This is an intriguing part of the aura that I don’t often talk about with clients, because, like the area between the legs, it can be complex.

When I first began sketching, I discovered that aura colours found under the arms can provide information about ‘what has been brought in from the past’, like suitcases of unresolved baggage. Whether I read ‘past’ as childhood or past life usually depends on the style of reading being given and what is appropriate for the client.

While aura colours hidden between the legs often represent completely buried and repressed psychological material, issues represented by aura colours found under the arms, while still buried, tend to sit a little closer to the surface of our conscious awareness. These feelings and memories can be uncomfortable so the client might attempt to deny these feelings and patterns to themselves and others around them. For this reason it can be a ‘touchy’ area and if, as the counselor, you press too hard up against these wounds, they will bite back with denials and rejections.

I do have some clients who take a plain and simple ‘cold hard light of day’ approach to exploring their past wounds, readily acknowledging and owning the emotions of past traumas, but for many, this approach is too direct, uncomfortable, and confronting. It can be safer and more effective to help people explore their personal story in an indirect,  more abstract manner. This is when story-telling comes in handy. Past lives are a perfect example of this. Clients in partial denial can connect with these larger-than-life characters and sagas without having their psyche shattered by un-faceable facts. Story-telling provides a buffer, helping us explore the events and how we feel about them as though the story were someone else’s, not our own. By holding the experience at arms length, we feel safer and approach more readily, opening to insights simply through proximity to truth.

This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in past lives, because I do. As with spirit guides, my take on past lives is complex and multi-faceted, not always easy to explain. In the context of no-time, no-space inherent within the psyche/psychic realm, past lives never seem to me as though they are past or separate from the current self. When I walk into a past life to facilitate healing, I’m walking into the depths of the clients psyche to reweave a story. What seems past becomes present, as though all of our lives are happening at the same time, with our various selves are working together to restore wholeness to a fragmented psyche.

Later in my training, Spirit taught me to read this area as ‘deep inner self and hidden feelings’. Colours in this area would show me who the ‘real’ person was behind the projected persona. This is great because if a person has guarded, tough or cool colours in the outer field they can be difficult to engage with if you can’t see the real self hidden underneath. At first, I find these people intimidating but when I see the softer colours hidden underneath, I immediately relax and am able to begin building a rapport.

Years ago I was working with a woman who appeared unfriendly, cold, controlling and selfish. Naturally I held her at arms length and felt threatened by her. Then she asked me for a reading and I finally got to see the very sensitive, gentle soul underneath all those coping mechanisms. In other words, she was over-compensating because she felt very vulnerable. Needless to say, this was very good for our working relationship because I understood that her behaviour was about her, not about me!

Specific blues and greens in this area, like ‘hermit green’ and ‘watch blue’ help me understand that this client is an immensely private person, putting me on notice to proceed with caution and be more alert to subtle cues as to what material can be safely discussed and to what extent. It’s important to respect a client’s privacy and the boundaries they provide you with.

I’ve learned that just because I can clearly see an important issue or personality pattern that needs addressing, doesn’t mean the client is ready to deal with it. I have to honour the client’s pace through life and let them be where they are at. That doesn’t, however, mean that I won’t sometimes nudge up against a client’s personal boundaries to test readiness and to remind them gently that the issue is there.

Clients who repeat the same colours both on the inside and the outside of the arms have a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of personality and are generally more open to being laid bare than clients who have different colours in each area. These people usually mean what they say and say what they mean and are delightfully straightforward. They value honesty and dislike psychological game playing.

When a client has a colour under the arms representing a specific emotion, but this colour can’t be seen in the outer field, it means the emotion is being hidden from others. The client is aware of the emotion but they don’t openly express it for others to see. Sometimes this means they are repressing (not expressing) the emotion, but more often it simply means they don’t wish to share it with others- they may still express it in private. Grief is a common emotion people will tend to express in private, whereas anger is more likely to be completely repressed.

White under the arms can be read in a few different ways, depending on which meaning we assign to this body-area, but the meanings are still inter-linked. When representing past life, it means the client has ‘come in with’ a clean slate or a fresh page and doesn’t have a back-log of unresolved issues left over from a previous life. This really frees the incarnated self up to fully sculpt the landscape of their own lives. Whilst I am in no way fatalistic in my thinking, I do believe that unresolved baggage has a tendency to recycle and keep us a little trapped in the same patterns.

I guess this perspective has come from years of working as a healer and observing both my own and other peoples healing journeys. Unresolved issues are like unfinished stories. In order to move on, people usually require some kind of conclusion or resolution, even if this is simply a perspective they can live with as opposed to a perspective they cannot. We digest our experiences, breaking them down and attempting to make some kind of sense of them, but some experiences don’t lend themselves easily to being made sense of. Undigested experiences are like merry-go-rounds that don’t let us off until the find an ending the psyche will accept.

I’ve often said that wounds emanate a frequency that attracts more of the same- this is another way of looking at the merry-go-round of unresolved issues. When we have a wound or unresolved issue from the past, the psyche is bleeding out a message that expresses the wound as a personal truth. This personal truth might say something like ‘I’m invisible- no one hears me’ or ‘the people I love always betray me’.

The metaphorical blood from this wound is on psychic broadcast, radiating outwards into the world until it finds something (or someone) to resonate with. In many ways, it is a personal statement of truth that says ‘this is who I am, what my story is and what I expect from life’. The wound is exploring itself, attempting to consolidate by proving itself consistently true, or transform itself by challenging the life-hypothesis this personal truth is based on. If this wound can find a different truth, a different ending to the story, it may be able to transcend a limited perspective on life and rise into a version of reality that provides true healing.

If, on the other hand, we surrender to the wound and give up, we become deeply entrenched in the reality of this wound because we have no energy to rise above or beyond this perspective and experience reality in any other way. Even direct challenges to the reality of the wound will be met with flat denial and it can take a truly magnificent, life-shattering event or persistent work over a long period of time to finally bust you free from the hold of the wound. Once this has occurred, we find white under the arms, signifying the liberated state of a cleanly healed slate.

When looking at the under-arm area as representing deep inner self, white represents a washing clean, a letting go, a deep cleansing of old dross (rubbish or unresolved baggage) from the depths of the psyche. White is strongly associated with surrender to God/Goddess/All That Is or the concept of ‘Letting go and Letting God/Life’. In many ways, this colour expresses in the aura when we resolve an old wound, rewrite an old story or rise above a limited way of viewing ourselves, others and the life we are living. White is a liberation from being held back by our old ‘stuff’ so we can soar free on wings of light and uplifted possibility. We may not be able to change the basic content of what has or hasn’t happened in our lives, but we can completely transform our personal experience of those events in a way that sets us free, simply through releasing the perspective that is causing us pain.

I guess, if we look at the position again and remind ourselves that this is the area under the arms, we can think of this area also as being symbolic of ‘what we are holding onto’ or ‘what has not yet been released’. White in this area means we have let go and by doing so, we have set ourselves free. It is, after all, a bit difficult to fly when your wings are holding onto great heavy boulders from the past.

Understanding the nature of wounds and their tendency to replay themselves also helps us understand why the traumas in past lives stories so often seem relevant to our current lives in some manner!