What Your Nose Knows: Sensory Discernment, Somatic Awareness, and the Spiritual Gates

Welcome back to Set Apart Conversations. I am your host, Shenera Boodie-Wienken mental health clinician, trauma specialist, survivor advocate, and watchwoman.

I am so glad you are here. If you have been following along, our last episodes took us deep into the Smiles and Shackles series with They Don’t Wear Hoods Anymore, Parts One and Two , where we talked about covert racism, institutional harm, and the architecture of how systemic oppression operates in plain sight.

If you have not listened to those episodes yet, go back and find them here on Set Apart Conversations , and you can also find the written versions on my Substack, Mind Body and Spirit Chronicles , right on the home page. Today we are making a turn.

We are moving from the external landscape of systemic harm into the internal landscape of the body, because I believe you cannot fully understand how harm operates around you if you have not yet learned to trust what your body is already telling you about it. Today’s episode is part of Watchwoman Writings , a section within Set Apart Conversations reserved for prophetic, clinical, and spirit-led truth for women who are seers, feelers, and truth bearers.

Today we are talking about what your nose knows. Sensory discernment, somatic awareness, and the spiritual gates.

Let’s get into it. There is something your body knows before your mind catches up.

Before you can name what’s wrong in a room, before you can articulate why a person makes you uneasy, before logic has assembled its argument, your body has already rendered a verdict. Today we’re talking about one of the most underestimated discernment tools you carry: your sense of smell, and what it means clinically, somatically, and spiritually when your nose is trying to tell you something.

My name is Shenera Boodie-Wienken. I am a mental health clinician, trauma specialist, and survivor advocate, and this is Watchwoman Writings , part of Set Apart Conversations , where clinical wisdom, somatic awareness, and spirit-led truth meet.

Part One: The Clinical Layer—Your Body Knows In somatic and trauma-informed therapy, we talk a lot about interoception, which is your body’s ability to sense its own internal state. Most people think of interoception as noticing your heartbeat, or feeling tension in your shoulders, or recognizing that your stomach is tight when something is wrong.

But interoception also includes your sensory experience of the external environment. What you see, what you hear, and yes, what you smell.

The olfactory system, which governs your sense of smell, is the only sensory system with a direct pathway to the limbic system, the part of your brain that processes emotion and memory. Every other sense—sight, sound, touch, taste—routes through a relay station first.

Smell does not. It goes straight to the amygdala, straight to the hippocampus, straight to the seat of your emotional memory and threat detection.

This is why a smell can stop you cold. This is why you can walk into a room and immediately feel unsafe before you have consciously registered anything wrong.

This is why survivors of trauma often report intense sensory memories—a particular cologne, a particular smell in a house, a particular odor in a building—that can activate the nervous system years later. Your nose is not being dramatic.

Your nose is doing its job. In sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing, we teach clients to track these sensory cues as information rather than dismiss them as oversensitivity.

When your body registers something through smell, that registration is data. It is your nervous system, your threat detection system, your embodied wisdom doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The question is not whether to trust it. The question is whether you have been conditioned to override it.

Part Two: The Spiritual Layer — Guarding the Gates In Hebrew scripture, the body is understood as a dwelling place, and a dwelling place has gates. Gates are not decorative.

Gates are functional. They determine what enters and what does not.

They are the boundary between what is sacred and what is profane, between what belongs inside and what must remain outside. The ancient Hebrew concept of guarding the gates, shamar —to watch and preserve—applies not only to the city walls or the household threshold, but to the body itself.

Your eyes are gates. Your ears are gates.

Your mouth is a gate. And your nose, the breath gate, the gate through which life itself entered when YHWH breathed into Adam, is a gate.

Scriptures are not silent about smell as a spiritual indicator. The fragrance of offerings was described as a sweet savor, a pleasing aroma before YHWH.

