Counter-Culture, Aura Readings at Their Finest
March 11th, 2008 by Rose Rosetree
While I was on Blog-Fast, getting my new book to press, mostly I felt as if moving into the future. But wouldn’t you know it? Life has brought a couple of pull-backs into the past, just to keep things balanced.
Since 1986, I’ve been teaching how to do aura readings, using the system I eventually trademarked as Aura Reading Through All Your Senses(R). Well, within one week, I had two of my most shocking experiences ever when teaching this system.
In one mentoring session, “Babette” began by telling me how much she enjoyed my approach to reading energy fields. in advance of our appointment, she was so into doing spiritual reading that she had read half of Aura Reading Through All Your Senses.
Then Babette proceeded to tell me her story. “Every day, I do the exercise about looking at the aura around my hand. Some days I see green. Some days I see red. Some days I see green shifting into red. But then one day I saw purple. Tell me what that means.”
WHAT IS IT ABOUT THOSE COLORS?
If you’ve looked at the book at all, you know it contains over 100 techniques, all listed in the front in a “Table of Techniques.” But looking at your hand for “the colors” is not one of those techniques. Instead I teach how to use one’s full set of gifts.
Whatever God gave you to help you do intuitive readings, including aura readings, only two things are guaranteed. You don’t have only one gift. And the one gift you are sure to have is synesthesia, not a specialized type of clairvoyance. You know, the one that, according to myth, is the only true and meaningful gift.
Another thing about reading auras that will be obvious, if you give my system a chance, rather than the cliches, is this: You learn how to use your Inner Dictionary to interpret your perceptions about auras, whether colors or smells or textures, etc. A big part of that book is the Inner Dictionary technique.
It’s so central to personal empowerment, doing any type of spiritual reading, that I also explain how to do that technique in Empowered by Empathy, Cut Cords of Attachment, and my upcoming book, “The Baby,” Read People Deeper.
Never would I advocate giving your pwoer away, or diminishing your own wisdom, by asking an expert to tell you the meaning of your innermost perceptions when doing aura readings. Please, never do this to yourself.
If you get “purple” or “sticky” or “freezing cold,” this is just the first half of your reading. The second half is to find out from within yourself the meaning of your perception.
BTW, I did manage to help Babette to get unstuck in her rut about aura readings.
HELLO!
Shocker Experience #2 happened while I was leaving a classroom where I had spent nearly three hours on basics. The students were taught some techniques, but mostly I emphasized, clearly as I could, how auras are three-dimensional energy bodies around the physical body, full of information. Naturally, I emphasized that the important thing about doing aura readings is all the information. The goal shouldn’t be to say, “I saw the colors.”
It was a delightful group, and they enjoyed learning about their many gifts. Everyone received loads of personal attention to help them understand and value their personal gift set.
Yet, as I walked out, “Heidi” had one last question for me:
“If someone is colorblind, could she still read auras?”
You Blog-Buddies who have been doing auraa readings of your own, do you have any idea why some people keep thinking “It’s all about the colors”?
Honestly, has that been your experience?
When you do techniques to read auras, do you find it useful for relationships, self-knowledge, healing, consumer smarts? What has your own intuitive reading taught you?
And if, like me, you do some aura readings every day, do you find that the best you can say about the amazing energy fields of the people you read is, “I saw green?”
I also invite you to share stories about people you know, without naming names. Do you have any friends who are stuck there? If so, any idea what got them stuck? What is it with the big fat Myth about Auras?
COUNTER-CULTURE
Maybe people find it hard to know just how counter-culture they are. Maybe I am one of those people. I don’t think of myself as intensely rebellious, yet I don’t own a microwave. I don’t give out my cell number, and have made maybe 20 calls on that contraption, total, ever.
Okay, I get this is different from the majority of Americans. But surely these are minor rebellions.
Come on, Rose. You’re into spiritual reading? And you think you’re normal?
