Reading auras is actually not the way it is usually depicted in books, sites or pictures. When a psychic manages to see an aura, it can impress them so much that they feel the need to capture it, give it permanency and learn, learn learn from it.
A real psychic knows that it is not a coincidence or a trick of the light- they have confidence in their skills and they have such a complete sense of themselves (which is an underlying purpose of most of the exercises on this site) that they will not let it go.
The result? They obsess over it. Every detail is magnified, stressed, analyzed and over-dramatized.
And as you would expect, their audience has a completely mistaken idea of what an aura is, how it acts and how to read one. An aura is:
The only way to catch a glimpse of an aura is to trick your over-rationalized mind to let you see one. And you do it like this...
Seeing an aura is one of those things that is impossible to accomplish solely by concentrating and willing it to be there. The harder you try, the more elusive it is. So try this when you want to see a person's aura:
1. Relax yourself and slip into your contemplative mental mode (drifting but alert).
2. Look right past the person, and then casually glance towards them, and then quickly away again. But do it with a sense that it is not really your physical vision that is doing the looking past and glancing, it is your concentration that is deliberately focusing on something beyond the person, but is also peripherally aware of what's going on around the person.
What you are doing is similar to what you do in the meditation exercises, but instead of ignoring the person in the first part (looking past them) you are really pushing your focus beyond them.
3. If you can simultaneously focus beyond and yet still be alert to the person you are not looking at, you will get a fleeting color impression, just at the edge of your awareness. Grab onto this with your mind and examine the memory of the image (The actual image will be gone at this point.) for familiarity and/or categorization.
Check out this Q&A about seeing auras.
If you are curious about your own aura, check out how to see your aura.
Interpreting an aura is a personal, individualized process. A generalized list of colors could be used, but so much of the meaning would be lost. The only real way to know for certainty what a person's aura means is to know how it makes you feel. Your mind will make its own connections, and it is important for you to know, to be certain that whatever you feel it means, will be right, in the context of that moment. Confidence in your own snap judgments is an important factor in your ability to use your psychic powers.
You will develop your own code of meanings that will be refined with each aura experience you have. You will find, for instance that you cannot just group these experiences by color alone. (This is particularly true of the white aura.) Texture- hard, soft, jagged, pebbly, gauzy, etc. will also change the meaning.
The most important thing to know about reading auras, is that they are clues to future intentions, not to past facts. And colors can change, even as you are seeing the aura.
You can go from this:
to this, in the blink of an eye.
This is because the future is made up of possibilities only- not certainties, and people's intentions and futures are continually changing. You can actually track the development of the personalities for people you know, by their changing auras. Reading auras will alert you to new situations before any other information is available.