Decay, rot, and corruption in scripture are consistently used as markers of spiritual and moral deterioration, not metaphorically, but as a lived sensory reality that the people of Israel were meant to recognize and respond to. What I am telling you is this: your sensitivity is not a liability.

It is a prophetic gift operating through your physical body. When the Ruach HaKodesh lives in you, your gates become calibrated to detect what does not belong.

What some people dismiss as anxiety, as overthinking, as being too sensitive, for those of us who are seers, feelers, and truth bearers, is often the body functioning as a spiritual instrument. Guard your gates.

What you allow to enter through your senses shapes what takes root in your inner life. Part Three: The Testimony — What I Smelled and What It Meant I want to share something personal, because this is not abstract for me.

When I walked into the York County Courthouse in Pennsylvania, I smelled something that stopped me. It was not sulfur.

I have smelled sulfur, and I know what that is. This was something else.

Something thick and pervasive, like decay, like rot, like something that had been dying slowly for a long time and nobody had acknowledged it. Nobody else around me seemed to register it.

But it burned my nostrils and made my eyes water, and my body went on immediate alert. I was there filing pro se motions in my divorce case.

I was already navigating what I now understand to be a network of institutional corruption; a judge who has since returned to that bench carrying twenty-six federal counts, a Prothonotary supervisor whose marriage to a sitting judge created a direct conflict of interest over the very filings I was submitting. My motions were suppressed.

They did not appear on the docket until I physically went in and demanded accountability. My nose knew before the paperwork confirmed it.

And in the home I shared with my former husband; a man I now understand to be a malignant narcissist who used every available system, legal, financial, social, and technological, to break me down rather than simply let me go there were moments when a smell filled the entire house. Decay.

Rot. Something that had no physical source I could identify.

It saturated the space. And I now understand that what I was registering somatically and spiritually was the atmosphere of a place where moral corruption had taken up residence.

I am a clinician. I believe in evidence.

I also believe that the body is a spiritual instrument, and that some things are real whether or not they can be measured in a lab. Pay attention to what your body registers when you enter a space or sit across from a person.

Pay attention to what your nose knows. Not every uncomfortable smell is spiritual, but when your nervous system goes on alert, when your gates activate, when something in you says this is not right, that is information.

Honor it. I will not override what my body knows.

I will not dismiss what my senses register as weakness or oversensitivity. My gates are mine to guard, and the Ruach HaKodesh within me is my discernment.

I pay attention. I trust the witness of my own body.

I walk in somatic awareness and spiritual clarity, and I do not give access to what my gates were designed to keep out. What is sacred in me is protected.

What is corrupt cannot stay. In the name of Yeshua, I am a gatekeeper of my own inner life.

Thank you for being here for this conversation. If this episode spoke to something you have experienced—a smell, a feeling, a moment where your body knew before your mind caught up—I want to hear from you.

Find me on Substack at Set Apart Conversations and share what your body has been trying to tell you. You are not too sensitive.

You are equipped. Shalom.

Legal Disclaimer: This episode includes personal testimony, spiritual reflection, and clinical perspective drawn from my own lived experience, including matters connected to ongoing legal proceedings in Pennsylvania. Statements regarding institutional conduct, court personnel, or case history reflect my personal experience, research, and documentation.

Nothing in this episode should be understood as a legal filing, legal advice, or a final adjudication of any matter. Statements regarding any named individual reflect my personal experience and perception and are offered as testimony, not as an established legal finding.

Citation Note: A federal indictment count was referenced from memory during this recording. For accuracy: a York County judge was indicted on 31 federal counts (26 wire fraud, 2 mail fraud, 2 witness tampering, 1 obstruction of justice) in October 2024.

The indictment was later dismissed following a pretrial diversion agreement, and the judge was reinstated to the bench. No judge is named in this episode.

Sources below. U.S.

Department of Justice, Middle District of Pennsylvania York Dispatch Fox43 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit inspireyourmindbodyandspirit.substack.com/subscribe