Читать книгу Essential Oils for Lovers: How to use aromatherapy to revitalize your sex life - Maggie Tisserand - Страница 9
Оглавление‘He found her as she slept in the beauty of her palace. She awakened at the fragrance of the god, which she smelled in the presence of his majesty. When he came before her, she rejoiced in the sight of his beauty. His love passed into her limbs, which the fragrance of the god flooded.’
From an inscription on the chamber wall of an Egyptian pyramid
ENHANCING YOUR NATURAL BODY SCENT
Each of us has our own ‘smell’ which is as unique as our fingerprints. Mostly we are unable to detect it ourselves because our noses become ‘satiated’ with one smell after a short period of time – just as when we apply perfume and cannot smell it after half an hour even though other people can be aware of it for many hours. Uniquely personal, we can often only detect our own scent when we take a worn item of clothing from the back of the wardrobe and realize that it needs laundering. This is our ‘stale’ scent, however, an aroma we find disagreeable and do not choose to be associated with; yet our ‘fresh’ scent signature is one that we take with us wherever we go and by which we are recognizably us.
Smell has very strong erotic connotations, and we can be attracted to or repelled by another person by the way he smells. Just as you can love someone for the softness of her skin, so you can love someone for the smell of it. Part of loving someone is loving his smell, and ‘just as it may be difficult to live with someone whose voice is unpleasantly loud or shrill, so it may be impossible to live with someone whose body smell is disagreeable.’ Some North African tribes give so much credence to personal aroma that the wife can be instantly divorced if she does not smell ‘right’.
Your individual aroma can be affected by what you put into your system – food, alcohol, coffee and other strong drink, cigar or cigarette smoke, etc., and by your mental and spiritual attitudes. Anger or fear, for example, can alter your smell as your body releases adrenaline. In an acute situation this chemical change may be insignificant, but if it becomes chronic due to the pressures of work, then your body chemistry can be altered to such a degree that your partner no longer ‘recognizes’ the person he fell in love with.
Acupuncturists are trained to recognize different body smells, and so are able to utilize the sense of smell as a diagnostic tool. Spiritual harmony is supposed to imbue the body with a beautiful aroma, and reports from India claim that after the death of holy men there is sometimes a lingering aroma of beautiful blossoms.
It is interesting to note that the Japanese, who have long employed a daily relaxing bath in scented water, do not have an underarm smell – there are of course a few exceptions, but in general their understanding of the need to create harmony in their everyday lives, and their conscious effort ‘not to disturb the “wa”’ (harmony) may have caused a systematic physiological change over the passage of time.
Sexual excitement causes all sorts of exotic odours to emanate from the body – from the breath, the skin and in particular the genitalia. In many successful relationships the partners are able to recognize each other’s smells, as the body’s natural perfume is indeed a potent method of non-verbal communication. An experiment showing that when a woman’s vaginal secretions were applied to her chest she and her partner had sex more often has recently been reported in the British Journal of Sexual Medicine
