I’m still wondering about something I saw many years ago during a psychotherapy hour. My client was an artist who created beautiful photographs with his very fine sense of landscape, line, and color. He had been working with me on his struggles with loss and limitations. During this hour we had been using imagery – he with his eyes closed looking at images that came up on his mental screen and I, with my eyes open, accompanying him and sometimes guiding his explorations. He began to confront Death in an intense and immediate way.
There was no sunlight coming in through the windows and the room was softly lit. Suddenly I saw swirls of color, streams of purple and chartreuse, circling around his head. I thought something might be wrong with my eyes so I turned away and opened and closed them several times to clear my vision. When I looked back at him the flowing mist of colors was still there and it stayed there for several more minutes. Then it disappeared as his emotions shifted.
I didn’t say anything to him at the time. I was puzzled by the strangeness of what I’d seen. I really wanted to understand what had happened and in the following years there were several chances to question people who might know something about what I’d seen. None of them had answers and, discouragingly, the first person I asked seemed to doubt my eyesight and my stability.
Sometimes we have to hold on to the reality of what we’ve experienced, to keep on wondering, and to make sense of unusual events as best as we can. I’ve come to believe that long ago sight was a product of the deep stillness in that room and the intensity of the artist’s facing himself as he explored profound emotions with an open mind and an open heart. He generated subtle energies in the field around his head that were visible as colors. This was like (but not the same as) the aura that can be seen as bands of light or as colors surrounding the whole body.
There’ll be another post, another week, about the auric fields, but for now, if you can add what you know to my conclusions about what I saw, please leave a comment at the end of this post.