Preparation

 

For this exercise, you will need a volunteer. Its wonderful if you can find a friend who is learning healing too, so you can practice together. If not, call on open-minded friends, family and animal friends.

 

To begin with, please don’t worry about which auric sheath you are scanning. Later, you can develop your own ideas about what sheath is where and what relevance it has to you personally as a healer. My own classifications are very loose, but other healers develop very sophisticated sheath systems that work very effectively for them. For now, lets get you used to interacting with the sheaths.

 

Begin by establishing your personal healing space and state. Remember to centre yourself, at the very least. For some of you, it will help to get your hands ‘switched on’ before you attempt scanning. You can do this by doing some hands-on healing until you feel your hand chakras activate (warmth/movement/tingling) on palms of hands, and a subtle change in the way you feel. For me, it feels like my mind and body have filled with warm, liquid light or sunlight. If you don’t get any sensations, just pretend or imagine what it would feel like if you did.

 

‘Cloud hands’

 

You can do this exercise with the volunteer standing, sitting or laying down. Simply begin by holding the palms of your hands open, fingers together or only slightly spread, with the flat of the palm facing the volunteer, but at a distance of about one meter.

 

Slowly, slowly, bring your hands in and feel for any resistance or difference in pressure under your hands. Its almost like looking for an invisible cloud under your hands. It can feel a bit like what happens when you hold two opposing magnets facing one another and try to move them towards each other; a subtle resistance or pushing back against your hand. The sensation is often quite faint, especially when you are first learning, so concentrate and assume any slight difference in air pressure is what you are looking for. It might take a few attempts before you are able to perceive an auric layer, and you may find more than one in the one meter zone. You can of course, experiment by starting further out.

 

Scanning

 

Once you have found an auric layer, begin to slowly run your hands over the surface of it as though it were someones skin and you were doing a very, very slow and gentle massage. You might move your hands in one direction, slowly back and forth over the same area, or in a circular motion that gradually moves in one direction. As you are doing this, pay attention to the sensations you feel on the palms of your hands.

 

Just as with hands on healing, some areas will stimulate your hand chakras more than others, creating different sensations in your hands, such as tingling and warmth. You can stop moving in these areas and simply allow energy to channel into the sheath in this position until you intuitively feel its time to start moving again.

 

You can also use what you feel beneath your hands to create a picture for you; a picture respresenting the condition of the auric sheath. For example, some areas may seem to dip or pull in closer to the physical body, whereas other area may seem to balloon out, away from the physical body. These mountains and valleys in the landscape of the auric sheath are showing you where problems are. Ideally, the skeath should be of an even tone all the way around the body, or in other words, it should ideally all be the same distance from the body.

 

The surface under your hands can also feel quite textural. For example, some areas might seem soft and fluffy, whereas others seem hard and metallic. Some areas might seem choppy and unsettled like the ocean before a storm, whereas other areas by comparison, feel calm and smooth like the surface of a still lake.

 

Another ‘picture’ can be created for you by the different temperature sensations you feel. For some people, warmth is translated as congestion and coldness is translated as emptiness. It doesn’t really matter how you interpret what you feel, so long as the interpretations are based upon, or backed up by, your own personal observations during scanning and healing.

 

Auric Massage

 

Once you have found a sheath and begun to feel its surface, you can begin to move the energy around with your hands to get a more consistent temperature, consistency and texture throughout the entire surface of the sheath.

 

For example, you can mold the valleys and mountains into each other, spreading the energy around a little more evenly so that it isn’t piling up in some places and lacking in others. This is a bit like playing with clay or doing a massage (the mountains are like tight muscles that need to be kneaded!).

 

You can also disperse the warmth outwards so that it isn’t so concentrated in certain areas, pushing warmth into cool areas to warm them up and bring more life into them. Alternatively, if it’s the heat that seems excessive, you could cool it down a bit by massaging adjacent cooler areas into the warm areas.

 

The general idea with this is to mix, soothe, smooth and spread, just as you would in a massage. Even gentle stroking over the sheath can help it to relax and rebalance itself.