The Monthly Aspectarian: Rosalyn, you've been studying the human aura for a long time. Could you give us a thumbnail of how it's been for you? How did you start?

Rosalyn Bruyere: I started in a rather unconventional way. In 1968 I had two very small children who at ages three and four were seeing auras. I did believe they were seeing real phenomena and I sought information. We have a great public library here in Los Angeles, so I was able to look up auras and find out what was in print about them.

TMA: You probably ran across the material published by the Theosophical Society.

RB: Yes, but every cult that couldn't stand winter is in California, and every leader of every cult self-published and gave a book to the downtown pubic library so in 1968, there were actually 328 books about auras. There were old Spiritualist and Theosophical texts, and Yoga Publications Society material, certainly, and there were also mediums and Native Americans lots of different kinds of stuff. What I discovered immediately was that nobody agreed about what it was!

Eventually I was taken by a good friend to a local medium who mentored and me and took me under her wing and helped me with my children. I studied spiritualism and went on to educate myself. By 1974, I was in East L.A. doing research in auric fields under the direction of Dr. Valerie Hunt. Fortunately, when I had still been in school, before I dropped out of college, got married and had babies, I was an electrical engineering major. So my sense of the science of this field is probably better than a lot of my peers. It has been a very long journey.

TMA: Where did you go from there?

The major research project of this internationally acclaimed healer, teacher and medicine woman encompasses the energy field — known also as the aura — that surrounds and interpenetrates us, affecting us personally and interpersonally on all levels. She also talks about why practicing respectful inquiry into others' beliefs is imperative; her work with the indigenous peoples of North America ... and about earth changes that have already come about.

RB: I was very devoted to research. And because of my success as a healer, I had a very large private practice. I treated between 40 and 60 patients a day. I was trying to train other healers, at night, as quickly as I could because I was deluged with patients. That's when I developed my healing school. In 1974, we were commissioned as a separate religious entity. I ran the Healing Light Center primarily as a healing school and religious organization since then. And began lecturing about our findings in research as well as teaching a course, as someone needed to do, about personal development in order to become a healer. I did that for about 20 years.

About eight years ago, we gradually turned our educational system into a College Without Walls and began breaking the courses down into week long intensives and weekends so that we could better serve the professional community that needed to add it to what they already did instead of teaching people from scratch. It's now a University Without Walls. Because of that, I now travel about two-thirds of the year and have only the smallest meager practice.

My primary focus still is research because in 1981, Dr. Hunt retired from the university and set up her private laboratory and I continued to be with her. I also have worked with Dr. Elmer Green in some of his altered state studies when he was still at the Menninger Clinic and I continued to do ongoing research. I'm involved with a research project at the Alliance Hospital in Cincinnati, another one at Johns Hopkins and at other places. All the colleagues that do real research in the field stay in touch; we share each other's knowledge when it comes to doing serious research about whether or not [energy] healing is effective, what is the nature of the human aura, what can be measured and what can't, and how does the aura affect altered states.

My primary focus for the last 30 years has been the study of the human aura and all the things that it influences. Since the aura is a field around our body that penetrates our body, it really affects all areas of health, all areas of spiritual practice, all areas of human relationships. If you wanted to study everything the aura touches, you would have to study all of human knowledge.

TMA: Does the aura actually affect health, or does it reflect health?

RB: Yes!

TMA: I think the general view is that the aura shows the conditions of things.

RB: No, it doesn't. It's a precursor as well . . . and it's not a reflection, either, it's a fact. Part of the problem people have in understanding energy fields is that they use language indicating that the aura is a metaphor for "what if there were an energy field?" The truth of the matter is, there's a known, seeable, measurable energy field, and when you start to deal with it as a reality, you start to understand it. It's not outside your body, it interpenetrates your body. It's made up, probably, of ions, which are the outer bonds of molecules. Therefore, it can penetrate tissue, and therefore, for instance, magnetic fields around us affect our health, our moods, our way of being. Other people affect us through the aura and thus affect our health inasmuch as our health is our inner aura. So in terms of energy, you're just dealing with what we already know in the material world.

