night falls in the moon garden
sweet cacao kisses the delicate petals of the rose
– an Eden,
in the heavens of our hearts
the eternal beloved
~ poetry by Lubomira Kourteva
We were all created with our five basic senses: smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing. While many people on a spiritual path are often motivated to develop their intuitive and psychic abilities, what I often tell my clients is that the path of intuitive development first begins with attuning ourselves more deeply to the five senses. Once we sharpen those, it is only natural for other senses to open up for us – and they do, inevitably.
The truth is that our five senses carry within themselves all that is needed to connect to and engage ourselves with God essence, and to expand in our energy.
When we develop a deeper connection to our senses, we also strengthen and further our intuition and our channel of creativity and imagination; and we become more grounded, establishing a stable channel through which inspired creativity, and source energy, can flow freely through our body.
Our five senses are also what grounding techniques are based on. If you think about it, grounding essentially means to come back to the present moment – which means embodiment. In addition, working with our senses is also one of the key components of Feminine Embodiment – and invoking feminine energy. As women, we connect and align to our natural rhythm through our senses.
There are many wellness and health benefits as well, because each of our five senses is essentially a language of what our body needs. They also serve as intuitive pathways about what is going on in our external environment – and when we widen our inner world through them, so does our understanding of the outer world widens also.
We can develop and devote our senses towards a higher purpose that will naturally bring us more fulfillment and soul expansion. Once we learn how to mindfully and consciously use our every day movements and gestures, higher love is expressed and embodied through our hands, ears and lips in a way that is meaningful, purposeful and aligned to our spiritual path.
In esoteric astrology, the sign of Taurus, which is the sign associated with the five senses, is a sacred sign with a strong link to enlightenment. Those with Taurus ascendants have a very powerful third eye, and their soul path in this life is about reaching divinity and God through transcending their senses. They learn to transform life force energy, release attachments, and develop their senses towards higher purpose. Once they step into their higher self and soul purpose, they also inspire and teach all of us how to find sensual pleasure through spirituality, how to engage God essence through all of the five senses, and how to ultimately reach freedom, illumination, liberation and enlightenment.
A responsibility goes with all in life, in that we need to understand how energy works, and the purpose of the tools we have. Senses can be our greatest allies, but they can also be used against us, to trap us in our lower chakras, if we don’t understand our true inner power and we only over-indulge in them. The key is learning the middle path – not to deny yet not to repress.
Our Sense of Sight
The spiritual essence of our sense of sight of that of the Beauty Way. It is recognizing the beauty beyond the veil and within our self; it is recognizing the divinity of all creation and being in deep reverence to it. On a practical level, it is recognizing the efforts that our loved ones make every morning and every day – that they are doing the best they can despite their own inner world hardships, and to stay in gratitude and humility rather than be wrapped up continuously in annoyances. Sight is also about noticing, which is what true love embodied is based on. A love that pays attention is a love that is alive.
Sight is also our inner lamp – which is our inner wisdom and connection to heart. Our heart is connected to spirit and is the initiatory pathway to higher consciousness. When we shift our eyes towards the inner landscapes, we come into deeper self-knowledge and illumination as we explore our unique emotional and spiritual wildlands. The higher purpose of our sense of sight is our spiritual vision. The eye is the lamp of our body – and when it is healthy, our whole body is full of light.
Questions to reflect upon:
What does beauty mean to me? How to walk the beauty way?
Do I see the divinity in one’s eyes and all of creation?
How do I give appreciation and thanks, so that I am more engaged and build a bridge to all around me?
How do I give thanks for the gift of sight that I am able to read this page?
Do I see the world through the eyes of love and compassion; how do I see my own inner world?
Are there any blindspots that I can remove to see clearly, more beauty and more love unfold through my view?
Our Sense of Sound
We are like a violin, through which God’s breath dances us into life and creativity. Sound is also connected to the power of the word, which is one of the powers of creation. Whether it is music, song or poetry – there is a language unfolding like a ceremony, speaking to and engaging the hidden corners of our psyche.
Words particularly carry a very strong vibration and much can be transformed through their energy. Every day we make a choice of whether to speak harm or love into ourselves and others – whether to imbue love and purpose into our creations. We must be mindful of how our words affect other people. Not only do sound and words change our own frequency, and affect our health and well-being, but our choice of words also reflects our current state of being.
Without love and intention, words are only meaningless noise. It is also believed that when people speak of love, they embody angels – because the only language understood in the higher realms is that of the pure human heart.
