Exploring psychic smell
Stories of clairalience and connections to the unseen world
Your intuition is constantly influencing you, often through your physical senses.
Our bodies are like antennae for psychic information—our sight, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling act as conduits for intuitive impressions, often without our conscious awareness.
Smell is not a sense that I experience often while I’m giving a mediumship or intuitive reading, but it’s a common way that people may become aware of their departed loved ones visiting them. Because smell is highly linked to memory, it’s a powerful way the our loved ones in spirit choose to make their presence known.
Years ago, I was having dinner with a medium friend, and we both became aware of smelling powder from a barbershop. We instantly felt that our mutual friend, who had passed years before, was visiting us. As an experiment we asked the spirit world to play with us a bit. We invited them to make us aware of a smell, and we would say it at the same time. First, we smelled lilies, then popcorn, then old spice aftershave. Each time, shouting out our impressions simultaneously to be sure we weren’t being influenced by one another.
When I share this with people, it often leads them to consider when this may have happened to them in the past.
The smells can be specific. This morning, I walked into my kitchen and smelled faint cigarette smoke mixed with the perfect blend of my grandmother's soap. I just smiled and said hello and felt thankful for the visit. Often, when I am waking up or drifting to sleep, I will smell my dog, who passed a few years ago, the faint oatmeal smell. It can be so natural that I forget he is not there is the physical form.
I have also come to believe and rely on psychic smell. Psychic smell is different from a spirit person visiting and refers to the energy of this world, as opposed to the spirit world.
Smells that we experience through our intuition and have no physical source. This smelling sense often call clairalience that alerts us of danger or points out who is pleasant or uncomfortable to us in our environment.
Years ago, I sat in a regular work meeting of the same colleagues and constantly smelled a rotten egg smell. I tried sitting in different places and could not figure out the source of the smell. I knew there was someone in the group that I didn’t enjoy interacting with but it didn’t occur to me that the source of the scent could be my intuition. Until one week, I missed the meeting, and the person had to call me and ask for help. I immediately started to smell the sulfur, and it all clicked.
Being in this person’s company had been the source of the unpleasantness. This was further confirmed on the day they quit their job and told me they had never liked working with me because they felt I was always trying to overshadow them. Later, another colleague confided that this person had complained to them that I had not allowed them to shine in their role and said that I was “taking up all the oxygen in the room —everything was about me.”
I tried not to laugh at the irony, holding back the urge to say, "Well, they have been stinking up the place with their thoughts!"
Now, I will share the best and most definitive example of psychic smell, experienced by my son. Years ago, having a bad feeling about the school he was attending, we decided, for a short time, to send him to a private school.
This was a huge undertaking, out of our budget, and almost an hour's drive each way. After a few months of taking the bus, my son started to complain about the smell. Every day, he would say, “I just can’t take the smell. It’s making me sick.” This started to escalate over the next few weeks while my son and I worked on convincing his Dad that we’d need to drive him from now on. There was something wrong, and that smell could not be ignored.
Not really understanding why we were doing this, my now ex-husband Mike, who is, by the way, one of the most good-natured people alive, agreed that he would no longer take the bus.
Now, we were spending our already busy mornings and afternoons driving our son back and forth to avoid the smell.
Three days into the new arrangement, Mike called me and told me to turn on the local news. The school bus that my son had been riding on every day was being live-streamed on TV by a cameraman in a helicopter, and it was on fire.
I felt an icy chill rush through my legs as I watched the bus engulfed by flames. The driver, who was being called a hero, had acted quickly pulling to the side of the road at the first sign of smoke and immediately evacuated the students as the bus began to melt to the ground. The fire chief said he had saved their lives.
We sat on the phone silently for a minute, watching TV, and then Mike said, “I just want to know if you two knew the bus was going to burn down. Or did you make it burn down?”
When my son returned to school, the other kids immediately credited him with “knowing” something was wrong with that bus. Apparently, he had been complaining about it to them as well.
I’d love to hear about the ways clairalience shows up for you. I love the meaning and connection found through sharing our stories.
With love,
Sheryl
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