Wednesday was a bad-aura day for me. I didn't know as much until my afternoon appointment with Khushbu (
What is Aura-Soma?
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
Depending on how you see it, Aura-Soma is either a holistic approach to spiritual awakening and individuation based on the power of plants, crystals and color -- or a 90-minute parlor game.
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
To have your aura "read," you select your four favorite colors from 103 two-color bottles that sit on a white back-lit shelf. Each bottle is a half-oil, half-water combination tinctured with various colors using plant and mineral essences.
Believers call them "Balance Bottles" and the first you choose -- the one your psyche is drawn to more than any other -- is your spirit bottle. It represents your true nature. The second bottle represents the obstacles and difficulties in your life. The third and fourth are, respectively, your present circumstances and future situation.
An Aura-Soma therapist, such as Khushbu, who has been trained to "clear and harmonize the aura and subtle bodies," interprets your selections. Once your therapist explains the specific colors you chose, you can literally absorb the power of these aromatic extracts by rubbing them onto your corresponding body parts; violet combinations for the head, blues and greens for the throat and chest, and orange and red combinations for below the navel.
Certified spiritualism
Getting certified isn't for those with only a parlor-game passing interest. For her part, Khushbu spent several months at England's Aura-Soma International Academy of Color Therapeutics. The academy is the world's only institute capable of certifying students to become Aura-Soma therapists.
There are over 300 certified therapists in South America, South Africa, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and throughout Europe and North America. Khushbu is the only certified therapist in Taiwan. The institute also holds the registration for the Aura-Soma trademark and its extensive line of products -- a fact that has skeptics screaming "snake oil!"
Such naysayers doubts are reinforced by the fact that the institute -- based on the healing power of light and color -- was founded by a blind herbalist, pharmacist and podiatrist named Vicky Wall, the "chosen custodian of Aura-Soma knowledge on Earth," according to the school's literature.
One night in 1984, she suddenly and for no apparent reason went to her laboratory and concocted what would become the first of the colorful herbal extracts. "She could neither `see' the beautiful jewels she had spontaneously and inspirationally created, or their possible intended purpose," the literature says. "Even more bewildering was the resonant power she felt emanating from them as they basked in the sunlight of the following morning."
"Other hands moved my own," Wall herself would later say of the episode. Practitioners of Aura-Soma therapy now consider the Balance Bottles to be born, rather than engineered and they're given names such as Metatron and The Archangel Tzadkiel.
By now perhaps your curiosity is piqued and you want to learn more about the healing power of color and light. The school's literature likely won't help. Published in 2000, the Aura-Soma Handbook was written by the institute's principal and Wall's closest associate, Mike Booth. It's challenging reading and often beggars understanding.
"The True aura is about the size of a walnut existing in the area around the navel. The True aura is an energy picture surrounding the first cell that came into existence at our conception," the book explains. "In seeing our future parents copulating we were attracted predominantly to either the energy of the mother or father, depending upon what our own sex will be. ?Is all this planned, preconceived a long time before? Yes. It is an agreement we have already made with our parents when they too were out of their bodies." And that's just the introduction.
Seeing the light
I hadn't studied anything about Aura-Soma before my appointment and told Khushbu as much. She assured me that the process was painless and relaxing and that I might even learn something about myself. She invited me into her studio and sat me in front of a light box containing all 103 Balance Bottles.
"Pick with your heart, not with your mind," she instructed me and several moments later I'd chosen a pink-and-green bottle, The Archangel Tzadkiel; a turquoise-and-blue bottle known as The Crystal Cave; and an all-green bottle. My last choice was the only bottle on the light box that had no color and which I suspected was only water.
Khushbu and I moved to a table surrounded by pillows and sat on the floor. She looked serious at first then smiled and told me that my spirit bottle, the pink-and-green one, reflected my qualities of unconditional love and unconditional acceptance.
"Someone who has these qualities is a pioneer for freedom. A secret agent of truth," I later read in Booth's Aura-Soma Handbook, in one of the only passages I understood clearly.
My problem, Khushbu explained, was to be found in the second bottle I'd chosen, the blue-green combination. There were obviously repressed feelings of guilt looming in the depths of my psyche that had to be brought into the light and dealt with. She suggested that perhaps the pink power in the bottom of my spirit bottle was trapped in my base chakra beneath my lower intestines and causing me pain.
"I had a lot of stomach aches in high school," I told her, not knowing really what to say. I told her that my father had succumbed to intestinal problems when I was a child. Khushbu instantly offered her prognosis, "It' s likely that when you and your father were both in the spirit world, you learned that this would be an obstacle you would have to overcome," she said. "We are often forced to deal in this life with unsolved problems from past lives."
This, in turn, put the bit firmly between my teeth and I pressed her to tell me what the bottles had in store for me. She said that my third bottle, the green-green combination, showed the extent of my leadership abilities as well as my integrity. Because this bottle was my third choice, and so reflected my present psychological state, she suggested that assuming a leadership role would benefit both others and myself. I wholeheartedly agreed.
The high point of my reading came at the very end. The fourth selection represents what the future holds and mine was the clear bottle called Serapis Bay. It represents someone who understands suffering and is growing within himself or herself, someone who is aware of the revelations in their life. This, I felt, surely encapsulated who I am.
Khushbu opened the bottle and dabbed some into my hand. It smelled like eucalyptus and jasmine, like fertile soil after a rainfall. It smelled like the future -- my future. She dabbed some into her own hand and, rubbing them together, waved them over the top of my head, behind my shoulders and in front of my chest. She was feeling my aura, she explained, though she never told me what it felt like. She didn't need to; it felt fine.
I'm still a skeptic, but I understand now that Aura-Soma and other holistic therapies don't have any medical value beyond the value you assign them. "Aura-Soma will only work for you if you allow it to," Khushbu said. "It' s not the colors themselves that are powerful so much as how the colors make us feel."
I can buy that. But at NT$2,200 per reading I'd only buy it once.
Khushbu's Rainbow Rose Bodywork Salon is located in Tienmu at 23, Tienyu St, Lane 38, 3F (
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