A TOUCHSTONE REVIEW:

Wheels of Light: Chakras, Auras, and the Healing Energy of the Body * **
by Rosalyn L. Bruyere
Atria (1989, 1994, 2009)

* For this review, I have mined information on the history and influence of this book from Kurt Leland’s Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016).

** Rosalyn Bruyere did not make herself available for comment, although it was my hope that she would provide additional information and corrections to this review.

The Author: Rosalyn L. Bruyere (1946 – )

Website:  https://www.rosalynlbruyere.org

Rosalyn Bruyere 2019

When Rosalyn Bruyere was very young, her great-grandmother taught her to see the lights or auras around plants. Her great-grandmother’s psychic abilities alarmed her family and, when Bruyere was six, they sent her great-grandmother to receive electroshock treatments. When she returned from these treatments, Bruyere saw that she had lost her abilities. From then on, Bruyere let on to no one that she too had psychic abilities in order to avoid being treated the same way.

Then, when she was in her twenties, her own children began to speak about seeing “colored fuzz” around people. Their ability to see auras stimulated her own abilities and interest once again. She sought out teachers and was taught rudimentary healing techniques, and she gained a reputation as an aura reader. But she had no intention of becoming a healer until the people she “treated” felt better and she discovered that a healer is what she had become.

In time, Bruyere came to understand that health of mind and body means to become “full of light.” She began to study. The more she studied, the more she found a variety of cultural references to the chakra system.

She discovered that the aura and the meaning of the auric colors often differed from culture to culture. These observations led her to ask whether the practices of different religions change the auric colors. Her explorations led her to consider that if an entire culture’s thought process was dominated by a particular chakra color, that culture would tend to see reality through the “eyes” or particular viewpoint of that dominant chakra.

To Bruyere, it seemed that Native Americans are the only people who have a natural relationship with the chakra system that has not been dogmatized. And since that realization, she has been greatly influenced by the traditions and ways of these peoples.

She also came to understand that in antiquity, before science and religion were divided into separate, antagonistic camps, the chakras were an integrated part of daily life. She learned that even when the ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Chinese, Brahmans, Greeks, and Native Americans were conquered or destroyed, sacred priesthoods preserved knowledge of these mysteries and what H. P. Blavatsky called the “universally diffused religion of the ancient and prehistoric world.”

In the 1970s, Bruyere was introduced to UCLA psychologist Dr. Valerie Hunt , who was conducting research on the effects of rolfing on the human body. Dr. Hunt asked her to participate in the project to help measure the effects with her ability to perceive and interpret auric phenomenon. Trained as an engineer, Bruyere was instrumental in the eight-year research project.

Bruyere’s role in the research was to perceive the energetic effect of Rolfing on the chakras as a clairvoyant while scientific instruments recorded information on fluctuations of electrical charges in the skin in areas where the chakras were located. Readings of the electromagnetic field were taken before, during, and after the Rolfing process specified by Ida Rolf’s program of Structural Integration. The findings of this project seemed to provide scientific evidence for the existence of the human aura and measured it scientifically for the first time.

In l975 Bruyere founded the Healing Light Center Church in Glendale, California and became its pastor, so that she could lay hands on people without risk of being charged with practicing medicine without a license. She set up a clinic and school in the basement of the Maryland Hotel in Glendale, where she taught a generation of healers who now practice across the country, including Barbara Brennan, who founded the world’s largest hands-on healing school in New York. As director of the church and the school, Bruyere has committed her life to the teaching of sacred ancient healing disciplines to ordained ministers, most of whom are graduates of her four-year training program.

By the time Rosalyn Bruyere wrote Wheels of Light in 1989, she had already served twenty years as a healer and teacher.

Bruyere’s ability to see patterns of disease and behavior in detail and to energetically transform tissue at a cellular level brought her worldwide attention and a reputation as one of the nation’s most successful healers. Today she lives in Sierra Madre, California and remains an internationally acclaimed healer, clairvoyant, and medicine woman.

