Tricia Sharkey: Co-Create A Fulfilling Life With Colour

“If you have a colour that you love, you might want to put it in your décor so that all the qualities of those colours support you when you get home. “

Tricia Sharkey uses Colour Therapy, Massage Therapy and Energy Healing to help those around her. She is a licenced Hay House Heal Your Life Workshop Leader and Life Coach, Teacher and Mentor. Tricia is also one of five founding members of the Drop Into Life™ system, where the natural properties of individual colours and essential oils are united in a way that can empower you to transform your life. As well as being a celebrant, she has just published a book, The Kaleidoscope of Color: Understanding Your Life Through Color, which is as much a personal journey as it is an everyday guide for working with colour. With her diverse skills and background, Tricia is all about authenticity, love and helping others to discover themselves anew.

After a life-changing experience with a colour bottle reading, Tricia realised that there is a common language we all speak, irrespective of race, location, or situation, and that is how we respond to and communicate using colour. From playing touch footy and partying, the passing of her mother moved Tricia to embark on a personal and spiritual journey, helping her to embrace love, positivity, and colour into her life. Now she enjoys helping other people to discover themselves through colour, to find their true identity and purpose in life, and shows them how they can become the happiest versions of themselves.

“People can only change when they are ready, and life will deal you stuff so you can change, and if you go with the flow of life’s events, then life becomes easy. But if you resist that change, it’s so painful because you hold that in the body and become stagnant. Imagine being the same for the whole of your life and never moving through it”.

Kim: Let’s start by asking, who is Tricia Sharkey in your own words?

Tricia: As a person, having reached the age I am now, it’s really about empowering people. I find more than anything; I’m someone who holds space for others to discover themselves. I’m a very loving woman, and I have always had a huge capacity to love people and my family. I think that’s what life’s all about, that giving and receiving of love.

Kim: You’ve had an incredible life. You’ve gone from playing touch football to now, where you’ve just launched a book that highlights the importance of working with colour to heal ourselves. How did you go from one extreme to the other?

Tricia: It’s a funny story in one way, but it’s not really funny. I’ve always had an interest in different things because I’ve had little happenings throughout my life. I remember once seeing my grandmother come to my door, and she had two little girls, but of course, my grandmother had passed away. I’ve always noticed signs and have had very vivid dreams, and then they come true, or similar things like that. I’ve never taken any actual notice, and I played touch footy for a long time. We were always travelling, and I loved nothing better than being in a group of people, playing sport and having a good drink and a celebration after the win, or the loss, it didn’t matter.

My mum started to get ill when I was in my 30’s, and around the age of 35, I began to question, “is this life?”. There had to be more to life, and with my mother’s ailing health, I also started to question why she was so ill because she was so young. She was 56 when she finally passed in 2000. It was pretty dramatic for me; mum passed away, I got married, and I moved to Alice Springs, which was like arriving on the planet Mars, which I write about in my book.

Kim: Did it change the depth of your relationships with those closest to you?

Tricia: Absolutely, I have such compassion and acceptance now. I understood why they did what they did in the way they were doing things, so it definitely changed my relationships. Of course, when I did start crossing over into colour, I lost some people along the way because people wanted me to stay the same, and I was evolving. I’m still the same person, and I still have everything that I was then, but I didn’t want to talk about other people anymore. I didn’t want to hear racist comments about people’s backgrounds, skin colour, or religion.

We’re all one as a race, and I understand that we are different, but we are also the same, and as I said, the rainbow expresses it to me. There was a deepening in respect, and I accepted others for who they were. I was never looking at how they could change until they were ready.

Kim: How important do you think it is for people to open themselves to change and expand in their own lives?

Tricia: I think the most important thing to understand is that the only person who can change is you, and as you change, you give others permission around you to change. We know that change is the only constant in life, so life is always going to change, but sometimes it isn’t easy if you’ve been wired a certain way.

As a touch footballer and partying, my friends were used to having me like that. So, when I started to change, like wanting to meditate or believing in angels, I became separated from them because they loved the comfort zone being the same.

Kim: What made you step into the realm of becoming a practitioner who works with coloured bottles?

Tricia: I wanted to share what I was learning with others. It was like finding out about sliced bread and wanting everyone to know about it. One thing I can tell you is that not everybody wants sliced bread, so that was hard at the start because I was so exuberant about it; I just wanted everyone to know what I knew.

What made me transition into developing what I have through Drop into Life and then writing my book The Kaleidoscope of Color: Understanding Your Life Through Color was that I wanted the information to be accessible for everyday people. Colour is non-intrusive; you either like a particular colour or you don’t. The colour you love the most will represent the aspects within yourself that you love. Then, the colour you have an aversion to is the parts you don’t like, either about yourself or what has happened in your life.

