The aura is perceived using psychic perception. There are six basic psychic skills people use to do this. We are all psychic to some extent, but some of us are more consciously aware of and in command of our psychic ability. Our psychic abilities get stronger with training and practise.
Feeling – Clairsentience
The ability to feel energy is called clairsentience. I also call this empathy or our ’emotional imagination’. When using clairsentience to scan an aura, I feel the energy of aura colours as movement, temperature, texture and mood in my own body, almost as though I am feeling what the client feels. This ability is useful for picking up on emotions, physical illness, personality traits and relationship issues. While clairsentience is one of the easiest abilities to use, and very useful for counselling and healing, it is the most difficult one to manage in terms of maintaining personal boundaries.
Seeing – Clairvoyance
The ability to see energy is called clairvoyance. Clairvoyance provides you with a bit more distance so you can stand back and observe without getting so close! When I ‘look’ at the aura, I see colours in my minds eye. These colours then trigger visual snapshots or unfolding movie-like scenes in my mind. These visions are usually symbolic and I have to translate them. Clairvoyance is useful when it comes to developing a psychic language of your own, where specific images represent specific ideas; for example, one psychic I know uses images of hats and uniforms to represent different careers. Another uses different kinds of flowers to represent anniversaries. I use colour.
Hearing – Clairaudience
Courage Yellow and Rebellion Brown are two aura colours I always ‘hear’ as a word in my mind before I see or feel them. Hearing energy is called clairaudience, where a person will ‘hear’ frequencies as sound or thought. As with feeling and seeing, this is a very internal process and more like imagination than something you would experience with your physical ears. I often get keywords, phrases and saying coming to me during readings and healing. One of my healing colleagues gets a lot of her messages in the form of songs that suddenly pop into her mind. Clairaudience is very useful in mediumship when passing messages through from loved ones who have crossed over.
Tasting – Clairgustience
The ability to taste energy is called clairgustience. This isn’t an ability I’m very conscious of using, but Resentment Green definitely leaves a bitter taste in my mouth! Some mediums with a knack for clairgustience are able to correctly identify the favourite foods and drinks of our loved ones on the other side. The strongest clairgustient experience I’ve ever had was a mediumship experience. While doing an aura sketch and reading for a client, I kept getting distracted by a metallic taste in my mouth. By the end of the reading this taste developed into an intense, multisensory experience of vomiting blood. My client then told me that a work colleague had recently died in her arms, coughing up blood. Once we had identified this deceased friend as the source of the psychic impressions, I was able to start passing messages through from him.
Smelling – Clairallience
Smelling energy is called clairallience. I find this ability a bit unsettling at times because i have trouble discerning between psychic smells and real smells. I was recently in a situation where I leapt up out of my seat and called out to my daughter who was in the kitchen, because I could smell smoke. No one else could smell smoke and my daughter assured me everything was fine. Thirty minutes later she emerged looking forlorn because she had burned something to a crisp in the oven. When I’m working with the aura, certain colours have a distinctive smell; for example Clarity Yellow smells like lemons, Confusion Brown smells like faeces and Past Green smells like Pine Forests.
Knowing – Claircognisance
There is another ability called claircognisance, the ability to ‘know’. This is a strange mix of cognitive insight and awareness blended with a gut-based faith or certainty. You don’t know how you know, you just do. This is how the concepts behind my colours usually arrive; a sudden flash of insight and knowing, and then the mad scramble to write it all down or convey it verbally to the client before the awareness fades. The claircognisant sensation is a mind-expanding aha! moment where you suddenly understand so much more than you did before. I always think of a light bulb when I think of claircognisance.