The Book

Link to searchable 1994 edition of Wheels of Light

Chakra Healing: Exercises and Meditations to Use and Balance Chakra Energies for Greater Health, 

Audio Renaissance (1990) is the CD companion piece to Wheels of Light. 

In this 60-minute audio cassette, the Rev. Rosalyn L. Bruyere offers not only a clear description of the chakras and the auric field, but also guides listeners through exercises and meditations for sensing and interpreting the flow of chakra energies within themselves.

Wheels of Light, A Study of the Chakras provides four take-aways that readers are not likely to find elsewhere, even today:

First, the recognition that chakras are universal archetypes found in cultures throughout time and place.

Second, an extensive and expansive view of what sexual orgasm is, how it works, and what purpose its serves in overall well-being based on the dynamics of the chakras of the human energy body. Arguing from the nature of the human energy field, she also makes a perfectly rational argument why sexual intercourse should not be casual but a sacred activity.

Third, a complete description of the Rolf Study experiment in 1976 that first showed the human energy field exists and that a clairvoyant’s perceptions coincided with recorded, measured electronic data (an experiment in which the author took part).

Fourth, the first description of chelation, the therapy the author invented to clean, purify, and clear blockages in the chakras.

The book is valuable for bridging of ancient and modern healing arts because Bruyere sees the chakra system as part of the ancient and lost mysteries. Early on in Part I, Bruyere sets about unraveling some of the sacred mysteries of the ancients, beginning with the Native American Hopi and the Egyptian priest-scribe generally known in myth and legend by his Greek name Hermes, who is credited with defining for the first time the elementary nature of the chakra system. The discussion continues into Part II.

In the West, she finds the idea of chakra energies “within the rituals of the ancient Greek mystery schools of Eleusis and Delphi as well as among the practices of early Christian mystics and Hermetics.” And she notes that the idea of chakras came into Western mysticism again around the beginning of the twentieth century through the Theosophists, “whose assumptions may or may not be accurate.”

In ancient sources, Bruyere finds a basic distinction made between the lower centers and the upper centers:

They each represent a different three-dimensional world. The three-dimensional world of the lower chakras (the first, second and third) is mankind’s world, and the three-dimensional world of the upper chakras (the fifth, sixth aud seventh) is God’s world. (The fourth chakra acts as the transition between these two worlds.)

Bruyere points out that the animal nature of the chakras is reflected physically in the development of the human embryo and metaphysically in the chakra symbolism of the Hopi. Biological science observes that the human fetus in utero goes through a serpent stage, then a fish stage in which it has gills, before it begins to develop lungs and take on higher life forms. Thousands of years ago, this cycle was known to the American Indians and symbolized by them in the seven chakra system:

According to American Indian lore, the lower chakras are aligned to animal forms. The first chakra is the snake, the second chakra is fish, the third chakra is bird or fowl, the fourth is mammal, and man resides in the fifth center. The sixth chakra takes man one step further into the collective and the spiritual, since again, according to Native American tradition, it is aligned with all spirits, living and dead. Finally, the seventh chakra is the Kachina, the living symbol of the Universal Spirit which embodies all animate matter.

Bruyere constructed her book in two parts. Part I, “Wheels of Light” discusses the chakras in general. Part II, “The First Chakra,” as its title suggests, discusses the power and nature of the first chakra.

The final chapter in the book provides an extensive look at various serious health conditions like cancer, arthritis, colitis, Alzheimer’s, inflammatory diseases, high blood pressure, sexually transmitted diseases, and polio. Four appendices follow the main text along with a glossary of terms and definitions, descriptive footnotes, and a complete index. Bruyere’s footnotes – alongside references to modern scientists referred to for their research findings – cite esoteric philosopher Manly P. Hall and Theosophists H. P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and Alice Bailey as authorities when she is speaking of the functions and spiritual characteristics of the seven chakras.