In our modern day, we have over-simplified language and vulgarity or shallowness can be unfortunately quite common. It is also more common to express ourselves through emojis and memes. It is really important to beautify not only our way of language – but beautify our language itself. Invest in listening to beautiful music, in reading richly layered literature, in learning beautiful words and infuse them with meaning, heart, honesty, integrity and purpose – let a rose garden bloom from your soul-skin.
Sound is also connected to silence. We have to know how to listen intentionally, when to speak and when to listen; and it is also about our intuitive voice. This is about our heart center and how to discern mind’s voice from heart’s voice.
Questions to reflect upon:
Did my words sound pleasant today?
Am I speaking with love?
Am I listening with love?
Am I responsible with my choice of words?
Where can I listen more, and speak less?
What is my purpose and intention for saying [this]?
How can I contribute to someone’s day and well-being with my words or through sound?
If I was a song, or a poem, how would I sound like?
Am I hearing the voice from the quiet corner of my heart? What do I hear in silence? What does my intuitive voice sounds like?
Our Sense of Touch
Touch is healing. It is one of our most needed senses, and just a hug can help someone in times of sadness. Often times after many years of marriage some couples have forgotten how to touch and they can revive their intimacy simply by holding hands. The power of the human touch is one of our greatest powers – we show love, nourishment and compassion, and we nurture all we love with our loving, caring hands. The many years of love unfold in the wrinkles of care; we hold strong and we build hope and stability. And no matter how dry or rough from dishwater and soap, mother’s hands on her child’s forehead to check for fever is a love embodied in its highest essence.
Many spiritual masters have healing hands and can heal from a distance, so they don’t need to touch someone to heal them, nor do they even need words to be spoken. And yet some choose to touch, such as Jesus Christ who was a true healer and essentially, a teacher of love and the power of the human heart. By the physical touch he showed even more compassion, connection and humility. The symbolic use of touch involves affecting someone that moves them emotionally, and Jesus was moved and “touched” by many of the people he met.
We come into more compassion and humility through touch, and grace becomes us. The sweet aroma of a rose scents the hands of those who held it long after it’s gone and unheld. Just like grace. Just like kindness. When we’ve been touched by someone’s kindness and forgiveness, it is only natural that it will move us and stay with us, and we’ll, hopefully, be inspired to touch others with it.
Love leaves its light touch everywhere. This is why people often describe God’s touch as invisible, as unnoticeable, so subtle as if it’s not even there, and as light like the wings of a butterfly. It’s not social media popular, it’s not grand sparkling light, it’s not high gurus on big stages – it is something we often don’t even notice at all, like a simple gesture or a phrase of a passing stranger. But it finds its home into our heart and radiates along the stream of our consciousness, until one day we become aware of it. Perhaps today God was an iceberg, but its holiness will unfold itself through the years.
Touch is also connected to emptiness, and to trust, and to portray this I often tell the story of the Buddhist monks. As part of their advanced training, they need to learn the spiritual lesson of receiving – which is one of their hardest lessons. To do that, each day they go to collect alms with their bowls, and whatever they collect is all they can live off of. They are also not allowed to engage with those who help them – they can’t look at the people who donate to them nor thank them. This requires great vulnerability, humility and trust. How many of us have this kind of trust in the universe; that life will find its way to channel through the right people on our path who will support us; to completely surrender and renounce the material and accept the interdependence of humanity; to accept that we will still survive even without our “control”?
Humility and vulnerability are strengths understood only by those devoted to their spiritual paths. It is understanding that beyond our physical self there is no place for the ego beliefs. It is understanding that both the bowl and the hands that give are both empty at the end of the day – but we are still whole and strong. This spiritual act of receiving reminds us that we are all dependent on the same emptiness. Only this walking silent gratitude notices the fillings of the heart.
Touch is also about feeling, both physically and emotionally. It is about learning to connect to our emotional body and feel our feelings. To feel our feelings, we need to focus on where on the body they are felt. How does sadness feel? How does happiness feel? It is about honouring the cycles of our land, honouring the sanctity of our heart’s tears and longing, and giving ourselves freedom to remain in the vulnerability and uncertainty that feelings can sometimes inevitably put us in.
Questions to reflect upon:
How can I show love through my hands?
How can God’s love be my hands to those who need it?
How can I contribute to someone’s day and make it better?
How can I raise and lift someone up?
How do I support, and provide stability, consistency and devotion?
How can I leave more love and kindness in my every day steps, for others to light their way?
Am I touched by the need of others? What do I do about it?
How do I show my appreciation when I have received something whether it was by word, energy, physically or as gesture?
