Tuning In With Incense

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon blending up a new loose herbal incense blend. This blend is a formula that I have been making for years, and have decided to make it available for purchase. It's called "Honor the Ancestors", and is suited for rituals involving ancestor work and past-life regression. I blend loose organic herbal incense to use for ritual and magickal work. These incenses need to be burned on charcoal. I always have a charcoal burner ready to go on my altar, filled with sand and I keep a roll of charcoal disks in my altar drawer.

I love to use incense, and burn some every time I prepare to do magickal work. Whenever I craft a new blend or make a new batch of tea in my workshop, I burn incense. I also like to burn scented incense sticks and cones just because they smell nice and they are easy to use! I have certain scents that I use for particular reasons. Some of my favorites include Amber (working around my altar), green tea(anytime at all), jasmine or other floral(doing herbal research) and Pinon Pine/cedar(to freshen my space and energize me). Of course, I don't limit myself to just these scents, but I seem to have developed my favorites. I have a drawer filled with incense, and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm always on the lookout for new scents. My newest favorite is called "Pagan's Brew", made by my friends at Scarborough Cottage.

Scent is a great way to orient yourself to a particular task. Incense makes that easy to do. It's a common practice to use incense before meditation. If you light the same scent of incense every time before you start, you will begin to find that you will achieve a meditative, contemplative head space faster than without it. We tend associate certain scents with certain things. You can train your brain to associate a scent with a particular activity, such as meditation. Wouldn't it be nice to get into that space more quickly so that you can get more out of the limited time you have?

Hmmm, I think I should find a scent to help me when preparing to write in my blog! What are some of your favorite scents?