It is no mistake that Bruyere devotes the second half of her book to a detailed discussion of the first chakra. Her explorations led her to consider that “if an entire culture’s thought process was dominated by a particular chakra color, that culture would process reality through that dominant chakra” – that a culture would tend to see reality through the “eyes” or particular viewpoint of that chakra. Bruyere considers the first chakra to be the area of consciousness of the physical body, which is the cultural focal point of modern, and especially American, culture.

Bruyere also devotes an entire chapter to describing the experience of scientist Valerie Hunt, who led the study in which Bruyere herself participated. The results of the Rolf Study, published in 1977, provided evidence not only that the red frequency of the first chakra exists but that it is connected in a very real way to an awareness of physical sensation. The study inadvertently recorded also the rising of the kundalini in one participant and an auric field experience which Bruyere called “an electromagnetic direct current or ‘DC’ shift,” which enables an individual to access their subconscious and to feel more than one thing at a time. Appendix I excerpts the summary conclusion of the important study in Dr. Hunt’s own words.

Bruyere’s Chakra System

The historian of the Western chakra system Kurt Leland notes that Bruyere’s vision of the chakra system differs on several counts with the now-ubiquitous Western system:

The colors are red through violet in the first six chakras, with white in the seventh (and no indigo). The pineal is in the sixth position and the pituitary in the seventh. The second chakra is associated with Peyer’s patches (in the ileum of the small intestine) or the lymphatic system. The elements appear in an order at variance with all other Eastern and Western systems. To make matters more confusing, the chakras are identified in terms of planes, the names of which are also at variance with earlier teachings.

And he points out that Bruyere’s system is inconsistent with both Eastern and Theosophical ideas:

It appears that Bruyere’s version of the chakras is discontinuous. Like the Eastern system(and unlike the Western), it is not a progressive evolutionary continuum. Each chakra represents a distinct state of consciousness and the chakras are not stacked on top of one another in a progressive way. Thus the function of each chakra in Bruyere’s system is determined on the basis of what could be called horizontal rather than vertical associations.

Bruyere, Leland says, has “built up her own chakra system on the basis of personal investigation and validated it after through discovering resonances with other spiritual teachings.” But her system has the same downside as the formative systems of Blavatsky and Bailey: “It is messy and chaotic, in need of a consolidator.” Barbara Brennan, he believes, played that role for Bruyere.

All the points Leland makes may be true, but these difficulties do not outweigh the value of the dynamic concepts and intricacies Bruyere has discovered in the workings of the human energy field.

  • What is an Aura?

This energy field, she believes, is directly related to mind – to thought and memory, which science now postulates exist throughout the body. “If the aura is anything,” she says, “it is the mind: not the mind in the sense of the intellect but in the sense of the greater mind, the electromagnetic field which surrounds and generates the body.” Bruyere describes the aura as a luminous emanation “that extends beyond the body to interact with our external environment … generated by the spinning of smaller vortices of energy located within the body.”

Bruyere’s correlation between mind and the auric field is complex and related to the concept of kinetic energy, and so is best left in her own words:

            Kinetic energy is energy in movement within either a static or dynamic electromagnetic field. A field is considered static until the intensity of either the electric or the magnetic field is varied. A dynamic electromagnetic field consists of oscillations of a specific frequency or wavelength; a more complex field may have several frequencies. In a dynamic field, the magnitude of the oscillations determines the intensity of the field, or the amount of energy being carried in the field. The frequency and wavelength determine the “color” of the propagation…. So when we refer to the energy moving from chakra to chakra, or through the body, it is understood that this energy is being carried by moving electromagnetic fields. When we refer to “color of energy” (or, sometimes, frequency), we mean the color of the energy or chakra, as defined by the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation being emitted at that location, as perceived by those who have second sight.

