Aura Sensing & Cleansing

The aura is the body's weather: the field said to surround every person, changing with their state, readable by those trained to see it and tended by those trained to keep it clear. In the modern energy tradition the aura is a layered thing, seven sheaths interpenetrating the physical body, each with its own texture and its own territory, from the densest layer of physical functioning up through the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual layers beyond. The reader perceives the field's colors, its brightness, its holes and its density, and the reading says what the state is; the cleansing practice then tends it, clearing what has collected.

The system's history is younger and more traceable than its presentation suggests, and worth knowing accurately. The word itself is medicine's old term for the breeze that precedes a seizure, preserved in the neurologist's vocabulary still. The layered aura of the modern practice was drawn by the esoteric literature of the eighteen-nineties, the Theosophists whose diagrams gave the field its sheaths and its enclosing auric egg, and whose books made the aura a word of its moment; the physician who tried to make it visible through chemical screens at the beginning of the new century, the photographer who claimed its capture through electric imaging, and the layered system's great modern systematizer, a former atmospheric physicist whose seven-layer model became the energy schools' standard anatomy, carried the tradition through the century. The practice's history includes the instruments honestly: the Kirlian photographs that claimed to capture the aura and the laboratory work that found the images driven by moisture and pressure, the cameras of the modern aura photographers that produce portraits through sensors and software, and the honest framing the modern market itself sometimes offers, the aura photograph as beautiful art as much as diagnostic.

The cleansing practice is the entry's working heart, and its methods are domestic: the salt bath taken with intention, the smoke drawn around the body, the sweep of a crystal wand or a feather or the bare hand passing down through the field's edge, the visualization of golden-white light filling the body and allowing only love to enter. The practices are shared with and borrowed from the traditions around them, the egg cleansing of the Mexican healing tradition being the clearest case, and the modern practice holds those borrowings with the respect of naming their homes. Reiki's own protocol carries the same three movements as the aura work does, the grounding, the clearing, the protection, because the practices grew up together and speak the same grammar.

What practitioners and clients report is the practice's texture: the felt sense of heaviness lifting, the colors perceived by the reader and described to the sitter, the photograph's portrait as a memento of one's energy on a given day. The laboratory's verdict on the aura's literal existence is the one its history records, and the tradition's own modern teachers hold the practice in the frame they find truest: as a discipline of attention to one's own state, and a way of tending the boundary between self and world that the sensitive learn early, with or without the vocabulary of fields.