Imagine having no skin. What would happen? All your organs would spill out onto the ground. Your veins and arteries would sag and bulge. You would be defenseless against dirt, germs, and viruses. And, perhaps worst of all, you would look pretty frightening! Your skin is a highly efficient protective layer between you and the external world. It holds all of your organs in place, it shields you, and it filters out foreign matter that could be dangerous or irritating to your inner organs. 

Like physical skin, the aura is permeated with natural disease-fighting chemistry, and it hosts the sensory communications of the nervous system. This second skin is the boundary between your personal energy system and the energy of your environment; an illuminated wrap of life-force medicine; and a subtle nervous system receiving and sending energy messages. This energy skin is your aura. Every living being has an aura. 

The human aura field is distributed around the body like an ovoid, spherical, or egg-shaped cocoon of energy. Clairvoyantly, it appears as a shape with different qualities in different places. You may see the boundary as diffuse, well defined, smooth, or jagged. You can perceive the aura clairvoyantly as color, brightness, darkness, shape, and density. You can hear the aura clairaudiently as tone, sound, music, frequency, and vibration. You can feel the aura using biotelemetry (The detection and measurement of a human or animal condition, activity, or function such as the heartbeat or body temperature) and psychometry (temperature changes, pulsation, tingling, pressure, or magnetism). 

When you are feeling healthy, self-confident, calm, and grounded, your aura is healthy as well. A healthy aura is indicated by a cocoon of energy surrounding and extending out from the body at least 1 foot in all directions. This positive protection field is composed of bright colors, strong vibrations, pure tones, and a full, smooth, egg-shaped boundary. When you are sick, depressed, sad, or unsure of yourself, your aura is close to your body. The colors are most likely to be dull, murky, and dark. The frequency is slow and erratic. There may be breaks or tears in the boundary. And the shape could be bumpy and distorted. All of these indicate that your aura is not serving as a positive protection field between you and the energy of others and your environment. 

An unprotective aura can be a cause of illness and distress for sensitive people. Without the natural filtering system of a positive protection field surrounding your body, you are open to environmental influences. The frequency of different energies can coexist and overlap nondestructively in the same space; take, for example, radio and television frequencies. Much of the energy in your environment - mental, physical, and emotional - may be positive, but much of it is negative. 

An Early-Warning System 

Your aura is a multi-operational energy field. The aura also acts as a reception and relay network for subtle energies. It delivers energy messages to the chakra system, which translates them into hormonal, nerve, and cellular activity in the physical body. In general, the aura tends to hold present (rather than past) thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and interactions between yourself and your environment. As the world first interconnects with your auric field, the freshest impressions, communications, and intuitive hits are woven into it. As an early-warning system, your aura also detects energy disturbance not yet manifested. This aspect of the aura's function is a preview of the future that can be utilized as a preventive tool. 

Disease in the physical, emotional, or mental body is often preceded by a disturbance in the aura, or, if it originates within the physical body, it registers in the aura at the same time or oftentimes before it manifests in a person's conscious mind or physical body. When I practiced as a medical intuitive, I had a patient in the medical clinic who was in good health and having her annual health checkup. The clinic doctor asked me to energetically scan her, and I picked up a reproductive-system problem in her aura. None of the medical tests confirmed my scan. Three weeks later she returned to the clinic because of uterine hemorrhaging. Your aura is an early-warning system for disease. By paying attention to such forewarnings, you can take preventive healing action, whether it is medical, psychological, or energetic. 

A grounded aura allows you to sense when energy is being directed at you from near or far, and gives you the choice to accept it or cleanse it out of your space. This puts people and situations at a healthy distance from you, thus allowing them less power to unbalance you. With a grounded aura, you will feel safer and more secure, and the quality of all your grounding anchor points will improve. Your aura, when functioning effectively, acts as a lightning rod for negative energy or thoughts that enter your space. If your aura is not protecting you well, you might be hit by someone's unhealthy energy transference, or you might feel that you are being verbally attacked when someone is simply transmitting information. With a grounded aura, these undesirable intrusions into your system will be intercepted at the outer edge of your aura and automatically grounded out of your personal field and down into the earth. With practice, your aura will become an autonomic system of protection. 

A Positive Protection 

A highly healthy aura nourishes us with a constant circulation of life-force energy. It also protects us, because high-energy fields disintegrate energy that enters from lower-energy fields. 
In order for your aura to act as positive protection it must be in a whole and healthy state of coherence. When your aura is filled with life force, others will show respect for your boundaries. With your intuition you can sense and heal aberrations in the field of your aura. With intention and affirmation, you can quickly revive the potent vitality of your aura's protective qualities. You need not be in quiet meditation to practice aura sensing and healing. 

When you leave your home, the best health initiative is to walk into the outside world with a grounded, vibrant aura. Physical, mental, or emotional abuse of any kind - real or imagined; from within yourself or from your environment - can affect all of your subtle-energy systems when you are not being conscious. At times, your positive intentions may be pushed out of focus, and you may find yourself unprotected and affected by chaos from the world or ill intentions from other people. These are the times to be energetically proactive. Immediately scan your aura for aberrant patterns - energies that are not yours or attached themselves to your auric field and are operating below your level of positive intention. 

The following story illustrates how to actively work with your aura in daily life. It comes from a twenty-five-year-old corporate secretary who is a highly clairsentient (acutely developed sense of empathy) and has practiced aura healing for one-year. She had difficulty with a boss who constantly intimidated her; she felt his energy pushing out her own feelings and thoughts, leaving her speechless and vulnerable in his presence. She described this situation as a “violation of boundaries,” but she has now learned to use her aura as positive protection during these episodes. 

The biggest aura revelation for me was discovering that the ways in which I had always tried to protect myself (being defensive, withdrawn, shut down, and angry) were energy drains in and of themselves, and that my boss was still able to “get in” and drain my energy. The discovery of being grounded, being aware of my auric field, keeping my auric field grounded, and having healthy energy circulating through my aura literally changed my experience of life. Now I truly feel safe and protected, and I am almost immediately aware when someone or something is trying to violate my boundaries - or if I'm ungrounded, energetically unprotected, or vulnerable. I feel like a different person than I was a year ago. 

Try This! 

Have you ever been in a roomful of people and seen a person walk in and all heads turn to look at him or her? I see this as a manifestation of the person's aura filling up the room, reaching out and touching people like an energy handshake. Others call this charisma. If you would like to bring attention to yourself during a speech, in a group, or for whatever reason, try this with your aura: Fill your aura with bright colors and expand your auric field into a large cocoon around your body. Experiment first at home to find out how much you can expand your aura and which size is comfortable for you. Some people can fill an entire room with their aura and feel comfortable and grounded, while others become scattered when their auras are expansive. Notice how others react to you when you practice this fun experiment. 

I hope that this article has given you insights into your own aura and how you can use your auric field as a protective skin, and a passport to walking through the world with ease and grace.