The sum of potential and kinetic energy is always constant. The law of conservation holds that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Thus, energy cannot be extracted from or added to an electromagnetic field without a corresponding change in the field. A thought then can be referred to as a potential or static electromagnetic field pattern. On the other hand, the thinking process represents a continually changing or dynamic electromagnetic field. As thought changes from a static to a dynamic field, it imparts energy to and receives energy from the thinker during the course of the thinking process. When the process ends, the resultant thought is stored (a memory) as a static electromagnetic field pattern in the auric field. Clearly the mind, the aura, and the electromagnetic chakra system are inseparably interrelated.

An additional statement of hers serves as a corollary to her theory of mind: “We can suppress information in the body or in the chakra system, but we can never eliminate it.”

How is information accessed in this “vast and complex data base composed of many smaller energies (bits) stored throughout the tissues of the body”? Her answer: “It is the kundalini that allows a flow of energy to locate the information and bring that information up to the conscious level…. Our secondary means is the nervous system, which transmits the energy of the experience or event first recorded by and in the kundalini to the brain via the spinal cord.”

  • Bruyere’s Chakra System

Bruyere’s experience indicates that each chakra has four discernible characteriestic that functionally affect the aura: color, size and shape, rotation or spin, and intensity. Intensity is a function of how open or blocked a chakra is.

Bruyere posits that each chakra also has its own particular point of view and interacts with the others. However, Bruyere says, all the chakras are essentially identical:

     Our research [in the Rolf Study] showed them to be the same size. Each is basically the same shape. Most importantly, each chakra has, if not an essence of all the other chakras, at least a matrix or network that allows for another chakra to exist…. Simply stated, each chakra is both unique and potentially interactive with each other chakra, having both a specific viewpoint and the structure for a distinctly different one.

     Each of us exists through an interaction of many chakras. By focusing our attention on one chakra center or another, we limit ourselves to a single viewpoint of the world. Nothing really ever happens in a chakra. A chakra is only a point of origin. It is the effect of energy moving through a chakra which is important. Where a flow of energy … encounters the energy of a spinning chakra, it is pulled upward. It is this dynamic that moves energy from chakra to chakra…. As it spins, each chakra—a unique electromagnetic wave generator—creates a particular frequency. The frequency generated appears as a color that is unique only to that chakra…. When the system is functioning appropriately, there is a specific mathematical relationship between the frequencies of the chakras: the frequency of each chakra increases as we move up the chakra system. Not only was this found to be so in the lab, but this phenomenon is discussed in the Veda and in other ancient texts, where it is referred to as “the multiple.”

The seven chakras “are who and what we are, what we feel and how we think and change. They are how we express ourselves and how we create. Although we as Westerners have no cognitive awareness of its energies, the chakra system is precisely the means by which we gain awareness. It is how we experience life, how we perceive reality, and how we relate to self, others, and the world. It is life itself.”

Bruyere describes concisely how the chakras interact to produce the auric field and to produce changes in the field:

     Our auric or electromagnetic field is generated by the spinning of the chakras…. As it spins, each chakra produces its own eletromagnetic field. This field then combines with fields generated by other chakras to produce the auric field. An individual’s auric field is manifested via a combination of energies from three chakras. Generally these are the first, third and fifth chakras, empowering the physical, intellectual, and etheric bodies. It is a combination of these three chakras that produces the primary auric field (the inner shell of the aura), which can be physically felt by the hand as it is passed over another’s body. If one is sensitive enough, the secondary auric field (the outer shell) can also be felt. This secondary aura is produced from the interaction of all seven chakras.

     The spinning of the individual chakras creates energy, the frequency of which determines the color of a particular chakra. The amount or intensity of energy produced by a particular chakra or group of chakras determines the color that dominates the auric field.

The auric field colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and white – “are very specifically related to the chakras.”