If I'm carrying a germ into my office and I'm using my telephone, that germ will sit there until one of my office staff picks up that telephone and contracts that germ. Thereby, you will either deal with it or not deal with it. Thoughts and ideas that move through the auric field work in exactly the same way. They are around me, other people pick them up and they either affect them or they fight them off. Their field rejects it in the same way our immune system or any of the other defense systems we have and biologically, we have many of them rejects a germ or a virus. We have the same defense mechanisms psychologically, intellectually and spiritually. So things either affect us or don't affect us.

Some people don't take any of this literally then they find it is literal and they become superstitious. "Everything will affect me" . . . they begin to act funny, you know. It's like finally you understand that something exists that you thought wasn't there and then you become paranoid about it. It's a normal cycle; I guess we all do that.

TMA: It's interesting how mainstream thinking is coming around. People who fifteen or twenty years ago wouldn't even talk to you, want to study with you now. How is it for you, dealing with physicians and others who are newly converted?

RB: Well, the superstitious part of everybody is hard for me to deal with because I don't suffer idiocy easily. Or arrogance. I can barely tolerate my own! [laughter] I have to work on it continuously. But dealing with physicians and other people who care about the quality of other people's lives, the service workers of the world, is relatively easy for me because they're looking for pragmatic solutions to lifelong mysteries. Skepticism doesn't bother me. I think it's a healthy reflex. But I also think that it is a reflex and I don't know how healthy it is to cling to the ideas we know. It's difficult to get new ideas in there in opposition to what they already know, and I do have some sympathy for that.

As I look at my own resistance to change, I understand much more compassionately other people's resistance. The ideas in my field are easy for me to embrace and study and have clarity about and I know personally that there are areas where the change doesn't happen. One of the nicest things about being middle aged, I think, is that you can kind of look at yourself and go, Well, hmm! You've worked on that for twenty years and that didn't respond to treatment. [laughs] But over the years, you have developed qualities that are useful.

I have one good quality in being a teacher and that is that I can see the similarities in things and I can see easily how all of us are a bag of rigidity and fluidity. It's just in different areas in different people. It gives you a tolerance for things that other people don't have. You know, a lot of what goes on, unfortunately, in the new age movement, is that there are new age people who have a cult mentality where "We're the special people, we have the secret knowledge, we're gifted." I'm not sure that that attitude is any less offensive in the new age people than it is in medicine where there are elitists.

TMA: It's probably more offensive, because we should know better.

RB: We should know better, yes, absolutely.

TMA: The title of my column every month is "My Current Opinion." because that's all we can ever truly have.

RB: That's right! As soon as new information is in, "my current opinion" changes.

TMA: What are you working on now?

RB: I'm looking forward to doing two projects that have to do with children. I want to do a project that has to do with cocaine-addicted babies. I have had success in my private practice in treating them, and I want the opportunity to do that in a larger way. The other thing that's important to me as an adjunct to my educational program is working with the indigenous people of North American on their health care issues. Partially because I've had so much training in Native American tradition, I'm very sympathetic to many of their problems and have had the opportunity for the last six or seven years to work among tribal people in Canada and in the Southwest. I've been a consultant to the Indian Health Service in the Southwest for maybe eighteen years. Now I hope to get an opportunity to work with the Plains Indians this year.

The Native American people In Canada, they refer to themselves as Aboriginal People or First Nation people there's a lot of politically correct language that I suppose we should observe . . . not because I necessarily care about political correctness but because if you make the population you seek to serve comfortable that you are respecting their boundaries, then you have a way later of helping them find the boundaries they need to observe and the ones they need to fight against. Part of the maturation process for everyone is learning those distinctions.

