d never seen ships before. They saw only what they already knew. The billowing sails blended into cloud formations, the hulls rose and fell into the sea’s natural waves.

Remarkable to imagine, isn’t it?

Couldn’t happen now, though. Could it? Not in the 21st century, certainly. I mean, the world’s all been mapped now, hasn’t it?

And then again, maybe not. After all, we experience the world with the senses we know–sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing. What if something else exists right here that’s unknown to our ordinary ways? Are ships sailing by that we’re calling clouds because we don’t understand?

I think so. But what we’re not seeing is not physical. It’s spiritual. It’s experiential. It’s our essential presence, which is always there even when we don’t know it.

Open Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight

On an everyday ordinary level, an open secret is something you just don’t get. It’s hidden to you. But since other people seem to get it, it must be visible to them.

My favorite example of this phenomenon is my vast collection of diet books. Every one of those books represents at least one person who got the “it” that made them thin. Meanwhile, many of the rest of us are still groping around for the key that unlocks the vault to the Big Secret. In other words, we still don’t get “it.” And it’s right there in plain sight.

A Lucid Moment is an open secret suddenly revealed. Just because we didn’t get the aha! ten minutes (or ten years) before doesn’t mean it wasn’t always available to us. Did Rip van Winkle cause the world to begin by waking up?

The Five Subtle Secrets

There are five essential qualities that we need when we undertake–as true soul work–any creative project, relationship or inner development. I call them the Five Subtle Secrets, but they are taught one way or another in all major spiritual traditions from Adam to Zen.

Although I am not a Sufi, I love the Sufi way of illuminating these subtle qualities through color:

• Yellow is the Joy essence
• Red is the Strength essence
• White is the Will essence
• Black is the Peace essence
• Green is the Compassion essence

These five subtle energies symbolized by the colors are essential aspects of our true nature, our true self. They are always present. Always.

When we’re awake to them, these subtleties arise in our experience as needed. But they seem to be held secret from us because we don’t remember they’re there when we actually need them. We once knew as children, but as our personalities developed we lost touch.

The good news is that the blocks to the subtle energies (our habitual ways of being, our defensive structures, our fears) can be used as gateways into the particular essential experiences that they hide.

I’ll tell you more about how these essential qualities arise in us and how they can help us “get what we just don’t get” in future posts. Meanwhile, I wonder. What seems like an open secret to you in your life?