How to see auras by not looking for them

My aura photo showing deep blue, indigo and violet colours, 2013.

An introduction to aura reading.

I had my aura photographed at an exhibition launch in 2013. It was for the artist Lauren Baker, at her gallery on Floral St in Covent Garden, London, celebrating a series of works exploring the concept of auric fields and the unseen energy surrounding all living things. My aura was a mist of indigo and deep blue, and as someone who believes in these things, I was delighted by it.

But a few weeks later, when I found myself in a room with a group of people at an Extraordinary Sensing workshop, about to read each other’s auras, I was skeptical.

I had been reading tarot for at least a decade at this point, but I’d never seen colour around people’s bodies. I assumed it was a special thing you either could or couldn’t see.

If I could read auras, I’d be able to do it already, wouldn’t I? However, I was open-minded (and curious) so I was prepared to give it a go.

We were paired off. I stood opposite my partner, and saw….nothing. Just her.

At first.

Because nobody had ever told me that you don’t see auras in the usual way. Not in a way that you would usually look for colours - directly, evaluatively, with your eyes. Not like an aura photograph does, capturing biodata from a person’s electromagnetic field and visually rendering it in full colour print.

How you actually see auras, we learned, is through the practice of not looking directly. It’s more like a magic eye puzzle. First, you need to soften your gaze. To relax your vision, and to shift your focus slightly off-centre. You trust the picture to reveal itself.

And slowly, for me, it did.

Being gifted this approach of allowing and feeling instead of looking directly is how it clicked into place for me, because this is exactly how I learned to read tarot.

With my first pack of tarot cards (free from Girlfriend magazine when I was a teenager) I would thumb through the accompanying guidebook and learn each definition for each card by heart. It wasn’t until later when I moved to London and studied at Treadwell’s that I understood how to really read the cards myself, and how to trust my own intuition in the reading.

Most of the time when I read tarot now, the strongest messages aren’t coming from a specific card or it’s prescribed meaning, but from a feeling. Sometimes information just 'drops in'. I get a sense of a personality, of a situation, of a relationship, or a memory. It’s as if I’m looking at puzzle pieces and I can’t actually see the complete picture in front of me, but I can see the thread of the story unfolding. I get a sense of clarity or focus on specific pieces of the puzzle. It’s a completely different practice to recalling a memorised definition, or the chain and branch process of guessing or thinking - it’s more of a revealing, or a knowing.

So when I tried again to read my partner’s aura in the Extraordinary Sensing workshop, I softened my focus. I let my eyes blur a bit and let my attention drift above and around her head. I stopped trying to see, and that’s when her aura revealed itself. I had a sense of blue first, then green and pink. What surprised me was that it wasn’t set - it shifted as we stood there, the colours drifting into my focus, as if it had its own awareness.

Want to try it for yourself?

It’s your turn now (that’s why you’re here isn’t it?). So , let’s begin. It helps to be in a softly lit room (no big light) and a light-coloured wall. Have your partner stand in front of it, about a metre (just over 3 ft) away from you.

The first step is to soften your gaze. Look slightly above and around their head. Almost as if they’re the sun, and you can’t look directly at them. Keep your eyes soft and relaxed.

Imagine you are looking through the space around them, instead of at it.

With that same relaxed gaze, begin to take in their outline.

You might start to notice a faint line around their body, a kind of subtle shift or glow, like the space around them is vibrating slightly differently. This is the first layer of the aura.

The next layer is more subtle, and this is where the colour comes in.

Don’t try too hard. Let the colour arise as a feeling. You may sense a texture, a temperature, or an emotion. It may come gradually or it may suddenly reveal itself.

Don’t question it or try to analyse it yet, just notice. Let it drift into your consciousness.

Once you have a sense of colour, say them aloud or note them down.

I want to say that aura reading isn’t an exact science, but let’s not negate the science of reading electromagnetic energy. It’s just that any kind of energetic reading is always open to interpretation, and it requires a shift in how we use our senses.

Aura reading is more about softening into an altered state of consciousness - something we all knew how to do, once, before we learned to see things only one way. But also something we can still access, with practice.

If you do try this, I’d love to hear what you noticed.

And if you’re curious about aura colours or want to learn more about what each one can mean, I’ve written about that here.

This post was originally published on Substack. You can read the original post here.