Rich Powers was sitting on a folding chair with his eyes tightly shut when something brought him to full attention.
"Hey, Ray," he said, "there's a little bit of stuck energy behind you. It's a rust orange color, maybe some family energy. As the translucent blue comes in, though, it's cleaning out the rust."
Sitting opposite him, Ray seemed to immediately understand. "It has to do with the growth period I'm in," he explained later. "It's something I've been working on for a while -- making decisions for myself without letting other people's energies interfere."
Such is the tenor of conversation on almost any day at Anaheim's Southern California Psychic Institute, where people let their colors show. In fact, said Joel Hipps -- who co-directs the place with his wife, Barbara -- checking auras is a daily routine.
"There are no secrets in a psychic institute," said the former civil engineer-turned-clairvoyant, whose humor sometimes masks the essential seriousness of his endeavor. "We teach people how to manage their lives."
In fact, managing lives has been a major theme for the couple since at least 1995, when they arrived in Southern California to spread psychic techniques learned at a similar center in Berkeley. Aided by 10 teachers, they now instruct as many as 100 people a month at nonprofit psychic centers in Santa Monica, Costa Mesa and a business suite in Anaheim.
"Most people don't come here to be psychic," Hipps said, "but because it makes everything work. As spirit, you have instincts and abilities that people call psychic. You already have the ability -- what we teach you is how to use it more effectively."
For starters, he said, students -- who range in age from 18 to 85 and come from every walk of life -- enroll in a series of six-week courses covering such topics as basic meditation, healing and women's intuition. Those with more serious intentions, Hipps said, then pay $175 a month for a two-year training program to become certified clairvoyants.
"Psychic ability is like a muscle," teacher Pam Danzig said. "The more you use it, the more defined it becomes."
Lots of psychic lifting seemed to be taking place in Anaheim on a recent Monday night -- a time when students gather regularly to massage each other's auras. While some appeared to be directing invisible orchestras in the sky (actually, Hipps explained, "feeling" the edges of human energy fields), others sat in chairs doing psychic readings between noisy yawns symptomatic, he said, of the extraordinary energy being released.
