Smell Your Aliveness

“…the roses are heavy with a weight

Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.”

—“Credences of Summer,” Wallace Stevens

Chlorine and coconut sunscreen. Freshly mown grass and sweat. Cucumber Melon and Cotton Blossom shower gels and body mist. Percolating coffee wafting through the house as my never-fail alarm clock. Pine Tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror of the station wagon. The wooden spoons that came with those little vanilla-and-chocolate Dixie ice cream cups. The back corner of the children’s section of the library where I dredged for the best, and cleanest, books. 

Summer is a season that many of us associate with memory-making, especially for children—family vacations, making life-changing friends at camp, time exploring the beach/forest/books/crafts that ignite our imaginations and plant the seeds of our future selves. The expansiveness of the season lends itself toward a wandering attention that might be discouraged in school, and the “subjects” we cover in these self-made curricula of curiosity defy standardized testing. 

Sitting here remembering some of my own summer meanderings—picture Little Jennifer, legs dangling in the pool, nose buried in a book, traveling far and wide alongside her literary BFFs—a full array of sensory details come to me. But those smells of summer—going on 30 years old—are the vividest of all, as real in my nose as the aroma of the coffee sitting at my right-hand side here and now.

What is it about smell that has such staying power? Āyurveda has some ideas that not only reclaim the virtue and necessity of this sense that, in our modern world, we often take great pains to eliminate, reduce, or cover up. Immersing in smell at this particular moment is also an opportunity to experience the qualities of fullness and completeness that aligns with the maximally expanded moment of the Summer Solstice. As we slide into the Yin phase of the year on the other side of the Solstice, smell can be our guide toward remembering the feeling of ease and imagination we might have experienced during our childhood summers—a unique, and under-appreciated combination of the qualities of groundedness and lightness that may be the closest embodiment to the true union of matter and consciousness, Prakṛti and Puruṣa, that is the state of Yoga. 

Let’s dive in.

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Of all five senses (or six, depending on whom you ask), smell has the worst reputation. In reality, all of the senses have their pros and cons (in Āyurveda, we use a spectrum of sensory exposure and function to evaluate states of health), but somehow smell has a largely negative connotation. When someone says “what’s that smell?” they’re not usually referring to a nearby lavender bush or a fresh loaf of bread; for pleasing smells, we might use the words “aroma” or “fragrance.” 

The history behind smell’s modern malignment is fascinating (you might not be surprised to learn that Freud was involved). But going back even further in human history, there are plenty of reasons why smell elicits a more negative, even fearful, reaction than the other senses. Smell informs us that something has gone bad—the pungency of spoiled food in particular that, even today in the age of refrigeration and preservation, is a warning to our bodies that consuming said food would be detrimental to our health. Like food that is past its prime, smells arise from bodies that are diseased and dying; there’s the obvious sourness of fever and infection, but even diseases like Parkinson’s are now recognized as having a specific odor. In Āyurvedic medicine, as you might imagine, smell was an essential part of diagnostics and treatment alike. Without modern imaging and testing, doctors used their senses to “know” what was going on inside their patients’ bodies (fermentation, aka āma? Tissue necrosis? Stagnation? etc.); and the aroma of different herbs and spices used in medicine could be a therapeutic quality to heal the imbalance. 

Connected to the earth element, smell in all these ways reminds us of the earth we are made of—and the earth to which we inevitably return, hence the avoidance of smell as a reminder of our possible, or imminent, death. The Āyurvedic classics even describe a sudden loss of smell as a harbinger of impending death; in modern times, dementia and Alzheimer’s patients usually experience a loss of smell, and while their bodies may live for years there is a “death,” of sources of the self via the mind, the memory, the essence of the person. Even things as seemingly innocuous as covering up body odor with deodorant (which is as second nature as showering or teeth-brushing for many of us) reflects a desire to feel, and be seen, as immortal—if I smell good, I will be “attractive” to others and thereby increase my reproductive odds (so our cells believe, if not our conscious minds). But less innocuous is how we cover up the smells of illness and death in modern society, and therefore have divorced ourselves from the very thing that makes life worth living—our mortality. (Another clear-as-day smell from my childhood: the bleach-plus-bodies smell of the hospital where I spent weeks one summer when my grandfather was on the brink of death; he didn’t die that summer, but he did soon after.) By turning our noses, eyes, ears, hands, and hearts away from the process of dying—through sanitized hospitals and isolated “homes” for the elderly—and searching desperately for longevity through biohacking and even AI, we deny ourselves a vital part of the process of living that is having a serious effect on our ability to live in reality. By doing everything we can to avoid being in the earth, we have forgotten how to be on and of the earth. 

