Welcome to a journey through the 13 cranial nerves! This journey is designed to create balance between the sensory and motor functions of your nervous system.

You can find the playlist on my YouTube channel, and I’ll keep adding one new video per month. This month I am sharing content about the first cranial, or olfactory nerve.

You know how it is when you get all jacked up in hyper-activity mode, your nervous system is flooded with energy, and it’s literally impossible to stop “doing?” For instance, when you really get deep into something at work and feel it’s not possible to stop until you finish the project…and then you realize that’s going to mean working until midnight, but you can’t seem to stop or let go of your goal.

Or you get into an argument at a party and can’t seem to stop and breath? Your mouth just seems to keep talking, even though in your heart you want to hear what the other person might have to say.

Once I turn on my active side, I sometimes struggle find a way back down into calm receptivity. It’s like I know how to breath in and speak, but I’ve forgotten how to breath out and listen.

I personally have to have something concrete and clear that I can focus on to bring me back to a more balance, receptive state.

Maybe that’s why I love journeying through the cranial nerves so much. It has become a form of walking or sitting meditation for me. It also gives me an excuse to share with you how I’m choosing to structure the journey – the Embodied Learning Systems way.

Embodied learning (which I demonstrate in the above video) involves three kinds of inquiry:

1)    Cognitive
2)    Visual
3)    Kinesthetic/sensory
4)    Emotional

You can learn from books, you can learn from images, but when it comes to learning about “the body” I think it’s incomplete until you access the non-verbal intelligence of your specific, particular body. The part you are learning about already knows itself, basically, since it is part of you. If you use it to investigate itself, deep mysteries unfold!

Keep that in mind as we explore the first cranial nerve, which supplies your sense of smell.

The first three cranial nerves are all purely sensory, meaning that these receptive organs and nerves evolved first, and motor functions developed sequentially afterwards. This seems logical to me. If you don’t know where you are or what’s going on, why move? Yet, we often rush into activity without being aware of our surroundings, or we just assume that we know those surroundings and stop paying attention to them.

The motor activity of breathing necessary for smell, however, is way further down in the sequence of cranial and spinal nerves. Your nose does have erectile (yup!) tissue in it that expands and contracts according to need, but that is not a function of a motor nerve, it’s a function of the tissue itself. Your diaphragm is the primary muscle of breathing and its motion is activated by the phrenic nerve with roots in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th cervical nerves. This muscle/organ of lungs and diaphragm evolved much later than your sense of smell!

Air passes over the sense organ (with it’s 400 different receptors just waiting to be touched by interesting chemicals in the air) even when we breath very quietly. I experimented a lot this week and am delighted to discover that I smell just as much detail and nuance if I breath quietly, with small shallow breaths. I don’t have to “take a deep breath” or sniff/pant to perceive scent – in fact, when I do exaggerate my breathing that way, I smell less.

The takeaway is:

1) Simply tuning into your sense of smell is a great way to slow down and rebalance your nervous system.

2) Breathing quietly makes accessing smell easier. Lots of us are working too hard to breath. This small over-efforting, compared to bigger issues in our lives, might not seem like that big a deal…but it is if you consider the fact that the average person breathes over 20,000 times a day!

If you want to explore deeply how each cranial nerve affects your overall physicality, orientation, balance and coordination, check out my Cranial Nerve Sequencing offer.

Welcome to a guided journey through the 13 cranial nerves! You can find the playlist on my YouTube channel, and I’ll keep adding one new video per month. I am on vacation this weekend, so a new video will be posted next week.

We have arrived at the second oldest of our senses, the olfactory nerve. It carries chemosensory information from your olfactory bulb straight to your cortex along one pathway, although along another it sends information through your thalamus first, which routes the information to areas specializing in emotion and memory.

I’ll start out by sharing three reasons that smell is important, and end with some suggested explorations that will help you improve, enjoy, and understand your sense of smell.

1) Smell + taste = flavor, and flavor is a key element of pleasure in food.

Smell is way more important to me since I got COVID and lost it! With no smell, I literally could not taste food and didn’t want to eat. In fact, eating became extremely unpleasant and confusing. I had to make myself do it, and often actually felt nauseous. I’ve never been so depressed and confused in my life, and I’ve been through a lot! It turns out that smell is super emotional for us humans, connecting to the limbic system and memory. Without it, we become deeply disoriented.

2) Loss of your sense of smell can affect your health drastically.

I recovered my sense of smell relatively quickly (it usually takes about 30 days to return), but some of you may not be so lucky. Some people do loose the sense of smell due to an infection, neurological disease, or other causes. As many as 16 million Americans, even before COVID, have an impaired sense of smell, and more research is needed to help those folks. 

