This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Delights of the Season; The Sense-Spheres (3 of 5): Taste and Smell. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Delights of the Season; Dharmette: The Six Sense Spheres (3 of 5); Scents and Flavors - David Lorey

The following talk was given by David Lorey at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 03, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Delights of the Season

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this long-running 7:00 a.m. sit and brief sharing of teaching. We are going to continue today exploring the teaching called the Six Sense Spheres¹, talking a bit about taste and smell—mostly about smell, which, of course, accounts for a lot of taste.

In putting together a scheme for the week, I referred to this guided meditation as "Delights of the Season," and I repeated that in the title of the talk. I am not sure exactly what I was thinking—probably just that tastes and smells are so much a part of the winter season. At any rate, we will see how that turns up in the meditation.

Join me in sitting together, supporting one another's practice, coming together to share the teachings of the Buddha. Find yourself a posture for the meditation that is both relaxed and alert, attentive, present, and at ease.

Rebalance your experience by bringing your attention inward—inward toward the inner life, downward into the body. Connect with the breathing.

What is coming up around the "delights of this season" is the delight of the sitting practice. This practice of sitting here, bringing attention again and again back to the here and now of our life, can have such great delight in it. It is a delight free from seasons, free from external conditions, and free. The meditation gives us an opportunity to experience what it is like to be here and now, free.

We will explore later today how to be with the delights of the season in the same way that we can be with the delights of the meditation. We let what comes and arises in the meditation just be here. We touch it. We explore it. We let it arise and pass away on its own, on its own schedule. We don't intervene or interfere, except to keep bringing our attention back to the here and now.

Doing so creates a place of rest for the mind, a place of ease, a place of comfort even in the midst of discomfort. Every time we return to the breath, we can feel a little of that delight—what it is like to be here and now.

So, for this period of meditation, with each return to the breath, let go of any frustration that happens with, "Oh, the mind wandered," "I'm no good at this," "Oh, today is busy," or whatever. Just notice the sense of presence and see if you can find a little delight in that return. This practice is all about returning again and again to the here and now, and the delight that awaits us there.

Dharmette: The Six Sense Spheres (3 of 5); Scents and Flavors

Our practice encourages us and teaches us ways to cultivate comfort even amidst discomfort—to create a place of ease and rest at the very heart of our complicated lives.

With this comfort, sometimes we will notice delight arising. This is a Dharmic delight. It is a delight that doesn't depend on the season. It is a delight that we should avoid the temptation of pushing away. We don't have to hold it at arm's length; we don't have to worry that it will lead to overindulgence. It is a reminder of the wholesome pleasure that is here when we are here and now, when we are present for our experience in a way that is open and free.

May the delight that arises, may this comfort that we cultivate, benefit not only ourselves but everyone we come into touch with. May it lighten the burden that we feel. May it put a little spring in our step as we move through the holiday season. May it open our hearts to those around us.

Good morning again, friends. Welcome.

We will return today to continue our exploration of the Six Sense Spheres practice, and we will do so by taking a look at taste and smell—smell in particular, about which more in a moment. This puts us in the middle of this exploration of looking at how we can be present for our experience in the only ways we know experience—through these six senses—and find ourselves available for the holiday season without either overindulgence or an attitude of pushing everything away.

I will begin a talk on taste and smell with a personal story about smell. Several years ago, I sat a retreat at IRC (Insight Retreat Center), the retreat center associated with IMC near Santa Cruz, California. As I always do on retreat, I drank a lot of tea, usually a combination of mint and ginger. About halfway through the retreat, I noticed that I couldn't taste the tea very well, so I doubled up the number of bags I put in. I was making pretty strong tea.

When the retreat came to an end, I realized that the tea had no flavor at all. Upon returning home, I became aware that I had no sense of smell and, thus, no sense of taste either. For around seven years, I had no sense of smell. Food was warm and nourishing, but it had no taste. I became worried that in an emergency I couldn't smell smoke or a gas leak. I couldn't tell when food had gone bad in the refrigerator. As a result, my wife became my "nose," smelling everything for me—including me. I became a little obsessed with the fact that I might smell among friends or colleagues and be unaware of it.

But the most challenging thing about living without a sense of smell—which put me in direct contact with the way senses work together to create our worlds—was the way I felt disconnected from the rest of the human community. Sharing and commenting on the tastes and smells of things, particularly food, is a much more important sort of bonding and social experience than I had realized. It is particularly something that happens around this time of year.

I got used to going along and commenting on the taste and smell of things, even though I usually couldn't taste or smell anything. [Laughter] From time to time, the sense of smell would return for a brief minute or two, sometimes five minutes. I could go out in the garden and smell rosemary, things with a strong scent, maybe a rose. I would go back inside, smell my arm, make an espresso, have a bite of dark chocolate. It usually wouldn't last long enough to experience all those things.

