Activate your senses for inspired journalling

Interview and Article by MICHELLE R PRICE

The human body has five main senses; sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. The sense of smell is powerful in that it can take us back to a time when we were a teenager, or it may remind us of a grandparent we have lost. Leonie Featherstone draws on this particular sense in her entry in the Spiritual Discovery Journal.

Leonie is an author, an essential oil mentor and international speaker and a mindset educator and a lover of people and life. She wants to use her craft to inspire other people to be the best they can be and help them apply some techniques to allow them to discover who they are meant to be.

Leonie credits growing up in the Australian outback on the QueenslandNorthern Territory border with sparking her interest in essential oils. She enjoys working with people and taking onboard the lessons of nature to help them tap into their inner wisdom.

Spending her childhood without electricity and other modern-day comforts meant Leonie had to find other ways to have fun. She recalls travelling in the back of the family ute and travelling underneath a eucalyptus tree on the property. She would grab a handful of leaves and chew them. She admits they didn’t taste the best, but that chewing motion would help the leaves release their beautiful aroma.

Leonie said that, “When we activate our senses, we’re actually creating a pause, it’s like a state changer.

“I think our senses are our guideposts and when we can activate them, we can actually be more aware, it’s bringing us into a state of awareness.”

Leonie’s entry in the Spiritual Discovery Journal is titled Activate Your Senses for Inspired Journalling. She said, “Often we get caught up in the malaise, we get caught up in the stuff that’s happening and… even just saying that, I can feel my [insides] begin to churn… and so what I find, even before we get to the journalling, we actually allow the outside story to dictate the emotions.

“Whereas when we can actually be aware enough to just stop and activate the senses… grab a bottle of essential oils and inhale and in that moment of inhaling, we’re actually breathing… you have to slow your breathing to smell an essential oil.”

Leonie explained that process of stopping and inhaling activates our memory and emotions as well as our limbic system, potentially taking us down a different path. This may also cause us to examine what we can hear and touch as we return to a state of awareness.

She added, “I find my senses can help me tune into ‘radio Leonie’ and when I can tune into ‘radio Leonie’ I actually play the channels I want to play and listen to the music I want to hear.”

In Leonie’s diary entry, she uses Ollie the Octopus as a creative way to get us to jot down our story as it stands. We simply draw a circle on the page and write a question inside, then we come up with a bunch of answers and they become legs, surrounding our initial question. We are invited to use certain oils including ‘Forgiveness’ or ‘Passion’, to bring us back to our senses.

If falling into a state of presence and calm sounds appealing, you will definitely want to check out Leonie’s Journal entry.

www.scentsofempowerment.com.au