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Healing this fragmented, dillusory relationship with smell is not as hard and scary as we might think. In fact, our physiology gives us the perfect—unavoidable, really—solution. Because our sense of smell is inextricable from our sense of taste, connected to the water element (and the topic of last month’s exploration, if you’d like to revisit it). What we think of as “taste”—the flavors we experience in our mouths when we eat, the determinants of foods’ nutritive qualities per Āyurveda—is actually 80 percent smell. That’s why when we smell something through our noses, we almost immediately have some reaction in our mouths: we salivate if it’s a tasty-smelling thing, and we might get nauseous or gag if it’s not-so-tasty-smelling. Taste receptors on the back of the tongue respond to the odor molecules floating in the air picked up by the nose. This is why, when you’re sick and your nose and/or throat are congested or inflamed, both smell and taste are affected—along with a suppression of appetite while your agni goes to work on the disease. It’s not a time for food and nutrition, so all the ways we might be tempted to consume are turned off. How smart of you, body.

It may seem contradictory that taste—a sense of nourishment, connected to the “life force” of water—is so dependent on smell—a sense of death, connected to the dry and least-animate element of earth (in the form of rocks and soil, not including Earth’s spirit, of course). But consider this fun-fact about our evolution. Our human brains got the shot of jet fuel they needed to grow thanks to our ingestion of cooked food, which provided us with more nutrients than ever before. It’s hypothesized that the smell of said food—which many of us still have positive associations with; think—the aroma of a summer barbecue—was the lynchpin. When that food also tasted good…well, you can finish the story from there. The transformation of another being’s dead body (probably another animal at first, but later plants, too) into food for us was what grew our species into the forms and consciousnesses we occupy today. It was the size of the brain that then shaped the evolution of the female reproductive system and our skeleton, to respectively accommodate for the development of and anatomical supports for said brain. 

Can you imagine a stronger memory that our bodies would hold onto than what made us, us? No wonder we pay such attention to smell. It contains the entirety of our species—and the entirety of the macrocosm of which we are a microcosm. 

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My coordination of teaching smell during the summer season was neither accidental nor an exploitation of what we might consider to be our smelliest season. That evolutionary story queued up for us quite nicely a way to understand the Āyurvedic ecosystem of elements and senses: earth/smell is the culmination of all the elements’ sequential building, with fire, our most essential element, and sight, our most dominant sense, at the center of that progression. You see, it was our harnessing of the power of fire to cook food that ignited this smell-taste intelligence in the form of our actual brain; and from there, our more subtle senses (sound/space, touch/air) were able to develop a more refined function in our lives beyond survival. Prior to fire, we needed to use sound and touch to stay safe in the dark, which is why they respond so quickly, even pre-consciously, to those sensory triggers in the sympathetic nervous system. Once we could see in the dark, those senses could develop into expressions of our higher mind—communication, storytelling, relationships, all of which are as essential to our survival as brain-fuel.

At the Summer Solstice, we can see—and perceive with our full body-mind—how we fit into this macrocosm, this symphony of elements and awareness. Over the last several months, the days have been lengthening in tandem with the (re)building of our systems through food and activity. The busyness of spring is palpable in the exciting arrival of annual blooms and the increasing motivation we have to open our doors and windows, clean out our winter nests, spend time outdoors, and start the projects that were incubating all winter. 