Eventually, working with doctors, we identified a problem, I had some surgery, and within a very short period of time, most of my smell returned. I think it is mostly back. Things still smell a little different, and maybe it is changing again, but now at least I know what the problem was, and I can participate again in that part of the human community that involves sharing.

At a recent retreat I was co-teaching in Colombia, we had a retreatant who, over the last couple of years, has become almost entirely blind. It was really poignant to have someone there who had lost a sense as we explored the Six Sense Bases teaching and practices.

As Andrea Castillo and I looked into these things, we found ourselves fascinated by how little we knew about these six senses that mediate and create all our experience. Smell was a surprising one. The sense of smell among humans is actually a lot better than that of many other animals. The one exception, of course, is dogs, who are the kings in the animal kingdom among those who smell. But it turns out that humans are no slackers. We can detect smells at great distances. We can detect as many smells as colors—apparently millions of them. If you think about it, this is true. There is a huge variety of scents that we are aware of. If our sense of smell is working well, we take them for granted.

Smell may be the keenest sense we have, and it accounts for most of our sense of taste—probably 70% or 80%. I learned that there is a reason for this: we smell not only through our nostrils but also, as we chew things, we pump pheromones and other molecules up to our olfactory receptors. That part of taste actually is smell.

Turning from interesting facts to practice, the most fascinating thing about smell is how strongly linked it is with memory. While other aspects of our experience are associated with memories of certain periods, smell brings us into direct contact with our childhoods. Smell is particularly powerful in triggering memories from the ages of five to about eleven.

We are aware of this in literature, for example, from the work of Marcel Proust, who wrote In Search of Lost Time. In a famous passage about memory, he describes what happens when he dips a cookie—a madeleine—into his tea. With the scents that arise, he has this whole world of childhood recreated. That is the beginning of seven volumes of prose.

He says:

"When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

One of the things I want to bring attention to is the way the smells of the season provide us a way to keep in touch with childhood. Our Dharma practice frequently brings us into keen contact with our childhoods in ways that can be extremely rich and freeing. When we are in touch with our childhoods, we have an opportunity to be aware of a period when some of our earliest views were being concretized. We can see that some of our habitual ways of reacting to things go way back in time.

The smells and tastes of the season have a way of opening to us a presence for memory. We can use those rich, sometimes very poignant memories of childhood—of our expectations, of our enjoyment, of some of the various disasters that happened to us as children during the holiday season. All of these things are a very rich mix. If we are unaware of them, they sometimes guide our behaviors and reactions in ways that aren't particularly to our benefit or the benefit of others around us.

So, as you go through the holiday season, you can bring attention to this rich world of smells. We get used to the background nature of smells—the scent of our own houses or places we live. We notice when smells change. Part of the practice can be noticing what it is like when you leave wherever you are meditating right now and go into the kitchen, or when you go outside. This would be true of going to holiday gatherings or being in stores where scents are used—the "scents of the season," the pumpkin spice latte. It is a brilliant marketing idea because it has scents in it that work for a lot of people to trigger deep memories. Notice what it is like going from one environment into another, and the sorts of memories that are evoked. Notice how those memories feel in the body and what happens in the mind as we experience them.

Along with those memories, you will notice that there are patterns of entanglement, of knots², of holdings, of preference, of moving toward and moving away from. These are all ways we can learn about how our clinging happens, how we get attached to things, how we come to want things and not want other things.

Taking us back to our childhood brings us into touch with this world where our opinions and preferences weren't maybe as well developed as they became. Maybe that is when they started to become more fixed, including some of our views about the world. It can thus be a way to be a little bit more in touch with Beginner's Mind—this idea of developing a habit in our practice of meeting all experience as if we were doing so for the first time, without already having our minds made up about how we were going to respond.

When memories are triggered and our experience of the holidays becomes a field of practice, we can ask ourselves: Can I sustain a relationship with this sensory experience—this smell, this taste, this flavor—and hold it lightly? Can I interact with this world of tastes and smells that becomes so rich at this time of year without getting caught in it? It is an ancient thing to spice things and make things special during the cold, dark months. Can I do it in a way where there is a simple enjoyment or a simple noticing of pleasantness, and then let that experience go and move on to the next one? Can I be in this human body and mind, fully in the season, fully present with others in the gatherings that happen, without getting all caught up—without suffering?

The answer to these questions is yes, it is possible. This question was asked of the Buddha: "Who can untie these knots once they are knotted?" The Buddha responds that you can, we can—that it is possible.

One way we do this is by being aware of knots beginning to form. Somewhere in that process of the knots starting to form and get tight, fixing and holding us in time, we can let go. We can be aware of this happening in the meditation and in our lives. We smell something, we see something, maybe something related to the season. We sense the contact happening, the experience forming, and we can just let it come and go. We don't have to get caught in it, and we don't have to push it away. We can just be in that flow of knowing our world through our six senses without getting caught up. Being in our world, knowing it through the six senses, free.

Start to work with these senses and sense spheres, and notice how they work in your life and how you can work with them in your practice.