BY: AYA TSINTZIRAS
This has probably happened at least once in your life: you meet someone for the first time and take an instant dislike to their presence. Or you get a bad feeling from a room you’ve just walked into. There is a likely explanation for that – you might be feeling auras.
When we think of auras, we tend to think of people who see colours. Many believe that all children have this ability, but lose it, as they get older. But what if we all have the capacity to at least feel auras, if not see them?
According to the John Harvey Gray Center for Reiki Healing, auras and energy have been studied since the 18th century when Franz Anton Mesmer experimented with “animal magnetism” – the idea that you can heal people by accessing their energy through the “magnetic fluid” on someone’s body. This is not unlike modern day Reiki, a hands-on system of healing which focuses on energy.
An aura can be defined as energy around the body – a complete definition (from www.oxforddictionaries.com): “emotional, mental, and spiritual levels form an energy field around the body known as the aura.”
People who can see and feel auras define it as constant energy. Former psychic and now-astrologer Michael Zizis says, “It’s just energy that’s radiating from some source within a person – and that source can obviously be a little mysterious.”
Deborah Louise Levin, an Amsterdam-based clairvoyant, says, “We’re all energy. So some of us see what’s behind the physical field. If you can see auras, you can see energy.”
Amanda Bury, a Toronto-based psychic whose studio is called Psychic Amanda, knew from the age of five or six that she had psychic abilities. She could tell her dad where he misplaced his keys and could guess the contents of a bag of groceries. Soon she could see auras. “I would just stare at people because I was bored and I would see colours,” she says. When her uncle asked what colour he was, she told him orange, and he told the family it was possible that she was capable of seeing auras.
SEE ALSO: Meditation Is The Art of Floating
Levin remembers her family saying, “Okay knock that off, it’s not cute anymore” about her psychic skills when she was growing up. She finds it ironic that our culture suggests, as we get older, we shouldn’t believe we have those abilities, because we end up spending a lot of time and money on healers to clear our spiritual blockages.
Lynton Friedman, founder of Sanlyn Wellness in Toronto, was 24 when he first recognized that he was having spiritual experiences. In his therapeutic work today, he focuses on Jungian and Freudian clinical theories and more spiritual aspects. If he and a client are sitting in his office, each of their auras will swing out in front of them, and the auras will end up connecting with each other. “It’s a perception of a vibe,” Friedman says. “So when you take vibe and put it into a longer word, it’s a vibration.” Sometimes, both he and his client will see the office change colour. “If we’ve both seen it, both of us can’t be going mad at the same time,” he says. This can happen because of the healing that is occurring – if someone is going through a rough time, the room could turn blue, a colour of healing.
Sounds pretty badass, but can everyone do it?
Bury and Friedman both believe that it is definitely possible, and both mention that some people are just naturally more spiritually inclined than others. Bury teaches some of her clients how to see auras. “Just like a pro athlete, you must train to get results,” she says, citing becoming calmer and meditation as ways to get into the right headspace.
Levin believes that everyone feels auras. “You can feel if someone’s not well, or if someone’s happy,” she says. “With what I have with clairvoyance, I see it before I feel it.” She laughs and adds, “It’s also really helpful if you can feel it. I think feeling is almost a better ability than seeing it.”
So, if you are a sensitive person and can intuitively feel someone else’s emotions— you’re probably most of the way there. “You need a compassionate heart and a love of people,” Zizis says, adding that our culture is too focused on getting things done and not as sensitive to the environment and interconnectivity around us.
Still there are many skeptics who stigmatize the claimed ability of seeing colours radiating from bodies. “If you start seeing things, people are going to think you’re crazy,” Levin says. “Unless you make a living from it like I do and then people still think you’re crazy.”
It’s not always about colours, either. Levin jokes that she’s not living in a “psychedelic haze.” Both Bury and Zizis told me that they definitely don’t walk down the street and see colours radiating from people. It’s more subtle than that. Levin gives the example of seeing steam rise from a mug of tea: that’s what it’s like to see radiating energy.
As Friedman explains, “When you’ve got people that are skeptical, I still think they have the ability to tap in”
So the next time you get a strange feeling on a first date or at a party, don’t ignore the whisper of energy. Auras don’t lie.