3) You can develop and expand your sense of smell – and have fun doing it!

There are over 400 different kinds of chemoreceptor neurons in your olfactory organ, but they can combine in many different ways to create over 100,000 different smells. It’s also quick and direct, sending some information straight to your cortex as mentioned before. You can instantly tell if your food is good, or has gone bad. You can tell the difference between two very similar but different plants, or people, purely through smell.

So let’s give it a little love…. first of all, here is a picture of the olfactory bulb, which sits in the sinus cavity space right between your eyes:

And here is a picture of where the nerve is in your brain (this image is drawn as if looking at your brain from below):

Here is a three step awareness exercise to help you connect with your first cranial nerve:

1) Breath through your nose, allowing your lips to be softly closed without clenching your teeth. Think of saying the letter N, which will bring your tongue to rest lightly on the roof of your mouth. How deep inside your head does the sensation of the cool air coming in go? If you can count your breaths up to 10, you have just done some meditation!

2) Bring any object nearby close to your nose and notice the difference in smell between the “general air” you were breathing and the object. Could you even name or articulate this smell? It is beyond words, subtle, yet distinct. Why don’t we enjoy this sense more…?

3) Bring your own hand into the smelling zone. Do you have a smell?
Lately, when I go on a walk, I make a point of actually smelling plants, not just flowers. I’m amazed at how different each one smells! I believe that I can educate and expand my sense of smell simply by practicing in this way. I’ve noticed that my pleasure in food is increasing (as well as my desire to avoid foods that don’t smell so good!).

Here is a fun activity that illustrates how connected smell and taste are. Fun for kids too!

We will explore other aspects of this nerve and organ next week – see you then. And if you want to explore deeply how each cranial nerve affects your overall physicality, orientation, balance and coordination, check out my Cranial Nerve Sequencing offer.

Our first breathing ancestors emerging from the water…

Today’s post is my final tribute to the mystery of our vestigial Cranial Nerve “0” and the vomeronasal organ it supplies.

It’s not habitual for me to spend a whole month paying attention to just one thing, learning, practicing. It’s been soothing, and that’s good because, to be frank, I didn’t really need excitement this month what with the USA re-opening public spaces again. With all the excitement, I needed calming and centering.

I often ask my students to bring their attention to the tip of their nose, right between the left and right sides of the nostril cartilages. This simple spatial prompt is easy for almost everyone to use. When they play with it while walking, meditating, or doing any movement, it tends to ease the balance of the head on the body. It’s one of my favorite starting points for self-awareness.

Inside it, that small vomeronasal organ resides, the oldest “sense”, the ancestor of all of our senses. It evolved in bony fish called tetrapods, the first creatures to have 4 limbs, and is related also to the evolution of lungs. The lungs evolved to get rid of Co2 – gas that is toxic when concentrated in the body, but is essential to life. The nose leads the head, and its nature is to expel…and receive.

This morning, while I was sitting in meditation with friends, I realized how amazing it is to simply receive air. What a gift. Not to try hard to get it, or to focus on it, but just to receive it fully. And…to give it fully away. The whole world of receiving and giving, and of letting go was present for me. The folks I practice with follow meditation with a short “temple cleaning practice” and the point of temple cleaning was described to me like this:

“If you don’t clean the dust from corners of your room, pretty soon your room is full of dirt.”

I’m not sure who the source of the quote was. As I was exhaling during meditation, I heard this voice in my head say “letting go of the garbage”. (No this post is not about halitosis!) OOOO it felt so good. I sometimes think I’ve let go of mental garbage, only to turn around and still find it lying around in the corner. A good example would be my plans for the day. When I meditate, these plans often pile themselves up in my mind…big stinky pile of plans! My mind wants to hold onto that pile and carry it around with me, but as I start my day, without fail, something other than my plans happens instead.

I’ll think O no! But I have to do __________! Part of my mind is busy carrying around my plan-garbage, so while I’m doing what I actually have to do, I proceed to simultaneously mentally do the thing which I can’t get to yet. Exhausting.

In a lot of ways, everything that I think, or notice, or experience, is something to be let go of. Sweep it up, put it in the dustbin, and see what happens next. Bringing attention to our body in the moment, if it’s done simply, can help us loosen the grip on all the garbage. Look at our ancestors…they let go of water for land and air. Something about it must have been enticing…

So just for today, spend a few minutes giving this ancient ancestor take the lead.

Let the tip of your nose dance in space as you move and breath…inhale

let your eyes follow your nose…exhale

your ears follow your eyes…inhale

Your heart follows your ears…your body follows your heart…

Let go of the past and receive the day!