Intuitive artist Leiah Bowden explains her double Energy Portrait

If you’re interested in this phenomenon, you might be interested to read about something called the language of light, or angelic signatures.

OK, back to the chakras in your energy field … below the solar plexus chakra is the creativity/reproductive chakra, the locus of your procreative energy. This shows the nature of the energy you have which fuels everything you create, from shopping lists to new businesses. This is also sometimes thought of as the sexual chakra, although the depiction does not relate only to sexuality, but more to the creative energy in general that you have. Yours shows both a quietude and a sensitively informed focus, as if you are not actively projecting creativity but you have some very specific ideas underlying your choices, thoughts and dreams for the possible.

Your root chakra is that part of your energy body that ties you to the earth. Yours is the metallic gold that normally shows itself only in the higher centers. This indicates that you – one or both of you as a couple – relate for your sense of identity more in the world of the highest potential for human awareness than to the here and now on the earth. There is nothing “earth-bound” about your energy field – it is most strongly a reflection of the highest divine nature because of this metallic gold in your root chakra. If you read anything about root chakras you will see that according to most systems, this chakra is seen as dark red .. like blood.

Your arms and legs are different colors, as most people’s are, showing the way you receive and give out energy, and the way you move forward in your life.

The left arm and left leg show how we receive energy; the right arm and leg show how we act in our lives to distribute energy.

Your left hand is outlined in the bright yellow that indicates strong strategic intelligence and is filled with pure white, indicating an openness to the divine spirit. In other words, you are open to receiving whatever life – or God – sends you, and you know how to hold and draw in whatever comes to you in ways that you can make the best possible sense and use of. Your left arm shows that you receive energy with a sense of wanting to be useful (blue), with affection (pink), and with enthusiasm (red); and that you bring that energy into you in a spiraling flow of pure willingness to work with what you are given (white) and to do so openly and with a sense of service (blue).

Your right arm is a uniform white and silver filigree, indicating that you act in the world with an almost divine sense of doing whatever there is to do, doing it according to the best possible understanding there is of how something can be done, and doing so with an open and sensitive manner. Your right hand, being red and yellow, shows that you give out with strategic intelligence and enthusiasm.

Your left leg – that with which you draw energy and information (learning from experience) from your choices – from your path – shows that you absorb the understanding of how to be of great service as you go through life (the blue foot), receive information and impressions about the way your life is going and how to step out on your path in a way that helps you move through life with a sense of harmony, and bring all this into your greater self with drive and enthusiasm (the orange/red thigh). You receive all this along with specific impulses and higher, intuitive understanding that is connected to your life in other realms (the silver and gold symbols). In short, as you walk energetically through life eager to be of service and to live in harmony with others, you are always aware of subtle energies and clues all around you as you move step by step along your path. That’s the way you receive energy and information about your life choices.

The way you step forward, informed by all of this awareness, is to do so – now looking at the right leg – first, (the thigh) harmoniously and with that same gift of strategic intelligence we see in the crown chakra and the hands, and with tender affection and service (the blue and lavender lower leg and pink foot).

Swirling around the outside of your body we see blue – service – and light green – harmony and gentle appreciation of nature and the gifts of nature.

And Ta-Daaaaa -- that’s your Energy Portrait!

Oh – the signature – my symbol on the lower right corner. About 14 years ago, a group of artist-friends came to my house for an evening. One of them – the world-renowned composer Hilary Tann, who was – still is the chair of Union College’s art department and someone whose instincts and professional stature I admired greatly –noticed that I didn’t sign my paintings, and said, “You HAVE to sign your work!”

I didn’t because I didn’t like the way the signature interfered with the look of the art itself. That night – a winter night – after all of my friends had left, I stood on the porch waiting for my dog to do his business, and I called up to the divine, “Give me a signature!” Immediately I felt impulsed to draw a sign in the snow, and drew that symbol.

Here’s how I did yours --- the way I do all of them: specifically, I thought of the two of you as a couple, and then relaxed into a light trance, in which I “see with my heart.” This is the way I can see the energy flowing and moving. As I began to see intuitively, I started the painting, and simply continued until I couldn’t see any more of your energy flow. Ordinarily I begin to receive words, songs, and chants which I express and audiotape, but here, I held back to maintain your privacy.

