Seems today is a day for me to write about my personal beliefs and debunk a few misconceptions floating around out there.  After writing Indigo Children: soothing myth or hardcore fact? I realized I should explain a few things about how common sense, skeptical psychics operate and explore the subject of auras further.

Most friends know I have worked as a professional psychic and they know that doing that kind of work can lead you to meeting all sorts of charlatans and skeptics.  The best so-called psychics are incredible show business people and they sell what they do very well.  It is easy to fall into that trap, but it's not worth the stress of having to perform for each and every person who comes up to you for a reading.  I tend to be more down-to-earth and make no supernatural claims to sell myself. 

One of the biggest attractions for those seeking a psychic experience is getting your aura seen or photographed.  This type of photography is based on Kirlian photography -- a type of photogram (an image made without a camera) named after Semyon Kirlian, who in 1939 accidentally discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a source of high voltage, small corona discharges (created by the strong electric field at the edges of the object) create an image on the photographic plate.  Krilian in his later studies made controversal claims that this method showed proof of supernatural auras evident around objects.

But, if you go to a psychic fair, you'll soon notice that no two psychics will percieve your aura the same, and if you get your aura "photographed" each time it will come out different.  A so-called aura photograph is a picture of emanations of your body's temperature and can, like a mood ring, if you believe hard enough in it, say something about your emotional state at the time of the photograph.  And because no two people are alike and are prone to percieve things differently, any psychic you come across will see you in a different light and will make judgements about you based on their own personal belief systems.

This is what sets getting a psychic reading in the realm of entertainment. 

I remember once working at a psychic fair with a highly energetic friend of mine.  Whenever the two of us girls got together, it was almost like we made the temperature go higher in the room because together we were like overly excited school girls.  Sitting next to the Kirlian photograph booth, our nervous energy off set things.  Our "auras" showed up as this thick and consistant red light bleeding into the edges of the photograms of other people.  Once we sat in a different area away from the booth, the pictures came out with no more red invading the edges.  To test what was going on, we each took different photos of each other at different times during the fair -- ones where we were together, ones without each other near, plus ones where we concentrated on projecting a different mood.  Sure enough the ones where we were together were brilliant red, at other times we were blue, and even indigo.  Goes to show it's not an exact science and we left the photographer scratching his head, but smiling at our antics.

Much of what is determined as psychic perception is more naturally based on a keen observation of human behavior which, teamed with a bit of imagination and visualization, can be described in colorful metaphor.  So when some psychic sees your aura, they aren't really actually seeing your aura with their eyes, they are, in reality, interpreting how they percieve your mood or personality. 

For instance, the "auras" I see surrounding people are kind of cartoon like -- like seeing a person in a bad mood having a "dark cloud" over them.  Of course I'm not actually seeing that dark cloud, I'm just describing that person's bad mood as a dark cloud.  At other times I have seen people with different colors around them, sort of at the edge of my peripheral vision, and often it doesn't mean anything because it's caused by eye fatigue.  Yet there are times when I put my scientific perception to rest and let a message come through, then test it to see if it has any relevance in reality.  Nine times out of ten, coupled with what I've observed from someone's body language, I'm usually right about what I percieved about that person.

I once had a friend who challenged my psychic perceptions a lot.  He would claim to "flare up" his aura into different colors and ask me if I could see them.  Perhaps it was more of an exercise with telepathic communication, but often I would pick up on what colors he was projecting without fail.  At other times he attempted to project a color at me when I was faraway from him.  It was like a game and it was fun.  According to him, I never got anything wrong, and often whenever I'd send him a color, he could pick up on it.  It grew from a guessing game to a game of perception. 

I'm not saying that I don't believe in auras, but I take a more common sense point of view.  Only you can see what you want to see.  Some people won't believe in anything unless they see it with their own eyes.  But still I question what I see and, in the end, try to make sense out of the impractical.  If something works, don't break it.  Use it.  If you get something out of it, keep it.  Just don't go over board with outrageous claims.  I claim nothing.  I just report things as I percieve them.  If that makes sense to you and you got something out of it, then maybe there's something practical in this psychic stuff after all!