Yes, actually, I do think I’m normal. I’m a Soccer Mom. My son goes to a regular public school, has since kindergarten. I never miss an election. My shopping habits aren’t too weird (except for my stealth aura readings of produce at the supermarket, before I buy). Our family of three lives in a modest house in the suburbs, and our yard isn’t the messiest one on the block.
As for the work part of my life, what’s so rebellious there? I just don’t believe the ridiculous, limiting ideas out there about reading energy fields. Clearly the premise is drastically counter-culture, yet it seems quite normal to me.
Years ago, I bumped into “Glenda,” a successful and super-smart healer who would appear to be far more counter-culture than I. Her lifestyle! Her clothes! Her conversation!
Around 1987, she took my two-hour class on how to do aura readings. At the time, she did her first beginner’s exercises just fine. Being off to such a promising start, she could have been a world-class aura reader by now. But when I bumped into her some 15 years later, she said, “Remember back when I took your class? I didn’t see the colors then. I still don’t. Isn’t it a shame?”
Friends, what causes this? Is it the power of the culture? Is there some great big enchantment over the land? Otherwise what would explain why Glenda, like Heidi and Babette, could wake up for a moment, then fall right back into deep sleep?



It’s publicity and the power of the media. The big psychics made it as clairvoyants.
I suppose it’s the same reason why so many people think Asian Americans can’t play sports or that black people can only sing or play basketball. Those are the people who are prominent in the media right now.
When a black man becomes the president of MIT, at least some people’s ideas will change.
In the meantime, we can fight with Larry Summers (who, last time I checked, is no longer President of Harvard - a woman is!).
I’m a wordy (or is that nerdy?) person, so at first I wondered if there were something in the definition of “aura” or in the word’s etymology that would connect it with colors. Turns out not to be the case. “Aura” dates to 1694, a Middle English word, from Latin, and from Greek before that, ultimately meaning “air.” None of its standard definitions per Merriam-Webster’s current collegiate dictionary point to colors. They all discuss energy fields, atmospheres surrounding an object, and radiance. If your students were like me, maybe letting them know that “aura” means “air” would be of some help to them; rather than just negating their ideas equating “aura” with “color,” you’d be replacing.
But it may also be that people have been so set up for the idea of seeing colors that nothing you can do will satisfy them. That leads me to a question. Is it possible that people who want the color experience so badly could have an experience of color even if that isn’t their strong suit? I ask because when I was a teenager, I had a music teacher who discussed with me the idea of musical tones having been linked with colors by various composers and philosophers. He had me play middle C on my instrument and asked me what color it could be. I said it could be blue. It felt blue to me, but I didn’t really “see” blue. In other words, if someone has an experience of the aura, but not a vision of color, and wishes for color, possibly it could be somewhat satisfying for that person to ask him- or herself, “If this were a color, what color would it be?”
Thanks for your site. It’s wondrous!
Auras and colours - possibly the design of the human body has part to play. We perceive so much through the eyes. Every where we go colours are so valuable to us. Women and their lipstick, supermarket packaging, films, clothes, food colourings, fresh fruit and vegetables etc.. They pt. us in the direction that brighter more colourful is better, more exciting, fresher, interesting and desirable. From the day we are born who can resist the goloriousness of colour.
If we don’t see them we might think we are missing out on the most amazing aspect of auras.
Many magazines seem to list the chakras their stated basic colours and mention the word aura some where in an article. 90% of articles all seem to be on “Auras and how to see them”. Few if any ever mention not all people see auras in 3d technicolour but are able to use other just as valuable gifts.
I had a similar experience with the aura myth recently with someone I’m close to. We had been talking about something else, and I just happened to ask, “Do you at least believe in auras?” I expected a “yes, of course,” since he owns all of Rose’s books and has heard me talk about aura reading and empathy for years.
He replied, “Well, I don’t see any colors.” I nearly lost it: “Are you serious? How can you still believe that? If you read the first two pages of Rose’s book you would know that is like her main point, that they don’t have to be colors!”
