A few years ago, I woke up on Christmas morning and my sense of smell was gone.

This is awful for anyone…but for a perfumer? Absolutely devastating.

It was a slow recovery. Though my smell had mostly come back by mid February, I could tell that I wasn’t picking up on the subtle nuances I used to.

Smell is an often overlooked yet crucial sense.

A strong sense of smell has always been a mark of a healer — the ability to sniff out both the diseases and the cures.

It’s also closely associated with our intuition. We can smell when something — or someone — is off. This probably has something to do with the unique ability of aroma to bypass our conscious minds, eliciting unbidden feelings and memories before our thinking brains can process what’s happening…or get in the way.

Our sense of smell brings us into our bodies. While transcendence may certainly be part of our soul paths, we also come into bodies here on Earth to experience being fully human. Our five senses are the gateways to embodiment. And embodiment is an invitation to both pleasure and presence.

And, fragrance is a gateway to the gods. Statues of deities in ancient cultures were anointed with fragrant oils to wake up the gods they housed. The deceased were surrounded with aromatic plant material to help carry their souls along their journeys. Temples around the world are filled with fragrant smoke.

Healing, inner knowing, pleasure, presence, and spiritual connection…all rooted in our ability to trust our own noses.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that our connection with smell has been under attack for some time.

Did you know that as far back as ancient Greece smell was deemed a “lower” sense — and, yay patriarchal Greece, smell and touch were associated with women, while men were given elevated senses such as sight.

The lasting effects of this have birthed a culture that is either afraid of scent or fooled into thinking that artificial ones smell better than what comes from nature.

(That a “peach blossom” lotion smells like no peach nor blossom ever found in nature is a sign of how far removed from the natural world we’ve become.)

These fragrances train our noses — and our knowing — to deny what we know is true.

Where have you doubted your own knowing?

Where have you lost touch with pleasure, embodiment, and the ability to be present in each moment?

Where has the reverent ritual of bringing spirit into daily life been set aside in favor of more urgent matters?

Smell is a gift from the gods and fragrance is the perfume of spirit.

In Sacred Aromatics Foundations, we explore clairolfaction (clairalience), how we intuitively perceive through scent, and learning to listen to what your nose knows.

We begin October 14.

​→ Learn more here.​

Many blessings,

P.S. Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing more about the aromatics arts, plants, and fragrance as a path to soul coherence. If you want to opt-out of the sacred aromatic foundations series, you can simply click here.

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​Juniper Stokes is a botanical perfumer, soul alchemist, intuitive astrologer, and rewilding guide through mythic landscapes of the nature, spirit, and the cosmos. For over 25 years, she has been guiding soulful humans back to the heart of who they are and why they’re here.

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