And now, that season of building and growing has met its natural apex. The Summer Solstice (sol=sun, stice=pause) is the top of the roller coaster, the moment of suspension before we start to fall back down. Rather than continue to push and work and try to grow—which would certainly induce some sweat, some smell—we might choose to enjoy this view from the top, take in the vista of our wholeness, and rest on the earth that quietly whispered its longing to manifest all those months ago. The Earth—and its smells—have been longing for us to remember what and who we are: human beings, not human doings. Now, we satisfy that longing through rest.

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

—”Late Fragment,” Raymond Carver

Now is the season when, through engagement with fragrance, whether they’re the smells in your immediate environment or the ones you recall from the depths of your super-charged brain, we get to experience our Selves as living memories. We can vanquish our fear of death by feeling, in our bodies, what it’s like to be grounded and light—expansive, awake, full of vital prāṇa from the sun and the water we instinctively crave this time of year—not grounded and heavy—buried, suffocated, inanimate.

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In my early years of studying yoga and Āyurveda, I was told over and over that I needed “grounding” to balance my excess vāta doṣa. I was told to lie still on the ground, to pile blankets and weighted things on my body, to eat heavy foods and exercise less and sleep more. I hated all of these things. They made me feel trapped and often heightened the restlessness in my body and mind. And because of that strong response, I doubted whether I could ever find harmony in my system. 

For many years, I thought that the only way to be grounded was to add weight (guru guṇa). But this is not true. As I experimented, I discovered another permutation—grounded and light (laghu guṇa)—that was exactly what I needed, a combination that continues to satisfy almost all of my sensory, physical, and emotional cravings. It looks like moderately paced, rhythmic movement. It looks like leaving plenty of space between periods of consumption—food, information, time with others. It looks like activities that makes my heart, not only my brain, remember profound joy, and dive into a watery flow state where I am the expression of something bigger than what my little brain can comprehend—a state that has a different flavor for everyone, but when we taste it, we just know. It feels like the sense of smell—the essence of our life, inclusive of birth and death, floating invisibly through the air, able to recreate gross reality on the film screen of our mind. It smells like summer—where the days for curiosity and play seem to never end, but we follow the call to come back home for a bath, dinner, and bed, so we can do it all again tomorrow. 

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Teaching during the summer is always a bit hit-or-miss. This year, I’ve given myself more permission than in the past to “take off” and be away from the routines—which has been lovely so far, and I think/hope will create a much more balanced season for me. In my classes this season, we’ll be exploring poses that bring us back to earth in a humbling and restorative way. Throughout the spring, we spent a lot of time building strength in the legs, a relationship with the earth element that I visualize like this: 

Result: Strength in the lower body, giving stability and structure to grow and build

Now, the direction and intensity of effort has reversed; having harnessed as much strength as we need for now, we can now receive. 

Result: Space in the center of the body, welcoming in prāṇa and nourishment

I’m not saying that we stop “strength training” (or any exercise/building activity) all together during the summer (we’ll be doing some fun “ground-work” and squatting sequences), but the experience of that effort might change. If you’re not used to a cyclical approach to movement (aligning with the seasons, but also perhaps with the menstrual cycle and/or aging), this might seem like an odd approach. Shouldn’t I do the same circuit, the same combination of yoga/cardio/strength all the time to maintain “good health”? 

I’ll answer with a question: does nature “maintain good health” by doing the same thing, looking the same way, year-round? 

Outside of movement, I’ll share a few plant allies that can support this grounded-and-light state in the system. 

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Wherever you find yourself this summer, may you smell your aliveness and allow this vital sense to support your mind in “laying by its troubles”—even if it’s only as long as it takes to inhale the heavy fragrance of your closest rose.

Listen now—

the poppies bursting

out over the sidewalk

are electric with bees.

Look how they bury their bodies

in flower after flower, drunk

on their longing for the world.

 

Maybe that’s the real work:

to fall, over and over,

into the scent of what you love.

—James A. Pearson