Her ideas on the colors of the chakras express her theory of chakra harmonics:

The auric field actually exists in different layers of color sometimes referred to as harmonics. In other words, for people who can see the aura, it appears as a pattern of colors near the body and then another pattern of colors farther away from the body, and so on…. The color in each chakra likewise is composed of varying frequency bands within the range of that same color.

Chakra harmonics, Bruyere says, works by analogy like musical harmonics or sympathetic vibration:

As the frequency or harmonics or vibration of energy our body channels gets slower we become more physical; as the frequency of this energy gets faster we become more esoteric, less physical. There is a definite continuum from low to high frequency, and in the esoteric world we are trying to channel and maintain finer and higher frequencies (vibrations).

The table below presents a basic template of Bruyere’s chakra system.

In Bruyere’s chakra system, the seven major chakras or energy centers within the body have a traditional placement along a central axis parallel to the spinal column.

Figure 3.5 Location of the Chakras in Relation to the Backbone and the Front of the Body, Wheels of Light, p. 68

The first chakra faces downward and the seventh or crown chakra faces upward, just as Charles Leadbeater and Barbara Brennan describe.

The first three chakras are often called the “lower chakras” or the “lower centers,” the fourth chakra referred to as the ‘transitional’ or the ‘transformational center,’ and the upper three chakras called the “upper chakras” or the “upper centers.”

Bruyere also recognizes “two higher chakras that exist outside the body— the Atman and the Brahman—there are actually nine chakras.”

  • The Flow of Vital Energy Up the Chakras

When a stimulus comes into the body … the heart chakra is typically the place where this flow of energy [life force or prana] is absorbed or drained from the field. However, if energy is not drained or absorbed when it enters the heart center, it is then free to continue out the fifth chakra, in the sixth and finally out the seventh or crown chakra. That process of in and out, in and out, in and out becomes important. The source of the energy that moves throughout the body is the earth’s magnetic field, acted upon and modified by the electrical field of that body. … The auric field has a movement that tends to make energy ‘sweeps.’ which are usually three or four inches apart…. This serpentine dance of the auric field through the body and chakras produces a very complex interaction with the body’s neurological and physiological systems.

  • Direction of Spin of the Chakras

When energy enters the body it moves upward from one chakra to the next. In some cases, however, this energy can be lost before traversing all the chakras. Generally a healthy, functioning chakra will spin or turn in a clockwise direction (when we are viewing the front of a person), so that the energy will be drawn upwards to the next chakra. When the energy encounters a chakra that is spinning counterclockwise, it will be dissipated or drained from the system. Sometimes a chakra will not seem to be spinning at all. This is often indicative of a weak chakra, which blocks energy flow…. Often, if a person is tired, the heart chakra will become elliptical. If there is something wrong energetically, the chakra will also show as an ellipse. If, however there is serious damage or pathology in any organ, the chakra associated with that organ will spin backwards or counter-clockwise. Thus, the direction of rotation, shape, and diameter of a chakra indicates the state of its energy and the health of its corresponding or adjacent physical organs. Some healers actually see this movement in much the same way as they see an aura; others feel it or sense it tactilely or empathetically within their own bodies.

  • Interaction Between Chakras

The chakra system represents not just one level of reality, but several, Bruyere informs us: “The interaction of chakras is the entire process. All must function together in balance in order for each and every person to function as a complete sentient being.”

Chakras relate to other chakras in various ways. One of these relationships is polarity:

A chakra can be positive (+) or negative (-). Those chakras which move energy out the front of the body are called output chakras and have a positive polarity. Those into which energy flows are called intake chakras and have negative polarity. Each chakra with a given polarity is connected to the remaining chakras of the same polarity. For example, energy flowing up the chakra system into the fourth chakra (intake) will immediately connect to the second and sixth chakras (which are also intake chakras). Thus, the upper chakras of each polarity have access to the lower chakras of the same polarity and vice versa.

