Once in the early 2,000’s a friend and I were strolling and shopping and dining in Greenwich Village when we came upon a small store – just a nook really, filled with shiny clear rectangular glass bottles stacked on wooden shelves. A slender handsome hipster with an untucked navy blue shirt and somehow stylishly elegant slightly faded jeans manned the counter.
The bottles and their rectangular labels were identical except for the unique word on each label: Rain, Dirt, Beach, Grass, Dog among the hundreds.
In response to our outburst of giggles he offered sample smells.
A gentle whiff of “dirt”;and I was transported out of the concrete canyon and back to a time before vanity when I was a simple child doing what kids like to do. Play in the dirt.
Tobacco – was my 1960s father and warm leaves drying in the sununveiling a thought of slaves picking leaves in the hot, hot sun and wondering if the fragrance for them was unpleasant. Grass in a bottle was a little too much for both of us, but we both loved tobacco which was mysterious and somehow informative.
Smell emerges in the first trimester of a babies development, the smell of placenta and mother creating a subtle earthy unbreakable bond.
Smell evokes memories – our minds travel far into our histories and possible futures in the presence of them.
The Sankhya philosophy as commonly mapped on a chart lines up, as a bottom line foundation, the senses. Our connection to the physical realm moves directly through the five sense faculaties and the elements. This will become more meaningful as we move beyond the dense material realm.
Smell is associated with the subtle element earth – the root chakra, the mooladhara chakra – the focal point of the yogi’s shift of attention from the material realm upward from the realms of hunger and fear into more exalted states of consciousness…into awareness, understanding and wisdom. Smell evokes an understanding of ourselves in time, life and death, and anchors us in the physical.
In that essential awakening into that experience of life and death we meet the kaladanada…the yogi’s alchemical transformation from death to immortality. Yes, they actually mean that. Hatha Yoga was a practice of alchemy – a system based on primordial wisdom encoded in the sound of Om. Smell and it’s essential nature is a portal into the ancients through the root chakra, like an uplifting song moves us upward, so does an uplifting fragrance.
Of course for asana yogis, in the days that we still did this…wafting incense – burning of the earth, the smell of smoke offered up to the heavens – an invitation for ascended beings physical and non-physical to bless us with our wisdom.
Natalie Ullmann 