Make “scents” Of Your Meditation Practice

Okay. Okay. Hopefully we are live. Hey, guys, good morning. Sorry, we had a bit of technical difficulties with our live for the previous, so we just rescheduled. Everything should be on and ready to roll right now. So hopefully we are on. We're live. We saw the notification and hopefully people are beginning to join in this morning's meditation hack. We're going to be going over how scents can help us dive into a deeper meditation practice. So I'm going to be kind of introducing a few scents that I've used over the past several years in order to kind of like integrate a scent with my practice.

So what we're doing here, or the hack theoretically, is what we're doing is creating a scent. We're smelling that scent, it's coming in, we're noticing it, and coupled with that scent, we're immediately doing an activity. So I'm going to do this activity, meditation, of course. And this is going to help us dive into our practice a lot easier. So as we develop this kind of sensory perception of ascent, going into a practice over time, every time that we smell something like this, Palo Santo, you know, every time I light this now, I've created a neurological pathway in my mind to know that it's time to settle down and go into meditation practice.

So even now as I'm lighting this, you know, it's already helping me to calm down because my mind knows that when this is lit and I smell this, it's time for relaxation, it's time for my practice and, you know, with enough of this, you know, I say it typically takes, you know, you can, you can create the pathway within, within 60 days, even 30 days, but, you know, it, you need to maintain the practice. So I would recommend, you know, 90 days consistently. And by that time you've probably created a habit where it's hard, it's actually hard to escape from.

So when you wake up and you light this, you know exactly what you're doing. The beautiful thing about this kind of mind hack is it's not only associated with meditation. I like to use it for meditation simply because it's, you know, that's what I want to use it for. But if you wanted to say, you know, use a candle, a scented candle, in order to go to bed earlier, you could light that same candle. And right when you light that candle and you smell it, you need to go into your bed and start to wind down and you're going to start to create that pathway every time you smell.

Time to relax. Smell. Time to relax. This can also be applied with ascent, you know, sometimes singing bowls, and you can make a tone. There's many ways to kind of hack your brain into creating. Creating a pattern or a habit that you want. This can also be used to break down habits that you don't like. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce some of the things that I personally like to use. So this is palosanto. It's a wood that's typically grown in south or Central America. South America. And, you know, like, most of these have been known to do a kind of spiritual cleanse.

But, you know, it's not only a spiritual cleanse. I mean, if you really look this up, these things have a bunch of benefits that actually cleanse the air. Now, that doesn't say to light this up and just start inhaling the smoke, that's not necessarily good for you. But, you know, like, I do like to have it. You know, just walk it in front of my face, smell it. But if you have something like respiratory issues or something like that, it may be best to keep this just away from where you can physically inhale it.

But at the same time, this is actually going to be purifying the air. So don't get too crazy about, like, oh, am I inhaling smoke? Is this bad? For me? This is actually quite beneficial for a room and a space, so don't worry too much about that. The other thing that you need to be concerned with before you begin this practice is, you know, having a safe space, especially if you're diving into a meditation practice and closing your eyes to make sure that this is in a very safe space that is not going to, you know, you don't want to all of a sudden open your eyes and your couch is on fire.

You know, that's not really the practice that we're trying to achieve here. I'm going to introduce another one here. This is one of my favorites. It's actually coupled with two scents that I prefer to use. This is a white sage mixed with a bit of kopal. So Kopal is also from Central America, South America primarily. It's kind of like a tree SAP also has a lot of beyond just spiritual cleanse is what most people know it for. But, you know, again, these things carry, like, antimicrobial, antibacterial properties that actually help to neutralize some of the ions in the air, which basically makes less air particles, less dust, less pollen, things like that.

So we're actually with this tool both purifying the air and getting a nice scent out of it. And creating a hack if we really want to. So I'm going to go ahead and light this up and we're going to go ahead. And since I am lighting this, and like I said, I've kind of created this pathway, so I'm going to go ahead. And if you want to get yourself in a comfortable seated position, if you have something that is of a scent that you like, it could be, say, like an essential oil, it could be a candle, it could be sage, copal, palo santo.

I would only recommend kind of staying away from some of the synthetic incense sticks because sometimes these are just synthetic sense, which is clearly not good for, you know, what we're trying to accomplish here. That's not quite good for you. That's what I'm trying to say. These things are all naturally derived. So these came from a plant, got rolled up and you simply burn it as a plant. These aren't derived from a lab or something like this. So these have been kind of tried and true over years and years of time.

So now that we have this lit and it's coming in, we can smell it. What we want to do is begin by obviously smelling this. You can kind of brush it across. You make sure to get that scent, put it in your fire safe area. We're going to take a deep breath and I'm going to run you through a brief meditation. So get comfortable. You can light ascent if you prefer. And let's go ahead and close our eyes and start with Just a couple deep breaths. Let's go in through our nose, inhale through our mouth. And we're only going to be paying attention to three things.

The feeling of the air coming in through our nose. We're going to be noticing the scent ITSELF, and we're going to be noticing the rise and the fall of our chesT. So let's go ahead and do five of those, focusing on those three things. Now, it's okay if thoughts come in, we're just going to kind of imagine it like traffic. Like we're sitting on a bench and watching a car pass. EVERY time a car pass, we don't go running after that car, trying to grab it or, you know, get in it. We just watch the car pass.

It goes off into the distance and fades away Just like our breath. It's the same with our thOughts. We don't get attached. You just breathe in. And on the exhale, just let it go. One more inhale. OkAy. You can stay here if you like, but for the sake of this practice and being a short practice, we're going to start to bring some life back into our body. So we can start to wiggle our fingers, our toes, our neck, and slowly begin to open our eyes, come back, recognize our whole body, the space that we are in.

Notice the smells that are around us, feeling of the temperature, how we feel before our practice and now after. Just bring awareness to all these things. That's what this practice is about. That's what meditation is about, just gaining a deeper understanding of who we are and how we want to go about our life. So just to reiterate, this is our mental meditation hack, using scents, health as a tool to dive in much faster. So, like I said, if we light a scent, we smell the scent, bring awareness to it, dive into an activity like meditation, and we repeat this over and over and over again.

We create the neurological pathway to make a pattern, to make a habit that we love. We can also use this to disconnect from old patterns that we don't agree with. So with that, you're welcome to go ahead and try. Feel free to ask me questions, but for now, that's the end of our practice for today. I hope you found this useful, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks. Bye.