Smelling your way to inner freedom
I hope you don’t mind me using the title I just did. But smelling often gets a bad rap.
After all, don’t we spend much more time noticing the times we smell something bad? Most of the time we only want to avoid smelling unpleasant odors. But this is a pity. Smelling deserves some love.
We already covered during the last two days:
Now it’s time to pursue the Art of Deep Smelling. (would you have preferred this as a title?)
Like with the other senses, by engaging with your smelling with more attention, you not only develop a more unique point of smell and interact more inter-connectedly with the world, but you’ll also enjoy the act of smelling itself. It’s like looking closely or hearing intently. Being intensely present to the experience you have right now enlivens you. It’s where you’re truly fully alive.
Smelling is, like hearing, a great gateway to the present moment. Most of the smells are very ephemeral. They come and they go. Your awareness, though, stays. The reason why you normally don’t smell the same scent for long is that your brain shuts off the signal after a while. You only notice new smells to be more alarmed and alert to the change. That’s also the reason why you don’t smell yourself without making a conscious effort.
The way to practice smelling is very similar to the other senses. Just fully engage with it. Take a scentwalk through your neighborhood and identify the typical smells of each street. Mark them down on a map. There are scentmaps for a lot of different cities. You can compare your findings with them. Scentwalks are also a great way to bond with other people, but be ready for disagreements.
You can also go into a store and try to smell all the different aromas that hit you. Or find up to 5 smells you encounter within one street. You can do microsmellings, which is just a fancy word for smelling particular objects like flowers, trees, desks, pens, or whatever you encounter. The possibilities are only limited by your time and creativity. When you engage in these exercises, notice how each smell gets stronger and weaker again. Notice how your smelling is directional, that is how you can often tell, where a specific smell comes from.
Smelling practiced this way increases your mindfulness. It teaches you that all scents are worthwhile whether they are pleasureful or disgusting. Every one of them too shall pass. While your awareness is untouched. This is how you can smell your way to inner freedom.
I wish you a wonderful, smelly day,
David