Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Our ‘five senses’ comprise such a wonderful gift equipping our nervous system with information to process, enabling us to perceive things about the world around us. When damage or impairment occurs with any one of these faculties, we realise how invaluable they are for wellbeing and enjoyment of life and how easily they’re taken for granted.
Murray Smith
Referred to as the five ‘physical’ senses, they inform us emotionally too, impacting our feelings and mood. Information comes through our sensory organs: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin via specialised cells and tissues they contain. Stimuli received is translated into signals the nervous system uses, relaying them to the brain, to be interpreted as sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
We’re truly wonderfully designed and made. The connection between our sense of smell and its abilities to evoke memories is remarkable. ‘Smell’ is the only fully developed sense a baby has in the womb and it’s the one that is most developed in a child until about the age of 10 when sight takes over. It’s claimed that “smell and emotion are stored as one memory,” and childhood tends to be the period in which we create “the basis for smells we like or hate for the rest of our lives.”
Our sense of smell. Photo: Živa Trajbarič pexels.com
Our sense of smell provokes memory and even retrieves consciousness of buried memories in a way none of our other senses do. I’ve seen this evident at times when helping people suffering from deep trauma. A young woman who had little conscious memory of her childhood before nine years of age, began developing a serious eating disorder in her teen years through to her twenties. Doctors had few answers for sustaining her wellbeing.
Where there’s ‘effect’ there is ‘cause’ and so believing implicitly in the power of prayer, we engaged in prayer seeking to find keys to unlock and release this stronghold of control. Disempowered somehow, she clung to controlling what she would eat – nobody could take that from her.
One day when praying for her, she broke down, sobbing through tears, “That smell… that smell.” This moment unlocked the beginning of a healing process. She later related how the aroma of camphor timber, surfaced a suppressed memory of being taken as a child to a piano teacher decades earlier. Upon her arrival for each lesson, this man lifted the lid on a wooden piano bench… the smell was distinctive as he took the sheet music out. He then sat this little girl on his knee at the piano and abused her. She told no one. She developed uneasiness with men and unspoken attitudes to her father, a decent, kind man but his insistence on returning her for weekly lessons not knowing what she was enduring, caused trust issues.
God understands the inner detail and intricacies of our lives – of conscious as well as suppressed memories.
Painful experiences buried beneath the surface, though masked by attempts to just get on with life, demonstrate that time itself, heals very little.
The Bible describes Jesus healing damaged, broken and crushed hearts. His loving, gentle intervention is still bringing wholeness and freedom to people today.
Holy Bible on Stand. Photo: Pixabay
