Purple Haze

I am sitting in an apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with seven other people in a rooftop pavilion lined with exotic plants and dusty white plastic deck chairs. After finding an active Internet Indigo group, I phoned the leader and asked if I could attend a workshop she was giving.

“Are you an artist?” Julie Rosenshein, asks me at the start of the meeting. A TV producer points a camera in my face and waits for my answer. This free seminar is an introduction to Rosenshein’s methods in defining and dealing with Indigo children. Rosenshein also offers paid workshops and certification courses for education professionals around the country. A production crew has been traveling with Rosenshein on her talks in the hopes of creating an educational television program on Indigos. The fanfare follows the success of a 2005 documentary The Indigo Evolution, co-written and directed by Indigo leader James Twyman and independently released through spiritual centers and the Spiritual Cinema Network (think of it as Netflix for the New Age).

Somewhat startled by her question, I nervously respond, “I’m not quite sure what you mean by artist,” and look around the room at the ten or so parents, children, colleagues, and curious outsiders Rosenshein has assembled. Rosenshein calmly explains, “I get the sense that you have a creative spirit and that you’ve struggled with that.”

“Well, I’m a writer,” I answer, “…but I also want to be a doctor.” Satisfied with my answer, she continues with her lecture. “The sixth sense is an opening of the Technicolor of the senses,” Rosenshein explains. Dressed in a purple blazer (perhaps unintentionally) and dress slacks, she does not look like the spiritual guru the fringy ideas she endorses conjure. Rosenshein, a licensed social worker with a graduate degree from Columbia University, has worked in education for years. Speaking in soundbites, she is media savvy (she was featured in the CNN segment on Indigos), quick-witted, and as passionate about traditional practices as she is about the New Age. Rosenshein became determined to educate families about “highly sensitive” children’s special abilities after reading a book about Indigo children and realizing she was one herself.

“From a young age, I could be called clairaudiant, which means that I heard things, I channeled things: spiritual forces,” says Rosenshein. “I used to have very vivid dreams and be very connected with different kinds of spirit guides. Now as an adult I’m even more connected. I can hear and notice things about people that no one has told me.” A mentorship in “Angel Therapy Practice” with Doreen Virtue, a doctor in psychology and popular metaphysician, trained Rosenshein to hone her spiritual intuitiveness.

Rosenshein likens Indigos to radio towers that take in four key types of signals, or as she calls them, “sensitivities”: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Slight changes in the environment that the typical child would not notice, for example, can significantly affect a physically sensitive child’s physiology. A spiritually sensitive child, on the other hand, is attuned to the ephemeral. With her interdisciplinary background, Rosenshein has cultivated a business around decoding the various psychological and behavioral permutations in which these sensitivities manifest in children. Through seminars and private sessions, Rosenshein meticulously tailors therapies for children when their sensitivities are not in balance.

Rosenshein claims she was unable to harness her spiritual channeling sensitivity because her physical, or, as she describes it, biochemical sensitivity was in overdrive. Still a sufferer of migraines, she asserts these were exacerbated by paint and lighting conditions in schools where she worked as an art therapy instructor. As a young adult, Rosenshein self-medicated. “My high sensitivity led me to drinking and drugging after school,” she says. When she nearly died in a car accident, she felt compelled to adjust her lifestyle. “I had skidded across six lanes,” Rosenshein recounts. “I nearly froze to death in the back of my car and I had a spiritual awakening.” Her turning point came in 1989, when through her spiritual studies she understood why she had felt so different growing up and how understanding this could help others like her. “I think what we’re seeing,” Rosenshein says. “are kids that [have] very advanced spiritual gifts at a very young age, and if they’re not taught to use the gifts or honor the gifts, they go underground or use these gifts for bad purposes.”

Kevin†, a quiet, sophisticated looking young man in the front row of the Indigo meet-up, demurely chimes into the conversation. His mother, Sue, wistfully watches him as he describes a typical day. “You walk down the street and you see people’s pain.” Rosenshein calls Indigos “walking authenticity detectors” and says the emotionally and spiritually sensitive Indigos can intuit a person’s aura and personality. In school, Kevin was drawn to certain children by their auras, but others were so negative that they repulsed him. From the age of six, he was diagnosed with a variety of mood disorders and behavioral problems not limited to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Unable to reach a consensus for therapeutic regimen with his physicians (one psychiatrist gave the diagnosis “I don’t know”) and unable to make friends, Kevin, too, self-medicated. As he speaks about using drugs as a teen to overcome his multiple sensitivities, and how he ultimately succeeded when he found the Indigo support network, Rosenshein beams. Kevin is a former client whom she helped rehabilitate.

Rosenshein believes many Indigo children receive labels of psychiatric pathologies because mainstream professionals view their hypersensitivity and hyperintuition as an inability to screen for important information in noisy environments rather than as a spiritual connection. “He’s been different since the day he was born,” Sue told me after the meeting. “Sometimes looking at it on the surface you could think that these children are just the result of over indulging parents with no disciplinary skills. But an outsider doesn’t see these children when they are home, away from crowds and others’ energy. They are much wiser and more mature than their years.” Feeling misunderstood and alone, Rosenshein argues, Indigos cascade into depressions leading to drug abuse and suicide attempts.

“Being extremely sensitive,” said Sue, Indigos “need more parental attention, support and understanding of what they are feeling. I believe that because of their sensitivities, Indigos feel out of control of their lives.”

As fiercely certain as Indigo believers are, their critics are just as vehement. “I don’t believe in Indigo children,” said Claus Larsen, editor of the popular web site Skeptic Report, a forum where scientifically minded individuals critically analyze trends in superstition. “You take children with psychological problems and mix in auras—this time in a specific color, which not only is pretty, but also has a cool name—and dangle the promise of having special kids with great powers in front of worried parents, and you’ve got a winner.”

Larsen is among many skeptical of the validity of the Indigo lens. Richard Rockley, creator of the blog Skeptico, contends that the Indigo phenomenon is merely an exploitative scheme. “Surely the medical treatment of children (or adults) should be based on reality, not something some New Age bozo dreams up. If it’s not based on reality, why would it work?”

Rosenshein believes our society too often rushes to a medical solution for variations in child psychologies and behaviors. And while most people would likely dismiss a child’s persistent claims of speaking with angels or living a past life in an Egyptian royal family as the product of an overactive imagination or perhaps, in extremes, a psychosis, Rosenshein would envision this as a deep spiritual connection. “We’re creating disorders for our kids to fit into because were not really willing to look at the systemic problems that are happening,” she argues. “We’re not really changing our healthcare system or our education system. It’s easier to think the children have the problem rather than the society or the adults. People are creating these labels for their kids because it’s easier than changing the things that need to be changed for those children to be healthy.”

† The last names of the families interviewed have been omitted at their request.