To educate your sense of smell is not only a practice that improves the perception of one of our most ancient and fundamental senses, but trains ourselves to develop new inner qualities and a new awareness.
The sense of smell is particularly connected to our imaginative and creative abilities. When you smell a perfume, a scent, you receive immediately some images in your mind, images that are memories but also insights. It happens to everyone, immediately. These images are stored in us, and they emerge thanks to the perfume or to the scent we smell.
Smell has a great evocative strength. This evocative strength is not only a naive tool to have nostalgic memories of old times; it is an effective tool for letting new creative potentials (that are somewhere hidden in us) emerge.
Educating our sense of smell let us glean abilities from ourselves that are almost totally unused – to begin to train our smell let us recover a part of our sensibility and intelligence. Because of this I created a Method for learning Aromatherapy and Olfactory Creativity (a Botanical Perfumery for the Soul). To experience accords, synergies, and single raw materials is not only a technical thing; educating our olfaction means training our mind and soul, let a deep part of us to emerge, in a new way, and finally find our true nature and our “olfactory voice” – our special gifts and how to express them through scents and through our life.
When a substance reach our nose it is perceived by our physical channels but it perceived also by our mind and our soul. This means that “to smell” is not a passive act, but it has a passive moment (receiving the smell) and an active one (true perception, when we create our emotional and intellectual response to that). To smell is not a passive act. To feel is not a passive act. We always create our experience, and the path of Olfactive Creativity is a path of rediscovering ourselves, our abilities, our emotions, and our inner self.
