I’m looking all over the house for a photo of me from 2009.

I’m peeling open my husband’s office cabinets and sloughing through old photo books dug from closet depths. Where is that photo?! God it was good.

It was taken at an I Can Do It event for Hay House. That was a conference that used to bring together luminaries in personal growth into one mega conference. My job at the event was to create a second stage for all the biggest faces in spirituality and record these superstars live for internet broadcast (which was still a very, very new thing in 2009).

So I had to 1) get my full techy geek self on point 2) get my sweet personality celebrity handler personality on as well, and 3) make sure I didn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers in the upper corporate echelon, or anywhere actually. Two out of the three weren’t hard.

In between all the sweaty armpit-iness running around, I wandered into the main conference room where there are always booths set up at conventions. You know the kind—booths with crystals, health drinks, and swishy clothes that fit every figure (yes I bought several awesome velvet beaded fringy numbers that reminded me of Stevie Nicks).

And then there was the guy with the camera that took photos of your aura.

Now, I have grown up with this aura photos thing.

I’d been traveling through psychic fairs and Elfin Forest communes and actual real cults and all that since I was born. But yeah, give me a photo, Mr. Aura Man. I’m feeling on top of shit today. I am in command.
My “aura” was bright, unequivocally, and totally red. Maraschino cherry red. The guy handed me the instant photo with an embarrassed shrug. My heart twisted into a tiny ball of shame and horror.

Red is the worst color you want people to see in your aura. We’re talking root chakra, worst of the worst. Nothing elevated. Nothing spiritual in that. Just base sex, unresolved family trauma, and general un-evolved spiritual yuckiness.

In other words, I might as well have been dealing coke in the hotel’s bathroom and then crashing Sylvia Brown’s livestream with Tequila bottles in my hand right then. That’s red. RED. That’s what red aura people do.
At least, that’s how people used to think of things.

I don’t know if the aura camera actually works, but I like them. They’re fun. But hey, I wanted to see a deep resilient purple that would shout my spiritual awareness to the world. I wanted a soothing turquoise that would tell everyone I’m a healer with the ability to speak truth.
Nope. Nope-ity nope.

Have you ever been pinned as someone or something you don’t think you are? Yeah, me too.

This wasn’t my first rodeo having this happen.  When I was younger, I learned that being a young blonde was the the #1 way to get a target on your back. So I downplayed. I ducked my head. I dressed in black. I joked and obfuscated whenever someone said something nice about me or asked me out.

It took me thirty years to finally say. “Yeah I can do that and I do that very well.” (Whatever [that] was. I watched a lot of people shoot ahead of me while I was still figuring out that I could shine. That I should shine.
And then finally I really learned how to say: Hey wait, I’m good at this. I do this. I Can Do It. Watch me.

Sometimes it’s so ironic it hurts.

Owning yourself, as it turns out, is a very red aura thing to do. Own your feelings. Know what you are, where you’re going, what you want. Go deep and grasp the part of you that just knows what you’re capable of, where your truest senses and talents are. And sometimes that’s hard to do when you don’t have any support to do it—when everyone explicitly or even hiddenly says not to do it.

So you end up finding yourself on the trampoline of your red aura. You jump, and you keep jumping in that beautiful twilight evening—you know that evening–the one where you realize what you’re actually able to do, can do, maybe should do, if it weren’t so [scary] [outside the box] [not good enough compared to everyone else doing it]. Up and down, shining and dimming. So unsure.

Most of the time, we shut this “owning who we are” feeling down. There’s so many reasons to shut it down.
Now that I’m in my 50s, I find myself wishing backwards sometimes for previous opportunities. I also wish forward for new ones. I, mostly, don’t care anymore what color my aura supposedly is.

My life is judged not by a photo, but by the work I’ve done with others and by the impact I’ve made/am making. It’s the people who’ve risen, flown, changed because I intersected their lives. It’s my kids, whom I hope are also stretching outward from that red aura, base part of themselves, the part that’s there to help them utterly claim what they want from their lives. My aura is made up of the people I walked with years ago, and those whom I’ll walk with tomorrow.

I want to smear the sidewalk with all the colors.

My point is that a photo doesn’t ever tell you who you are. You tell yourself who you are, by every action you do every single day, with every person you interact with. Your aura is a kaleidoscope of all the lives you’ve touched, and your own feelings about them all. Red pink black blue orange.

So red? Yeah I’ll take it. And, some hot pink too. Yup. Then let’s flick in yellow or silver while we’re at it. And purple. Green. What’s next?

Bring them all on.

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