Behind the scenes over here I am just as spiritual-earth-mama-priestess-artist as you might think. What you see is what you get.
And…I love tracking what's happening in our collective cultural spaces — especially when it comes to the feminine, empowerment, beauty, and equality. Which can all veer a bit into pop culture territory.
I mean, I didn't obsessively watch the Johnny Depp - Amber Heard trials…but I was shocked by the collective coverage that seemed so punitive toward the woman involved. And I felt pretty damn suspicious when everyone was suddenly hating on Blake Lively and not so much was being said about Justin Baldoni.
I'm not saying these women were perfect or faultless — but the coverage of them, and rage against them it created, was bizarre.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about…omg I'm so jealous, lol. And it doesn't matter — because the point I'm making goes way beyond pop culture…
So when I came across a fascinating exposé¹ of the PR firm reportedly hired by both of these men to turn the court of public opinion against these women, I felt soooo validated.
But also horrified.
Public opinion can be shaped with astonishing efficiency. (Amber Heard has spoken publicly about the death threats she received.)
How? According to the reporting, here are just a few of the services included in the PR packages:
- Website creation, full reddit presence, and social account take downs
- Social crisis team to engage with audiences, go back and forth with negative accounts, change narrative, and stay on track
- Start “threads of theories”
- "All of this will be untraceable"
This approach worked. Which is very concerning.
And if a PR machine can manufacture narratives around celebrities this effectively, what else are we being fed every day by systems designed to capture attention, shape emotion, and keep us clicking? And don't even get me started on AI slop…
Because we live online, we are disembodied. And when we are disembodied, we lose touch with our innate ways of knowing — our senses.
All the "clairs" are important — clairvoyance (sight), clairaudience (hearing), claircognizance (knowing)...
But those clairs can be more easily hijacked online, where they reflect the primary ways we're engaging with content. Even our bodies can be flooded with biochemicals from all our online engagement that makes it more difficult to really know what's true.
Scent is different.
Your nose knows what is true.
And, so far at least, we can't smell the internet ;)
This is part of what makes scent such an invaluable ally for the times we live in.
Scent keeps us in our bodies when the world around us wants to knock us off balance.
It can ground us, open our awareness, sharpen our attention, stir memory, and bring us back into direct sensory experience. When we are actually inhabiting our bodies, we have access to more information than whatever is being handed to us through a screen.
It also does something strange and beautiful with time: A scent can pull you out of the relentless forward motion of linear time and drop you into a vivid present where memory, sensation, imagination, and possibility all exist together.
Which all makes scent a powerful way back to your own sensory intelligence — the part of you that can perceive, discern, create, and relate before the noise of the world tells you what you are supposed to think.
Here's the thing about letting yourself get taken for a ride — whether by a PR company or some other force. The outcome is pretty much always disempowering.
If you watched these celebrity scandals unfold in real time, how did you feel? Did you pick up on the messages that beautiful women shouldn't aim too high or they'll be taken down? Or that no one likes a woman who complains about a successful, handsome (I guess?) man — so keep your damn mouth shut?
Stay with me here. Because this is going to sound out there but it's true: If you were anointing your heart with rose for compassion, your third eye with frankincense for clear seeing, your feet with vetiver for grounding…you would be creating a state of coherence that helps you come back into your body, your senses, and your own deep perception. And you would become someone who is much more difficult to fool.
This is a really powerful part of sacred aromatics that I think we have barely begun to understand.
The oils are beautiful. They smell incredible. They can absolutely support ritual, meditation, healing, prayer, and all kinds of spiritual practice.
Yet the deeper practice is learning how to use scent to change your state of consciousness and the frequency of your body.
And that, ultimately, is what Sacred Aromatics Foundations is about.
This program is a six-week immersion into working with scent as an embodied spiritual practice — learning to attune your body, your space, and your creative vision to the frequencies you want to cultivate and the realities you want to call into being.
We will work with the plants through anointing, ritual, sensory practice, and direct experience so your relationship with scent becomes a lived, embodied practice.
And yes…I know it's a little ironic that this is an online training. We gather live, with the oils in our hands and on our skin, so our alchemical transmissions happen in the body while Zoom simply connects us. :) I mean, technology does have some perks, too!
Many blessings,
¹ Source: Matriarchal Blessing, "We can't stop talking about Justin and Johnny until we've learned our lesson.," https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/we-cant-stop-talking-about-justin
P.S. If you want to experience an anointing with me first, join our live monthly Rewilding the Temple ceremony this October 10th at 10am PT. Usually, these circles are $22, but this month I'm opening it to everyone at no cost :)
>>>Save Your Seat
P.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 but stay on my email list, you can simply click here.
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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