In addition to polarity, the respective functions of intake and output are interrelated:

Having an opinion in the third chakra is connected to the fifth chakra (speech, expression) because one speaks an opinion. The second, fourth and sixth centers (which are intake centers) form one relationship, and chakras one, three, five and seven (which are output centers) form another relationship. In most instances, one intake chakra will connect with the other two corresponding intake chakras, and an output chakra will connect with two of its corresponding output centers. If we want to make changes, we will energize the active or output chakras in combination so that we are moving concepts or changes through them. On the other hand, if we want to maintain a pleasant feeling, or one that is familiar or comfortable, we usually energize chakras two, four, and six. By energizing certain chakras and not others, then, our experience is affected.

Historically, chakras have been described as having masculine and feminine characteristics:

The positive polarity or output function of a chakra tends to push energy out or through the system, while the negative polarity or intake function tends to attract, to draw in, to pull. In Oriental philosophy, positive-masculine energy is termed yang, and negative-feminine energy, yin. Ordinarily the function of the first chakra is viewed as being masculine or male; it pushes energy out. The second chakra’s function tends to be feminine or female; it pulls in. Thereafter, these functions alternate: the third, fifth and seventh chakras are male, and the fourth and sixth are female.”

But there is another more exact way to look at the functions of the seven chakras from bottom to top:

We can view them as: masculine, feminine, androgynous, feminine, masculine, androgynous, exogenous. In other words, the first chakra’s vitality is very yang. The emotion of the second is very yin. The intellect component of the third chakra is both masculine and feminine; it is androgynous. The transformative property of the heart chakra is feminine, while the response/expression of the throat center is masculine. The wisdom factor and creative aspect of the sixth chakra is androgynous. Finally, when realization is attained in the seventh chakra, we are exogenous; we are out of the system. We are neither male nor female, nor are we androgynous; we are transformed, we are realized, we are complete.

  • The Chakras and Healing

At present, health in our country is defined as lack of disease. That is really not a reasonable definition for health. Health means ‘full of light.’ Less than ‘full of light’ might be termed ‘disease.’ However, if we do not have an instrument to measure ‘full of light,’ we are left with the model of ‘normal health’ that is deficient in many respects. The fact of the matter is we really have no concept of what ‘normal’ is for the body. Therefore, it might behoove us all to change our view of health to include much broader terms.

Going Further

Like most clairvoyant healers, Rosalyn Bruyere merely touches on the notion of the divine and does not discuss spiritual energy in her chakra system to any great depth. But her statement that health means “full of light” holds true in the spiritual realm as well as the physical.

Conscious spiritual being – that is to say, the soul – is the prototype of humankind. The “psychogenetic” person is merely a copy of the soul in physical form under the influence of physical laws.

In the ancient philosophies and religions of the world, it was taught that man was made in the Image of God as a Light body rather than as a physical body and that Light was the carrier of the divine Word or Logos. Though this Light was invisible and generated by God from spiritual realms, it was nevertheless related to the visible light of the physical universe. And it seems that the ancient philosophers of the mystical schools and the priests of the old world religions were able to contact the supreme creative force in the universe through a process of spiritual regeneration.

Most people today are not experiencing this contact. But it can be made. The process begins on the physiological and the psychological levels. The glands of the endocrine system are energized and begin to supply needed secretions into the blood stream; optical ganglia and nerve centers are stimulated; new retinal receptors emerge; and the pineal gland emerges like a flower and becomes the elixir of life that nourishes the physical body. Latent genetic factors are generated in the process, and, in time, latent spiritual faculties, wilted and all but atrophied, come to life again. The sun – and the proper application of its higher energies according to a sacred System – is the key.

The process involves linking the mundane soul with the pre-existent spiritual soul.  The Cosolargy Academy  presents the necessary techniques.

The System of Cosolargy is available to all individuals who sincerely wish to participate in their divine heritage by preparing them on all levels of their being to develop the non-physical Light body and to achieve full spiritual Consciousness.