How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [40]
REMINDING YOURSELF
Post the word “Smell” or an image of a nose in helpful places.
DISCOVERIES
The cells that respond to smells in the back of our nose are just two synapses away from the processing centers in our primitive brain for emotion and memories, so odors can evoke powerful conditioned responses—desire and aversion. These unconscious responses can occur even when we are not aware of detecting an odor. We don’t appreciate our sense of smell until we lose it, for example, when we have a cold. People who lose their sense of smell permanently can become depressed, since they also lose their previous enjoyment of food. Many become anxious that they will not smell smoke from a fire, will fail to detect their own body odor, or will eat spoiled food.
When practicing mindfulness of smell people discover that there are many smells in their environment, some obvious (coffee, cinnamon rolls, gasoline, skunk) and many that are more subtle (fresh air as we step outside, soap or shaving cream on our own face, clean sheets). They also discover that smell can evoke emotion, desire and aversion.
The rich experience of what we call flavor is mostly due to our sense of smell. Our tongue is only able to register a few sensations—salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami (savory, such as in meat or soy sauce)—but we can distinguish several thousand odors and as little as one molecule of some substances. Research shows that women have more sensitive noses than men. Women may wear perfume to attract men, but the effort is probably wasted. The fragrances men pick as favorites are the smell of baking bread, vanilla, and grilling meat.
In reality, there are no “good” or “bad” smells. We become accustomed to common smells around us. When I lived in Africa, people around me had a strong aroma of sweat mixed with wood smoke. It was undoubtedly a comforting smell to a child who had been surrounded by that fragrance since birth. Probably I smelled funny to them, and they could also detect me coming in the dark.
When East and West first met, Japanese people, who bathed daily, disliked the smell of Europeans, who ate dairy products and took baths infrequently. They called the visitors “stinks of butter.” One is not very aware of the odor of one’s own body. Other people may tell us, to our surprise, that we need to take a shower or that we have a delicious smell. Just as we are not aware of the scent of our own body, we are not aware of the “scent” of our own personality. How does that affect others?
DEEPER LESSONS
Much of our behavior is directed by unconscious conditioning. We meet a person who looks, dresses, speaks, or even smells like someone who wounded us in our childhood, and we feel an instant, inexplicable aversion toward this innocent person. It has nothing to do with them. It is just an electrical phenomenon, sense impressions causing neurons to fire and connect to storage sites in the brain for old memories and emotions. To transform these habitual patterns is not easy. First we have to bring the light of awareness to the body sensations, thoughts, and emotions as they arise. We have to watch carefully the junction between sensation and feeling tone, which is the seed crystal that will start a chain reaction that ends in thought, emotion, speech, and behavior (or what Buddhists call karma).
The cascade of sensation –> feeling (tone) –> perception –> action happens so fast that it is hard to see the individual steps. But people can understand this chain of events when it involves smell. Let’s say you step outside and take a deep breath. You detect a smell and recoil internally. Why? As chemical molecules hit the inside of your nose, you smelled something, and it caused a negative feeling tone, before your mind knew what it was. Then