The Power Of Exploring Your Senses

Aloha and welcome to The Secret Art of Huna. And today, I’m talking about the senses and about disconnection.

So I was talking to somebody on the phone today and we were talking about spiritual evolution and spiritual change and spiritual progress, and I suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, just got this whiff of frankincense.

Now, frankincense has a lot of spiritual connection, if you go into churches, for example, and into Indian temples, you’ll often smell frankincense.

It’s got a strong spiritual draw to it, spiritual pull. And it got me thinking about the senses. Now, I hallucinated to that frankincense. We were talking about spirituality and it just came in.

But then I went out and I went out to do a little bit of pruning in my garden. I don’t have a very big garden but it’s big enough for some lavender bushes and some herbs and some roses. I do like my roses.

So I went out to do some late pruning of the lavender. I should have done it a couple of weeks ago, but I was in Hawaii, I haven’t had the chance and I wanted to get it just back down to size.

It was taking over some other plants, so pruning it back. Behind one of the lavender bushes, there is an oregano plant.

Now, oregano is an absolute thug. It just grows and it grows everywhere. And given half the chance, it’s in other pots and it’s in other places.

So I also pruned the oregano. But the oregano, and this is some of the results of my pruning here, it’s not the whole plant by any means.

Oregano may be a thug, but it’s got this lovely, lovely smell and it got me thinking also about the senses.

So I thought, let’s talk about the senses and about disconnection and about how developing your senses, your five physical senses can help develop your unseen senses ’cause I know that’s something that a lot of people are interested in.

Let’s start with the sense of smell. Years ago, I trained as an aroma therapist. I wanted some back pocket skills because I thought I was gonna go around the world and I wanted to go for a year, that was the intention,

I’d go for a year and I’d be able to do massage and aromatherapy and earn some money, earn my way around.

Didn’t work out like that but I ended up doing my aromatherapy, my massage training and then my aromatherapy training, and then Indian head massage, and stress management, and all sorts of other things, craniosacral therapy.

But it really started with the massage and with the aromatherapy. And one of the things that you discover when you train in aromatherapy is that the olfactory nerve, that’s the sense of smell nerve, is a very, very short nerve.

Runs from behind the back of your nose into your brain and it’s a very short pathway. So it moves very quickly. The smell and your brain records it very quickly.

Powerful trigger for memory. When I used to live in Greece, there was a garden that I used to walk past on an island, I used to go to there every Saturday.

In the afternoon, when everything was calm, and at siesta, and I’d go there, and there was this garden. And this garden was full of jasmine and honeysuckle.

Honeysuckle first and then a couple of weeks later, the honeysuckle would die back and the jasmine would come into play.

And I would walk past that in the honeysuckle time and it would take me straight back to England, to my mom’s garden, actually this garden in the house where I now live,

to my mom’s garden because that sense of smell was so immediate and it just triggered the memory from Mom’s garden, all the summer evening,

the honeysuckle that she’d taken as a cutting from one of the local railway stations, and she’d manage to make grow. So smell, very, very powerful connection to memory.

Smell, if you don’t like the smell of something, we tend to run away from it. It’s a great safety mechanism. Rats are really good at this. They use their sense of smell to tell ’em what’s healthy and what’s not.

So the sense of smell is powerful, it brings in memory, and the sense of smell, for me, at least, along with the sense of taste, is so connected to the world of plants, the world of vegetables, the world of herbs, the world of walking up to a rose and smelling the rose.

It really connects us to the earth. I know walking on the earth connects you to the earth, but for me, there’s something about the sense of smell, and the sense of taste, but particularly the sense of smell that really, really connects you to the earth.

Smell goes very much along with taste. It’s quite common if someone looses their sense of smell for them to loose their sense of taste as well, and vice versa.

My grandfather had lost his sense of smell, which enabled him to work as a clark in an abbots ward, but there you are. And with it, he’d lost much of his sense of taste.

But the luxury of smell! How often do you really sit there and inhale something? Really smell it, really allow that sense of smell to just rush around your nose and the back of your throat? Same with taste.

How often do you put something into your mouth? It might be a piece of chocolate, it might be something that’s being cooked in a lovely sauce, it might be a piece of fruit that’s luscious and ripe and gorgeous.

How often do you put something into your mouth and really, really taste it? Roll it around your mouth. Really feel it, and sense it and just enjoy the glorious juiciness of it.

