Yesterday my students and I each drew an Aura Card. We were creating part of a group aura reading together.

You might ask “how can a card pulled by one member of the group be relevant for all of you?”

Answer: Because we are sharing space, and our auras are mingling.

Having worked together with the cards for many years, the students and I know from experience that every card drawn is relevant to most, if not all, people present in the room. My classes are small, 3-4 people, 6 at the most, so we have plenty of time to explore each card and see how it might be relevant to each person. Every Aura Card has multiple different aspects, with one facet being relevant to one student, and a different aspect being applicable to another. We are often surprised by the parallels running through our lives and this sense of ‘me too!’ draws us closer together as a group, with each member drawing on their own personal experience and wisdom to guide the others… “When that happened to me I did this…..”

Normally we just select cards without placing them in a specific layout, but yesterday Spirit asked me to do a partial aura spread. The first card we chose was placed in the first aura spread position. This represents the area above the head, representing the crown chakra or “what Spirit is helping us with.”

The card that came out was ‘Shame Green’, a slimy yellow-green colour that always reminds me of pus! I tensed a little and sighed internally. I always find this card a challenge to read myself, let alone guiding students through the process of reading! This aura colour has led me a merry chase though the years, flitting this way and that as it morphed through various identities, giving me insights into aspects of its character while never really revealing itself completely in  straight-forward manner. Given that the first name I gave it was ‘deception’, this game of masks probably shouldn’t have surprised me.

Unravelling the meaning of an aura colour can be a painstaking process of endless observation and enquiry, noticing whose aura it comes up in and learning about that clients story, while comparing it with the story of other clients wearing the same aura colour and looking for parallels.

The next card that came out, placed in the third eye position of the spread, was Gold. Cross-referencing this with the Shame card, the students and I had a great conversation together about self-worth and the way childhood shaming can affect us as adults. We also talked about the positive side of this colour: healthy shame. What might happen if you had no shame? This really helped me consolidate the connection between healthy shame, humility and having a conscience. No wonder this colour always makes me think of Jiminy Cricket from the Pinocchio story!

One angle on this colour is the idea of being ‘demonised’, or ‘demonising’ others. What does this mean?

When we are being demonised it means we are being made ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ in the eyes of others. I’ll always remember the first time I learned about this side of Shame Green. I was working with a young lady and suddenly had a strong psychic vision of horns growing out of her forehead, with a cloud of Shame Green surrounding them. When I asked her about this she told me a story about how she had recently been travelling and had confided in a priest in another part of Australia whom she had never met before. He made unwanted advances, which she rejected and in retaliation he became aggressive and began telling her she was evil, ‘the devil’ was in her. In other words, he had ‘demonised’ her, thus my psychic image of horns growing out of her head. I’ve become quite fond of the phrase ever since, in relation to this colour.

When she rejected him, the priest probably demonised her in order to avoid feeling his own shame. This is what is usually happening when we demonise others: we are projecting our shame out onto others in order to avoid feeling and owning it ourselves.

In some instances we do this to our children. When we shame a child by saying “what’s wrong with you?!”, we are probably revisiting upon them our own unresolved shame-wounds from childhood.

Toxic shame is a very uncomfortable colour to own, so it’s not surprising we try to avoid it by putting it ‘out there’ in the world, rather than recognising it inside ourselves. As an empath, whenever I find this colour in an aura, I have an empathic experience of disgust. On a mild level, this just makes me recoil from the aura as though it is distasteful. When there is more quantity, it literally makes me feel sick, as though I want to vomit. What am I feeling, when this happens?

One or more of the following:

*The clients shame, self-loathing, or self-deception. Keep in mind that this can be caused by real or perceived ethical transgressions, and that ones person’s idea of ‘being bad’ can be another person’s version of saintliness.

*The clients feeling of being demonised by another person. This can trigger old feelings of unresolved shame originating in childhood. We might think the other person is silly for accusing us of being bad, but even when we can’t relate to the accusation being levelled, the experience of being accused or admonished will invariable remind our inner child of past shame-wounds and it is this feeling we end up having to grapple with. When being demonised by others, it helps to remind yourself that the event is probably bringing up bad feelings from childhood, and these feelings have very little to do with the current present-time experience. Events that trigger ‘old stuff’ are valuable because they give us an opportunity to do some inner ‘house-cleaning’….. on the other hand there is the risk of making the current event bigger and messier than it needs to be.

*The client’s feeling that another person or people in their lives are transgressing ethical boundaries. This can make them demonise the other person, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly…. but the entire issue with ‘demonising’ is that it tends to be rather extreme or narrow-minded; we are seeing only the ‘bad’ and this is skew-whiffing our ability to see the bigger picture (or the whole person).Most people and situations are composed of shade of grey- rarely is any person or situation entirely good or bad, black or white, wrong or right. Life is a lot more complex than this- so are people. The difficulty often lays in assessing whether or not what someone else is doing is any of our business, and whether we really have a firm grasp on the facts. I often see this colour in the aura of clients who are convinced their partners are cheating on them. That certainly is their business, but suspicion isn’t necessarily fact. On the other hand, if your best friend tells you they are cheating on their husband, you might have the facts from the horses mouth, but is it really any of your business? And what if the husband is your brother? And their is a risk of sexually transmitted disease? At what point should you make a values judgement and bust the secrecy clause, if at all? Ethics are complex!

*Ethical dilemmas. Even an over-dose of philosophy class can bring a bout of Shame Green on the aura.

 

Blessings and Love

Om