What It’s Like to ‘Cleanse’ Your Aura
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I feel like I need to start with a disclaimer here: I am not a spiritual person and I tend to laugh at people who seriously believe in New Age things like crystal therapy, creative visualization, affirmations, and auras.
Specifically auras.
Like I’m sorry, but if we were all walking around with energy fields around us, how do we not feel it? How do we not bump into somebody else’s on the subway? And how can something I can’t even feel or see be healthy or sick and in need of cleansing?
So, I did what any 26-year-old sceptic with questions would do. I Googled it.
After opening over a dozen tabs on my computer, I quickly realized that an online search wasn’t going to do anything for me. Why? Because I wasn’t really reading any of it. Like… I literally couldn’t make myself take in any information about something I don’t believe in.
So, I did what any 26-year-old skeptic with questions that couldn’t be answered by the computer would do. I sent out a group text, asking all my close friends if they knew anybody at all who was into auras.
Luckily for me, one of my friends did, and as luck would happen, her aura expert friend was somebody I’d actually met and thought was really cool.
I sent her a Facebook message, and hoped for the best.
After a couple days, my friend’s friend Cristina got back to me, and very patiently answered all my incredibly basic and insulting questions like, what the fuck are auras and are they real, or just a conspiracy by New Age whack jobs?
Cristina calmly told me that yes, auras are real and consist of “electromagnetic energy fields which surround all living beings in this universe. These particles of energy radiate through the physical body and emit themselves in an oval shape that surrounds the body. Auras are made up of seven layers and are a combination of colors, sounds, and vibrations.”
Immediately, I began visualizing myself with a seven-layer dip surrounding me, which I’m pretty sure is not what she meant at all, but a tasty thing to imagine nonetheless.
Next, I asked Cristina if we should be regularly cleansing our auras just like we regularly cleanse our bodies.
As you can probably guess, the answer was “YES.” Our auras become dirty because we’re “constantly taking in other people’s energies as we move through our day. This is especially true if you’re an empathetic and intuitive person, as you will tend to absorb those energies at a higher rate.”
As much as I hated to admit it, that part kind of made sense to me.
Back when I used to work in a very tiny coffee shop in my neighborhood, I would frequently feel exhausted after the end of my shift, because in an effort to help make every customer who walked in leave in a good mood (so that they would tip me), I tried my best to take whatever energy they walked in with, match it, and transform it with my own positive energy.
Maybe, I thought to myself, there was some truth to the whole aura thing after all.
After a minute’s deliberation, I decided it would probably be worthwhile to give my aura a cleanse, you know, seeing as I’ve been walking around with the same one for 26 years, and it doesn’t get much dirtier than that, so I asked Cristina what was the best way to go about that.
She said there are three ways to cleanse an aura.
Option number one was to meditate. First, you were supposed to close your eyes and focus on your breath as you inhaled, exhaled, and slowly allowed your mind to settle. Then, once you felt like enough of an empty vessel, your task was to imagine that a white light was surrounding you and passing through your whole body until you felt sufficiently calm and cleansed.
That option sounded awful to me, so I told Cristina to move on to explaining option two.
Option two involved something called smudging, which Cristina described as “a Native American practice that uses white sage to cleanse any and all negative energy” which is great “after engaging which a bunch of people, if you’re [feeling particularly] drained, or moving into a new space.”
That sounded expensive to me and like it would involve a trip on the subway, which I didn’t have the time or the energy for. I crossed my fingers that the third option would actually sound like something I wanted to do.
As it turned out, the third option couldn’t have been more simple. All you had to do was take a hot bath, using epsom salts, apple cider vinegar, and lavender oil.
Finally, an option I could handle.
One short trip to Walgreens later, I set aside 30 minutes in the middle of my work day to cleanse myself of all the stress, negativity, tension and anxiety that comes with being a freelance writer in New York City.
And I have to admit, at first it felt really nice.
I haven’t taken a bath since middle school, and it kind of reminded me of being in a sauna.
I could feel the sweat dripping onto my lip, and as the smell of the epsom salts swirled around my nostrils, it became easier and easier to relax and reason away all my problems and stresses.
As I cleaned each part of my body, I tried to focus on a specific thing I was stressing about. Be it writing entertaining posts, trying to not be jealous of my friends, or the fact that sometimes I suffer from a debilitating lack of confidence.
After I was done, I felt better, but as soon as I raised myself out of the tub to get out, I started to feel like I was going to throw up.
My solar plexus, which is located between the heart and the belly button, and coincidentally the place where all of your emotions are stored, felt tender, sore, and like it was about to burst.
I felt hot. TOO HOT. Like if I didn’t cool off at that moment, something bad would happen.
But even though my heart was pounding and I was vaguely filled with terror that I would pass out in my own vomit on the bathroom floor, as soon as that energy began to fade away, I felt incredibly calm.
Not relaxed, exactly, but certainly calm. Even the skin on my face looked lax and neutral as I wiped away the steam on the bathroom mirror.
Plus my skin felt super soft.
Honestly, I can’t tell you whether or not my aura was cleansed by that experience, but I do know that something happened to me that doesn’t usually happen to people after they take baths.
I don’t know whether to take what happened as a sign that a large chunk of my negativity was being scooped out of my seven-layer dip of an aura, or just a sign that you shouldn’t take a hot bath after inhaling a bowl of yogurt, but at least if felt like something, right?
For obvious reasons, I can’t say that I’ll be re-trying this experiment soon, but it does make me believe that there’s some truth to auras after all.
Maybe there’s a little something to New Age mysticism.
