Aura-Soma practitioner finds true colors

A Whim & A Prayer | Celene Adams

The Japanese word “ma,” roughly translated, means empty, which was how Aura-Soma Color Care practitioner Kyoko Tanaka felt a few years ago after her only daughter graduated from high school and left home for college.

Then approaching 50, the Japanese-born Tanaka was married, ran a graphic design business and had lived in the United States since she was 21. From the outside, her life looked full. Yet she felt a void.

“Who am I? And what am I going to do with the rest of my life?” she wondered.

Since immigrating to the United States, Tanaka had learned to speak English, drive a car and earn an income. On the outside, she appeared to be a modern Western woman. Yet on the inside, she was still trying to live up to traditional expectations of women in the East.

“My [first] name, Kyoko, means ‘respect.’ I’m supposed to be nice, quiet, polite,” she said, recalling how, as a girl growing up in Tokyo, her mother had taught her to behave.

When Tanaka herself had wanted to go to college, her mother had opposed it.

“What are you going to do with a college degree?” Tanaka recalled her saying. “You’re going to be a mother and serve your husband.”

What Tanaka wore and how well she served tea had been more important than studying, so while now she was adept at acting “like an American,” she believed her value lay in taking care of others.

Where did the roles she had learned to play stop and the real Tanaka start?

Swirling in a sea of ma, Tanaka was soul searching.

Then, one day, she happened upon a book that introduced her to the Aura-Soma Colour Care System, a method of healing and self-discovery that uses vibrantly colored plant oils combined with water at a point of equilibrium. Although separated by their molecular composition, the two substances are nevertheless poised in perfect harmony: just as Tanaka needed her Eastern past and Western present to be.

At the time, though, Tanaka didn’t understand why she found the concept so appealing. Instead, she reasoned, immersing herself in the “deep meaning” of color and “how we are so connected [to it] as energy beings” might help her graphic design business. After all some of her clients were saying the Eastern influence in her designs, although lovely, wasn’t their “cup of tea.”

Such remarks made Tanaka’s questions more pressing: Where did she belong? Some Western clients found her designs too simple, yet when she visited Japan, she knew it was no longer home.

It was then that a small advertisement in a community newspaper caught her eye: The author of the book that had so captivated her had moved to the U.S. from Japan and was teaching an Aura-Soma class in San Diego.

Studying color was “like opening my eyes to my own soul,” Tanaka said.

Yet the practice of Aura-Soma seemed so esoteric. How could she market such a seemingly foreign concept in the U.S.?

Deciding to share her dilemma with a women’s business networking group, Tanaka stood before 100 entrepreneurs, her heart racing.

“I’d been taught to blend in, not to stand out,” she said. “What would they think of my desire to embark on such a unique path?”

But as she spoke, sharing her sense of feeling adrift and her desire to find her way, it was “as if they knew exactly what I was talking about,” Tanaka said. And, afterwards, basking in the glow of the women’s standing ovation, she knew she had to go forward.

How to do so was, however, one question Tanaka would not have time to ponder. Overnight, a tsunami hit Japan, submerging her homeland. The devastating images of houses demolished and families lost drowned out what remained of her deliberations.

“If you survive, it’s only you that you have,” she realized. “What we have inside is the most important thing that we have to nurture and care for. I saw that home is inside, and I need to do what my soul yearns for.”

Tanaka yearned to find her true colors.

In an Aura-Soma consultation, clients choose different bottles, depending on which of the dazzlingly brilliant hues they are most attracted to. The concept is that one’s choices reflect who we are. As Tanaka undertook to earn her Aura-Soma practitioner’s license, she learned that each bottle represents different qualities, challenges and life circumstances: potential and gifts; elements that need to be brought into balance; present situation in relation to future goals; and the quality of energy one attracts and creates, for instance.

In her own consultation, Tanaka chose a bottle representing awakening. “The keynote is a new beginning for joy and self acceptance,” she said. She also picked the “dolphin bottle, [for] peace with a purpose … and communication from the heart, truly expressed.”

Pink with yellow, royal blue with turquoise, the bottles are now just two of a brilliant array lining her windowsill at Hera Hub, the serene and supportive women’s workspace in Mission Valley, from which she’s operated Be Your Color since 2011.

In the West, we associate emptiness with absence, but ma is a term that encompasses the potential inherent of absence. Tanaka’s ma had felt black, but it had brought depth to the colors that lie within and illuminated her way to helping others find their own message in a bottle.

Business name: Be Your Color
Business owner: Kyoko Tanaka
Business type: Color therapy / graphic design
Years in business: 1.5
Services: Group and individual consultations; business designs
Market niche: Soul searchers; business owners
Business philosophy: Look within to find the answers
Website: beyourcolor.com

—A Whim and a Prayer profiles the trials and triumphs of entrepreneurs whose businesses have evolved out of their passions and life experience. If you are a local business owner and you would like to be featured in this column, contact Celene Adams at [email protected] or visit writeyourbusinessstory.com.