Sometimes known as aura therapy this is a type of energy work where the practitioner perceives some imbalance in the aura, sometimes using various equipment, and places their hands on or near the patient in an attempt to redress it. A few healers, such as some exponents of qi gong , use their own energy but it is much more usual to channel energy from external source such as the earth, God etc. as used in Spiritual healing or Reiki. This has the dual advantages of not depleting the practitioner and lessening the chance of the practitioner taking on any of the negative energy of the patient. Another method of balancing the aura is for the therapist to use his or her powers of visualisation. The therapist might visualise a ‘soothing blue’ going into and transforming an ‘angry red’ in a client’s aura or simple visualising energy flooding into the patient and ‘shoring up’ any week spots.
In much esoteric literature the human body is made up of various bodies in addition to the physical body. The four ‘densest’ of these, the ‘astral’, ‘etheric’, mental and emotional bodies overlap the physical body slightly and it might be these that are the main constituents of the aura or ‘energy field’ around a person’s body. There also seems to be a direct connection between the aura and the chakras, so for instance if someone’s aura appeared to be somewhat ‘top heavy’ it might indicate that they were ‘insufficiently grounded’ or had an underactive or blocked root chakra’
The concept of the aura has been around for many thousands of years. Depictions of figures with light emanating out of them have been discovered in Aboriginal cave paintings and Native American totem poles. The halo in early Christian art is taken by many to be an expression of the aura and there are many hundreds of thousands of people today who claim to be able to see them.
Even those who cannot see the aura can sometimes be aware of it. If you have just met someone and feel an instant dislike for them this could be from picking something up from their auras. There are also various aids to seeing the auras such as aura goggles, which are really just coloured glasses, aura photography, a relatively new development involving a camera and a personal computer, and kirlian photography. If you are trying to see auras for the first time it can help to put someone a few feet away from a plain background and squint at them in semi-darkness paying particular attention to an area from 6 inches to a foot away from them. Failing that many people claim to be able to feel the aura. Simply running your fingers at various distances around a person’s, or animal’s, outline and ‘tuning in’ is the normal method.
The aura is said to be influenced by many things but mostly your physical health and mental state. In fact it has been suggested that this might be a mechanism for how one’s mental state might affect the physical body. For example if someone’s lifestyle were particularly mentally stressful, that stress would directly affect the mental body, since it would be overworked, and the emotional body, which would be fed up about it. This could cause an energy imbalance which would feed back to the physical body, leading to illness. Other things that are said to affect the aura are diet, environment, spirituality and even the earth’s magnetic field.
An aura balancer or therapist could detect an imbalance and diffuse it before it had a chance to harm the body, or correct the imbalance and strengthen that part of the aura that was vulnerable. Needless to say the cause of the stress should be looked at or you would only be deferring the problem. Imbalances in the aura can be perceived in many ways. The various colours of the aura all tell a tale. The various associations of the colours are generally those used in colour therapy other than lighter colours in an aura would be preferable to darker ones. A dull or dark coloured patch in the aura could be indicative of some form physical ailment. A raggedy edged aura might indicate an emotional exhaustion or a giving too much of oneself. A particularly hard edged aura could suggest that the patient might be overly defensive. Shoots of light, normally coming from the head, could indicate anger or hysteria. In her book ‘hands of light’ Barbara Ann Brennan has many pictures of auras in various imbalanced states. An important point to note, however, is that not everyone perceives the aura in exactly the same way. Furthermore, the mental state of the viewer can not only affect how he or she perceives the aura but can directly affect the patient’s aura itself.
There are a number of ‘self help’ aura cleansing procedures available. Visualising white light pouring into your body is said to have a beneficial effect on the aura, and by extension the whole body. Putting sea salt in your bath is also a tried and trusted method. There is no reason why the two should not be practised simultaneously.