SPRITZ MY AURA
Leigh-Anne Hunter meets a therapist who treats her scepticism with bits of the rainbow
‘DON’T panic. These aren’t gynaecological tools,” Randburg colour therapist Penni du Plessis assures me, aiming two metal rods at my spleen. “I’m just going to take a look at your chakras.”
“Shall I take my shoes off?” I ask. She just smiles serenely, like a twinkly-eyed cherub in a kaftan.
As she scans my front from a metre away, the dowsing rods sometimes stand erect and sometimes hang a little to the left or right.
Colour therapists use them to diagnose which of our chakras — seven energy centres in the body — are off-kilter and then treat the areas using a specific colour. They’re also handy if you’re trying to find the nearest well.
Your base chakra is out of whack, Du Plessis tuts, whipping out a bottle of her pink “Angelic Wings of Love” spray (R150), which she prescribed to a client for her day in divorce court. “She got one of the biggest settlements in South Africa.”
I try not to move as she spritzes my aura. We wait a few seconds for it to take effect. Then, the rods she’s holding swing wide open. Apparently I’m cured.
“You even look different,” she says, enthusing that the spray instantly balances one’s chakras and expands one’s auric protection.
This means that if someone stands close to me now, I won’t snap: “Hey, you’re standing in my aura.” Until it wears off, I’ll feel safe, nurtured within. People will see me through “eyes of love” and offer to carry my groceries.
You can even spray your office to zap any aggression. I tried it on a surly colleague, but she didn’t take it too well. And I overshot her aura by a few feet.
The colours we’re drawn to can reveal a lot about our emotional and physical issues, says Du Plessis, 53, who adds enigmatically: “It has to do with light waves.”
After she rubbed the green “oil of transformation” (green is said to open the heart) on her chest twice daily for months, a client who’d been unhappy in her job bounded back into these rooms, gushing: “You won’t believe it. I was sitting on the loo and all of a sudden I knew exactly what to do with my life.”
Lining the wall is a kaleidoscope of bottles filled with Du Plessis’s range of “high vibrational” oils. “People crib my stuff all the time. It’s distressing.”
I’m instructed to pick nine colours that
People will see me through ‘eyes of love’ and offer to carry my groceries
make me tingle or give me “a ‘yes’ feeling in my third eye”. Choosing magenta, I think: “What am I doing? I hate magenta.” I’m told your higher self takes over. My spirit guide looks a bit like Rod Stewart.
She tells me in her sing-song voice: “You’ve been on a long quest.” She’s right. The traffic was awful getting here. Moving onto indigo, she probes: “Do you get hay fever?” She could’ve guessed that. I have a sneeze like a foghorn.
But her question about the coral bottle I chose floors me. How did she know that? Oh, and the magenta? It also indicates scepticism, she says, cracking a smile.
Du Plessis, who ran a decorating business for 17 years, worked with colour even before she trained as a colour therapist in 1993.
“I knew there was a deeper meaning to colour I didn’t understand yet.”
A single mom, she agonised over whether she could earn a living from it. Within two months, she was booked up three weeks in advance. Public demand has grown.
“It’s my passion. I’m here to expand consciousness.” She’s trained many others to become colour therapists.
The practice helped her too. “I didn’t like myself. I didn’t want to be this overweight body.” Her stock of pink oils always turned white. “I lacked self-love, so I’d suck the pinks out of them.” She’d replace them with new oils and suck the pinks out of those too.
Du Plessis rattles off the names of celebrities who have come for her hour-long sessions (R450), but most of her clients are regular people “looking for support”.
A woman at one of her courses was so excited she got her family to try it. Then she thought: “What about the dog?” He turned his nose up at the yellow bottle, but wouldn’t stop rolling on the green one. Maybe he needed to open his heart.
“If you’re in sales, the red spray is brilliant,” says Du Plessis, who also runs corporate workshops. Do people owe you money? “Spray the stack of quotes and watch. I call it the Roto Rooter colour because it pushes through any blockage.”
It’s no wonder Man United wins more often than Chelsea, she says. Red is energising, while blue is calming.
She quivered when a burly stranger arrived at her door to buy red oils. Oh my, she thought. He probably wants to use it for sex. He turned out to be the nicest guy.
Visit divinespace.co.za for course details.