It’s to empower people. I want them to have a simple tool that they can utilize every day, and the best thing about colour is that it’s universal. The colours are the same all across the world, and this is wonderful to help us understand people who can’t communicate.

Kim: Can you give an example of what orange could represent in somebody?

Tricia: So orange sits down on the sacral chakra just below the tummy area, which is connected to the bowel and reproduction system. But for me, it’s known as the relationship centre and is very much colour about community. Orange would be important for people who are connected to their family. They would be jovial and have a sense of fun, and want to have a good belly laugh and enjoy life. It’s a great colour to have at a dinner party because you’re going to be assured that people will eat because it’s stimulating the stomach area.

If it was negative and they couldn’t stand orange, it may be that they’ve had gut shocks, and there may be trauma there. We feel a lot through our tummy, and bad news comes straight into that area, and we feel sick almost immediately.

Orange is also connected to the past and past events, so when there’s a blockage there, it can pertain to shock or trauma that is unaddressed and being held onto. If you’ve gone through shock, though, it’s a colour that will support you because it’s got a lot of vibrancy. It’s also got the yellow in the orange, and the yellow helps bring sunlight back into our lives without it being too bright or cheery. It’s also got the red that will bring back the vitality and energy lost from going through a trauma.

Kim: Let’s speak about your book, The Kaleidoscope of Color: Understanding Your Life Through Colour, that you briefly touched on before. What first inspired the idea of it?

Tricia: I was in Bali teaching as a guest practitioner at a healing spa, and one night I had the biggest dream that I had to write a book, and at that point, it was called the Rainbow Bridge. If you think about the term bridge, it is to bridge you over something and gets you from one point to another, and I could see how colour could be that. That’s where it started. I started to write a few things down, and then it became clearer that this was a book about understanding the effects of colour and talking about the kaleidoscope of life, which ended up being the title. If you think about a kaleidoscope, it’s with one simple turn that life can change in an instant, then we’re into another colour, another phase in our life.

Kim: What would you say to somebody equally inspired to birth something that has come to them in a dream or a download?

Tricia: I think to follow your intuition, explore it, and it was an exploration sort for me and wasn’t really until the last six months of 2021 that I actually got into it. I had thought, “I can’t do this”, and I believe this is what stops many people; you have to get over the fear of what other people are going to think of you.

In my book, every colour I explained through my own life and how that colour was playing out. So there’s a personal story, so it was me putting my heart out there. It’s open to people to criticize, but I had to overcome that fear because the urge to help people is stronger. If I can help one person and then that helps another person, I die happy.

So I think that’s the thing, follow your heart, follow your instincts, and do what makes you happy. We all have a voice, and we’re allowed to express it, and how you do that is up to you.

Kim: You also co-created a beautiful colour card deck and essential oils. Can we talk about them?

Tricia: Along with some other colleagues, I developed the Drop into Life Color Cards and Essential Oils. You know how with oracle cards, you might pick a card for the day? That’s similar to these cards. We have included a poster with a tree on it, and on that trees, there are coloured drops. You choose a colour based on how you might feel for the day. The back of that colour card explains what you need to drop into and what you need to drop out of. So say it was blue; we need to drop into trust and have faith in what’s going on. Blue is also connected to the throat chakra. It may be related to communication, being able to express it rather than being stuck or closed off and nnot talking or not communicating. Because when we isolate ourselves, it can lead to heavier feelings, from feeling a little blue to depression.

Kim: How can we begin to work with colour in our own life?

Tricia: Find out what you love. What are the colours that make your soul sing? What colours make you feel alive, and what are the colours that make you feel not so good? Explore what it is about that colour because sometimes that’s been conditioned.

Each colour is important, so how can you bring it in? If you have a colour that you love, you might want to put it in your décor so that all the qualities of those colours support you when you get home. In my book, I write a lot about using colour positively, so there are lots of tips about using colour.

Kim: Last question Tricia, what is your fierce truth?

Tricia: That’s a big question. For me, it’s about authenticity and about showing up and being your true self. My sister-in-law always says to me, “You know Tricia, you’ll never die wondering because you always speak up”. I always speak my truth so that I don’t lay awake at night wondering if what they meant was what was said. So I always ask. The other thing is that I always speak my truth because when I do, I know whoever’s standing in front of me they’re real, and if they walk away, that’s okay; they’re not meant to be in my life or circle. My fierce truth is about speaking the truth and being authentic with yourself.

“Find out what you love. What are the colours that make your soul sing? What colours make you feel alive, and what are the colours that make you feel not so good?”