Awareness of Smell Meditation

This meditation trains your mind to generate and hold scent with precision, evolving simple recall into a powerful act of internal olfaction. By strengthening this faculty for vivid, internal smelling, you fine-tune your consciousness to perceive smell, a powerful part of consciousness based-information. This heightened inner sense of smell is the foundational skill that develops into clairalience, the ability to perceive scents beyond the physical source. It helps enhance your intuition in the long-term.

Level 1: The Perception of Smell

1. Select a strong, distinct scent. This can be a physical object like coffee grounds, a flower, an essential oil, or incense.
2. Hold the object near you or place it in your space. Close your eyes.
3. Inhale the scent with your full, undivided attention. Do not simply note "it smells like coffee." Experience the raw sensation of the smell itself.
4. Notice its qualities: is it sharp, dull, sweet, pungent, warm, or cool? Does it change as you breathe? Focus exclusively on the material, present-moment experience of the scent until it is all you are aware of.

Level 2: The Recalling of Smell

1. Put the scented object away or move to a neutral-smelling space. Close your eyes.
2. Select a smell you know intimately from memory, such as rain on hot asphalt, a specific perfume, or the scent of an old book.
3. Your task is to recall and generate that scent in your mind with as much vividness and detail as possible.
4. Engage your memory fully. Do not just think about the smell; attempt to actually smell it. Recreate the entire olfactory experience in your consciousness. If the scent fades, gently bring your focus back and rebuild it until it is stable and clear.

How to know you have mastered this meditation: When you can maintain the smell for 1 or 2 minutes, until it engulfs your mind, you know you have mastered this meditation.