When I do an Energy Portrait, I open myself completely to the other person’s whole life, and I often experience a rush of emotions, pictures of possible moments in the person’s history, and I also feel and see the other person’s hopes and dreams, fears, and wounds. The Energy Portrait process is really a kind of soul reading. Because of this, I never do one unless I have been asked to. This includes my offering to do them for people and people accept … in any case, it’s always with the person’s permission.

Each Energy Portrait shows different colors and shapes in the various areas of the physical and energy body, but patterns do exist, and your Energy Portrait includes some of those patterns.

One of the words I use to describe the areas of the portrait is “Chakra.” It’s a Sanskrit word and is used to denote the body’s energy vortices, or centers of concentrated physical and emotional energy.

The enclosed diagram shows your Energy Portrait with the various chakras and their general associations. Here’s a more specific interpretation of exactly what your flow of energy, combined as a couple, shows:

Crown Chakra:

The yellow shows that the predominant nature of your higher consciousness is clear-headed and given to strategic thinking. The blue shows that you are aware of and committed to being open-minded and that this open-mindedness leads you to being very service-oriented in the way you conceptualize your lives. The white spiral in the middle illustrates your strong, intuitive, central connection to the divine as your main link to higher awareness. This white spiral means that no matter what is going on in your life, you maintain a constant, whether conscious or unconscious, communication with God and your higher awareness of possibility, and this constant link keeps you aware and present in the stream of your life.

The flush of pink is an indication that affection is what you show to the world as your mode of greeting and self-presentation.

Throat Chakra:

The blue area with the more intense blue circle in the middle shows that you maintain a strong, even, centrally moderated flow of conscious, articulated thought and verbal expression. The circle is like a roundhouse: the thoughts and feelings you have are incorporated into an acceptable pattern (acceptable to you) before they are released into the world --- so you don’t say or even think consciously of all the ideas and feelings you have; you edit them (as do most people) before releasing them to your conscious thoughts and to those around you. But you do release them; the breadth and gentle form of the color across this section shows that there is no substantial restriction or blockage.

Heart Chakra:

I love looking at heart chakras, as they show so clearly the two main modes of how we feel and express love. Pink means that you feel and show affection. Green means that no matter whether you do feel affection or love for others consciously (and because I know you I happen to know that you do), you in fact show love for others by being generous with that nourishing energy we call love. I liken the green in a heart chakra to the drawbridge in a castle being lowered s all the people can come and find safety in the castle. People with a lot of green in their heart chakras do this. It’s very interesting --- I’ve seen people whose hart chakras have no pink – meaning that the feeling of love as affection isn’t strong --- but a preponderance of green shows that in fact these people are beacons of safety and nourishment for others. Yours combines the two. Now --- in a couple, this may well mean that one person has a lot of affection and the other has a lot of the nourishing kind of love, or it may mean that the two kinds of love exist in both.

Here’s where I will tell you something about the process of my doing your Energy Portrait that was different than the others that I do:

Solar Plexus Chakra:

Whereas the green in a person’s heart chakra broadcasts itself as a feeling in others of being very safe in your presence, the solar plexus is where you, yourself, maintain the feeling of safety. Your combined solar plexus shows a deep orange --- a powerful, steady, enthusiastic confidence that permeates your existence with apparent ease. There is a steady, unchallenged flow of safety that means that as you go along, you don’t have to shore up your sense of safety in order to move forward in your lives. As you know, many people seem always to be held back by uncertainty and fear. Not you! Part of the configuration that shows the source of that strength in you can be seen in the copper-colored metallic symbols in the orange. Those symbols are indications (whenever and wherever they appear in an Energy Portrait) of specific pieces of understanding that you embody in your multidimensional consciousness – in the complex of layers of knowing, understanding, and memories that come from the vast, interconnected experiences that make you the way you are.

I can explain this idea more this way: there are many versions of you as a couple, and of each of you, floating around in your whole self. Think about how it feels when you suddenly “come back” from daydreaming. It feels as if you are being pulled back into “real life” from an entirely different realm. Some people are comfortable with this explanation: you are being pulled back from an entirely different realm, a realm in which, in fact, the “you” who is aware is connected to but living a separate life from the “you” who lives here and now. Other people are more comfortable with an explanation like this: daydreams are our forays into other rungs of consciousness. Choose which one you can work with for the purpose of this explanation of those symbols. The symbols are artifacts, or expressions of patterns you use, in those other realms, or in those other lives you are living. They are a kind of code. I have never taken the time or made the effort to intuitively decode them, but I see these symbols appearing in other intuitive artists’ work.