I'm taken to most of the reservations that I work on ostensibly to work with the children that have fetal alcohol syndrome or drug addiction and to work with all the health conditions that indigenous people have because their genetics weren't given sufficient time to change to the new diets and the new way of life in the sense of time. There's a worldview change that was forced upon them in a hundred years that the biology of mankind cannot adapt to in only a hundred years. It takes many generations to make that shift. So there's a high rate of diabetes, a high rate of coronary disease, a high rate of blindness and circulatory problems because of diabetes and that is coupled, usually, with alcohol addiction in various forms and a high rate of tobacco addiction. You run into the paradigm difficulties among indigenous people; tobacco is a sacred herb and yet it's being used in a way that is anything but sacred; it's being used to destroy the quality of life.

You find yourself dealing with the very dilemmas that you have in your own society in spite of the fact that you're in a different culture. I've learned about my own spiritual journey that sometimes when I go to a place in another culture that's entirely foreign to me, I can learn and see a spiritual principle because it's not so enmeshed with my own culture. I can come back and look at my own culture and go, Oh, there it is I knew it had to be in there or it wouldn't have caught my attention to begin with.

TMA: Are you linking up with elders?

RB: Yes, I always have. Because I entered the Native world as an accomplished healer already, I was always introduced to elders, usually to give them healings. And then they would mentor me. They all said the same thing about me twenty years ago: "You're all right, kid, but you sure are dumb." You know, you're a Westerner and you don't understand ritual and you sure don't have any respect and . . . all the things that Westerners suffer from. They were all very, very kind to me and very loving with me because I was a good healer and was kind and loving about their condition and not judgmental, which is a kind of natural sympathy I have for people who have pain and suffering. They would be patient with me in my bad areas.

Now that I'm a grandmother myself, I'm usually taken to work with the elders and on the elders and help the elders. I've worked with the Cree Nation in Canada, the Suquamish Band in Vancouver, and in the Southwest I've worked with the Navaho and the Hopi, and here in California with the Chumash. I've worked with a lot of indigenous people, and always, because I was a healer, because of the interesting way I entered in, the rules that would normally apply in tribal life didn't affect me. I was always told by people who worked with Indians and white population, Oh, they'll never talk to you because you're a woman and you're young. And neither of those applied because what they saw first was that I was a healer and therefore special and therefore needed to be given a passport, almost, in their world, and help. They would help me to the degree that they perceived I was trying to help them, and they would be generous to me to the degree that they perceived I was being generous to them.

TMA: I've been pleased to see, despite some very vocal opposition by a minority, that indigenous peoples not only on this continent but around the world, are beginning to come out and share their spiritual technologies.

RB: Partially that's because their basic philosophy is that of generosity and sharing and hospitality. I've noticed that when you live very close to the land, there are certain rules of hospitality. When I worked and traveled in the Middle East, the Bedouins took care of us because we were Indo-Europeans entering the Sinai Desert. If they hadn't, we'd have killed ourselves. Their codes of hospitality as desert nomads is that they didn't let people die on their land or their turf or on their watch.

The same is true when I go to Canada. Where I work is 800 miles north of the border. You know, I'm a native Californian and I think snow is part of a ski package. I ski in California in my jeans because when you get down the slope it's many degrees warmer. I don't know snow! So they're constantly checking me as I go outdoors to make sure I have my gloves on, my hat on, do I have enough layers on, did I bring a safe cover. I don't know anything about bundling in all these layers of clothing and fur-lined gloves, and they check me because they know I'm dangerous to myself.

TMA: My point was that as we move into the future and even the near future, there has to be a marriage of the new ways and the old ways. If for nothing else, to begin to correct the damage that's been done environmentally and spiritually. There has to be a blending of the two. Neither one of them is right by itself for the future that we face.

RB: I think that the marriage that has to happen is going to have to happen out of respect.

TMA: Or it won't happen at all. We have to go in respecting each other.

RB: You have to practice respect beforehand because you're not a master at respect. You can't overnight change from the competitive way to the respectful way. It takes constant practice and constant vigilance and constant love. As they see us doing that, they're very generous with what they know. They're generous in teaching us what we need to know to function in their world so that we will teach them what they need to know to function in ours . . . so that together, we will forge a new world.

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