It’s Good To Smell!

Our sense of smell is probably our most underrated and misunderstood of all of our senses. We have tended to lose the importance of our sense of smell because we have devalued it and hijacked it with chemical additives.

Just think of how a dog interacts! The first thing that a dog does when it meets a stranger or a friend is to smell them. The dogs sense of smell will tell them so much about the state of being and the wellbeing of the individual they are interacting with. A dogs sense of smell is so powerful that they can now be used to diagnose cancers and identify the location of tumours in the human body.

Actually many nurses and medical workers report being able to smell illness and disease and even on process of dying. They can also smell wellness.

When was that we decided that the human body should not smell like a human body but should smell like a bunch of flowers? At some point in our evolution we decided that smells we describe as perfumes were preferable to the natural smell of being who we are.

I was brought up in world that was in the great transition from natural to chemical. The television was full of adverts about bad breath as we were all encouraged to have the “Colgate ring of confidence” with minty toothpaste and avoid “B.O.” (body odour) with roll on deodorant. I am not suggesting that we should not be clean but we do not need to smell like a chemical factory or a pretend garden.

Along with toothpaste and underarm deodorant came odour eaters to overcome the natural smell of out feet and fem fresh to overcome come the natural smell of the vagina. Some marketing manager convinced us that a vagina that smelled like a bunch of flowers would be sexier that a vagina that smelled like a vagina. Actually research shows that the pheromones given off by an aroused vagina especially when the woman is about to ovulate has the effect on the males around her of increasing their levels of testosterone their sperm production. This is all very natural and as it should be. We can smell sexual arousal in people that we are with. Yet our experience of the smell of often below our awareness so that we are effected by it but are not sure why we are affected. It could be that we are in a lift with a woman ovulating or a man feeling horny and we step out of the lift feeling a level of arousal but having no awareness of why.

I had the benefit of living for many years in a ashram where the classic deodorants and additional additive smells were not used. People were not dirty. They washed everyday and were clean. However, they smelled of themselves and not of manufactured chemicals.

It is estimated at 7 to 10% of our everyday communication is in pheromones. We smell fear, arousal, anxiety, anger etc in our everyday communication unless of course they are masked by perfumes and deodorants. In covid when people moved to communication online the pheromone effects was lost and the effectiveness of our communication was therefore diminished.

This diminished value of our smell effects every area of our lives. There came a point when we stooped using our sense of smell to determine the freshness of food in favour of the ‘best before’ date. It is now estimated that, because of this, over 30% of perfectly edible food is binned unnecessarily.

I have a suggestion to our listeners. How about we all try the experiment of not using these chemical substances for a week and we note what we experience, what other people experience and whether we feel any different. And when you do it give us the feed back and we can see what happened.

Take care

Sean x