Sense of touch. When I was learning the massage, I was probably in the depths of my clinical depression, actually, and one of the things about massage is that it is great because you are touched on the skin, assuming that you’re doing any kind of massage that takes the clothes off.

Skin touch is something that is so important for us. It’s important for us right from the moment we’re babies. Now, babies, they get hugged and they get touched and they get their cheeks pinched and they get their feet massaged and people love touching babies.

And if you’re in a loving relationship, hopefully, you’re getting touched as well. But for lots of us, along the way, we have periods in our life when we’re not being touched, not in a relationship, we’re not in a situation where another person is gonna stroke our skin.

At the massage school, I was receiving massage, I was giving massage, and I was often a massage demonstration subject.

So I was receiving a lot of touch regularly. Wasn’t in a relationship, but I was receiving a lot of touch. And with hindsight, although I didn’t realise it at the time, it was an incredibly supportive thing for me in my depression.

So if you are experiencing depression and you’re not in a relationship, then go get yourself some massages. It’s not just what it does for the muscles but actually what that physical touch does for us.

So the sense of touch, and there’s something really special the feeling of fabrics, but there’s something really special about the feeling of the leaf of a rose. It can be like velvet. It’s extraordinary.

Amazing what these plants can do for us. Sense of hearing. How often do you really tune in to what’s going on around? How often do you have the chance to sit in a silent house?

And very few houses are silent. They’ve all got their creaks and their groans and the wind going through some little ventilator shaft or the floorboards or the heating or whatever.

It’s very rare that a house is totally silent. But that time when the house is largely silent and you can really just tune in to what’s going on around you, how often do you do that?

Or is there constantly noise around you? Even in nature, it’s very hard to find real silence in nature ’cause if you go through a wood or a forest, there’s birds.

Assuming it’s not a dead forest, there’s birds, there’s wind in the trees, and so on and so forth, so we very rarely experience true silence.

But equally, how often do you tune in to what’s going on underneath? What are the little sounds that you’re not hearing?

A way of developing our connection with the house, with the forest, with nature, we rely, many of us rely a lot on our visual senses.

How often do you allow yourself to go into expanded awareness, visual expanded awareness so that you can really experience what’s going on in the periphery?

How often do you sit in a room and notice the different shades of green or blue or brown or whatever? How often do you do that? Because we tend not to.

The world is so fast and furious that we don’t take the time to really enjoy the experience that our senses can bring us. When we do start to tune, really tune into our senses, it can really help, as well, with that sense of disconnection.

I have clients who come to me because they feel disconnected. And one of the things that I have them do is to connect with their senses into the world around them, consciously using all five senses, or actually, each sense one by one, but consciously tuning in to the world around.

Because we are connected to the earth. We are connected to the environment around us. But so often, we lose that connection.

And it’s not just about am I connected with, I feel disconnected because my partner left me, or I feel lonely, or I don’t know, life doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Start with the basics. Start with the easy stuff. Start by reconnecting with your senses to what’s going on around you. Particularly nature, but not exclusively nature.

So we can use our senses as a way of dealing with disconnection. And there’s another level as well. So when we really tune in to our senses, when I worked for One of Many, we talk about The Lover archetype.

Now, The Lover archetype isn’t just about sex. The Lover archetype is about enjoying life, it’s about enjoying the juiciness of life, the essence of life, really tuning in to the essence of life. And the best way to do that is through your senses.

Through touch, through smell, through taste and hearing, and really celebrating and enjoying whatever it is that you’re experiencing through your senses.

Another par type archetype that we work with is The Sorceress, your connection with source. Now, The Sorceress is intuitive, it’s the intuitive side, it’s that ability to know at a very deep knowing level, the ability to connect and feel connected.

Sorceress is where you start to develop your psychic abilities, telepathic abilities, your abilities to see beyond the seen, see the unseen, hear the unheard.

When you actively use your senses, when you actively start to tune in to the subtler aspects of your senses, then you start to activate your ability to see the unseen, hear the unheard, smell, have those odd smell phenomenons, like me sitting here talking about spirituality and suddenly smelling frankincense.

So working with your senses is important for a lot of reasons. Mean time, I’ve been playing with my little bit of Oregano, and I’ve rolled it into a ball, so my hands absolutely wreak of Oregano and I’m gonna dry all this lot and I’ll have a great stash of oregano for cooking over the winter.

Hope this has been interesting, maybe fun, maybe instructive. And I’ll talk to you very soon. If you wanna get in touch, do. All these videos, you can either catch them as you may be on the Facebook page, Secret Art of Huna.

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