Our Sense Of Smell

Meditative Moods supplies a wide range of scented products, from 100% Soy Wax Scented Mood Candles and Scented Wax Mood Melts, to Essential Oils and Incense, each specifically designed to enhance your meditation practices, as well as making your home smell fabulous. In addition, all of our scented products are Vegan Friendly and Cruelty Free.

Our sense of smell, emotions and memories are all intertwined and therefore, smell can be used to evoke different mental states, or recall certain memories, in fact, smell can have a huge impact on our emotional states, without us even realising.

The scientific reason behind this, is that smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, the structure in the front of the brain that sends information to the other areas of the body’s central command for further processing. Odours take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory.

What that means in layman’s terms, is that whenever we detect a scent, our brain is immediately connecting it to past memories and emotions. That’s why a certain smell will often remind of you of another person and how you feel about them, as well as conjuring memories related to that person. Equally, the scent might remind you of a particular place, leading you to recall memories of your past holidays, for example.

With this knowledge, we can use scents to target certain emotional states and greatly enhance and deepen our meditation and relaxation. Taking Lavender as an example, it has long been known to have a calming effect and is often associated with helping one to unwind and drift off to sleep. This effect, is the scent helping to induce the emotional state of calmness and relaxation.

Scents can be uplifting, invigorating, focussing, calming, luxurious and many other things, so we can target just about any emotion by using scent, or a combination of scents, to assist our brains in moving to that state. Just think how you react when you smell cloves, cinnamon, orange and pine, which are common over the Christmas period – people tend to say “it reminds me of Christmas”.

Visualizations are an area where scents can be used to great effect, as they can help us to immerse deeper into the visualization, by adding an extra layer of authenticity to the practice. Let’s say you wanted to relax by visualizing yourself wandering on the beach of a tropical island, it would seem much more real if you were enveloped in scents associated with that image, such as pineapple, coconut and mangoes.