Is there fairness in my actions – do I give and receive fairly, is there equivalent energetic exchange?
Do I support or give to others based on what they truly need, or based on what I want or think they need?
Our Sense of Smell
Our oldest and strongest form of memory occurs in the olfactory bulb – which is why our sense of smell is very powerful. It also connects us to the liminal, to spirit, to soul memory, and to the lineage of our soul. In our every day life, it is also a way to increase our well-being. Think of this: Each time you smell something familiar, you go right there, all the way back to the moment when that thing happened. Scents open doors.
This is one the most powerful ways to work with our sense of smell – because it is so deeply connected to our emotional body and memories. Memories are like batteries. We enter doorways through senses – and in these rooms, we conjure feelings, experiences, thoughts and emotions. When we know which door to open, we can invoke specific moods into our life.
Scent is also very important in aligning to our natural rhythm. With so many harmful contents and toxins in cosmetics, food, house cleaning supplies, and contraceptives, our hormonal health is constantly disrupted, and our bodies can become too numbed in our senses affecting our health. When we are more self-aligned, we are able to increase our intuition, and discern situations much better. We also increase our well-being because each scent corresponds to a particular organ or energy in our body, and when we tune into the unique language of our body we can see which parts of us need more attention. In general, we are usually attracted to those scents that we are currently aligned to, or are pulling into our aura, or are already in our energy field, or we want to embrace more; while those scents that we feel an aversion to are usually those we have current resistances to, or just those we are not focused on.
Spiritually, our sense of scent is about the impact we have.
Love is a scent. All is a scent. Our actions, words and energy leave traces behind us wherever we go. Whether sweet or not, that’s up to us.
Questions to reflect upon:
What is the aroma of my actions and words?
What impact do I leave behind?
What is the scent of my love?
Do I leave a lingering sweet aroma for others to follow, for others to light up their own ways when they feel lost in the forests?
Do I scent of beauty, hope, love, encouragement or discouragement?
Do I scent of an artificial perfume, or a natural authentic soul-skin essence?
Our Sense of Taste
How do you feel when you eat chocolate? What does happiness taste like? What does an apple remind you of? If love was a flavour, what would it be for you? What does love taste like when it is given to you, and when you give it?
We all have our own unique scents, and this is how we leave our unique fragrances on others. We are flavoured enhancers to the environment around us. We contribute to and warm up the lives of others with our unique flavours; we are like candles or the hearth of a house.
Taste is about nurturing and nourishment. It shows how we take care of others, and how we create the needed space for them to feel comfortable enough to thrive and shine in their true selves.
It is also about connection to our own true self and being able to take care of our needs emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. It is about being mindful of what we feed ourselves with every day. We become our tongues and our hands – what we speak we become, how we act we become. If there are people we don’t like, that’s perfectly okay, all we need to do is walk away rather than engage ourselves with negativity or becoming the thing we disliked in them in the first place. Taste is about boundaries – and being mindful of over-indulgences.
And last but not least, the spiritual essence of taste connects us to sharing. We share our food with others. We share the tenderness and the caring. We give support and charity to those who need it. We remember that we live in a world of interdependence and interconnection – as all in life is a relationship. And when someone has given us the sweetness of comfort, respect, understanding and hospitality, may we return these flavours as well, feeding them some love and gratitude.
Questions to reflect upon:
How do I soothe myself and take care of my needs?
What flavour do I need more of in my life?
What do I feed to my mind and to my heart?
How can I add a spicier flavour of full belly laughter to my family today?
What blend of words and gestures can I cook today for a sweeter flavour?
What flavour do I need to use in order to cancel out the bitterness left from someone’s mouth?
Who gave me a flavour of sweetness today, and how may I show the same level of sweetness, hospitality and care towards them?
How may I live my life in more love, so that I am a flavour desirable to taste?
Our senses are meant to be used all together. If we touch in kindness but speak of harshness making abrasive noises, is that love? Will the sweetness we bring of our aroma erase the bitterness we left in someone’s mouth?
Our senses are a gift, a blessing and a beautiful natural way to build a stronger connection within and without. We were born because all of our cells simultaneously said yes to you, yes to life. We have our noses to smell vanilla, we have our ears to hear the laughter of our family, we have our hands to hold the hands of our beloved. We experience life in deeper and more meaningful ways because of all this; and the appreciation of this is a gift in itself. May we love more consciously.
For more of my writings, browse through my Art of Love.
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Cover photography by me of the beautiful wild roses in our garden.