Because I was so upset, he said, “Well, I guess that if aura reading is like those feelings and information that you just get about people that you just know, then I guess I could believe in auras.”
“That’s it!” I shouted. “That’s what aura reading is!”
I think the underlying problem with this misconception is just the consciousness of humanity right now. It’s great that science brought us out of the dark ages, but it has also programmed people to think, “If I can’t see it, it isn’t real. It can’t be proven.” Somehow “seeing” colors would make it seem “real,” physical for most.
Culturally, we still believe in a separation between the spiritual and the physical. Spiritual self-authority is still not accepted, sadly. We have been taught that imagination is meaningless - “just my imagination.” “Seeing colors” isn’t a misconception specific to aura reading, it’s part of a rigid, deeply-rooted belief system about “reality” that keeps us from moving forward.
Part of this “objectivity” came from the Renaissance Age, the Age of Enlightenment, which of course followed the Middle Ages, the Age of Darkness for many. Those were times in which people tended to be over-subjective and, you know, umm, beheaded people through the Spanish Inquisition or at least ex-communicated them for heretic beliefs (Galileo Galilei and the fact that the earth was round and revolved around the sun, instead of flat and the other way around).
We’re still moving out of that era, but perhaps over-objectivity reigned supreme in reaction to the previous over-subjectivity of the previous era.
Also, in that era, fiefdoms and social class and family background reigned supreme. Then, of course, we have slavery and racial oppression and castes… So the whole personal empowerment thing is still relatively new.
Now we admire those who “made it,” but usually that means they went to an Ivy League school and became rich or powerful (Bill Gates, who chose to drop out of Harvard, and President Bush, who went to Yale and Harvard Business School and is from an extremely affluent and prestigious family dynasty, yet is arguably not the, umm, brightest bulb out there).
With Senator Clinton and Senator Obama both running for the Democratic ticket, we are seeing the emergence of the truly self-made. Both did overcome huge personal obstacles. Then again, both are still Ivy League-educated… Clinton is a Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate, Obama is a Columbia and Harvard Yale School graduate, the first African American to helm the Harvard Law Review…
I always find that ironic - because, of course, Obama is also half-white. He just “looks” black, unlike Clinton…
So we’re still reading people by race and noticing it and commenting on it - we’re not talking and assessing by auras just yet, at least not in the mainstream public.
Not knocking on the Ivies, by the way. I am Ivy League educated myself and going for my second Ivy League degree this spring.
Having said that, I can say that being Ivy educated isn’t everything in life or the great determiner of character or success.
We may never know why colors are associated so tightly with auras, although I suspect one reason is that perceiving auras simply as colors is a cop-out. Saying “I see red” or “I see blue mixed with gold” is much easier than studying the various ways of reading auras and determining which ones work best for your individual self and developing an inner dictionary. The results, of course, are rather limited also.
Most aura readers who adhere to the colors paradigm seem to focus mostly on general personality characteristics of the people they read and do not get into deeper things such as experiences, life lessons, soul gifts, and soul evolution. I suspect that a lot of people who have popularized the colors paradigm do not have the desire to work with this level of depth.
I just had a great idea: Why not take aura colors to a whole new level? I could write a book filled with charts and diagrams and definitions and color wheels. I could write about the RGB values of people’s perceptions. I could even use my software development skills to develop computer software that deals with aura colors. I could be rich! But darnit…these ideas would not be ethical!
Hi Ryan,
You could do it if you felt like it. The selling out part? That’s for you to decide and whether you could live with yourself.
In terms of being rich? Well, there are much easier ways of doing it than through writing and publishing. These are notoriously fickle industries, particularly if you are going to try and do it through the mainstream big publishing houses. Doubly so if you are metaphysical and trying to do it through the mainstream publishing houses (I’m thinking here of Carolyn Myss, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, etc.). Very very difficult to succeed in that market if you are metaphysically minded, even more so if you are metaphysically minded and desire to have full integrity. The mainstream public is just not ready for that yet, I think.