This article will reintroduce the science of conscious smiling, aka “The Smile Mudra”, along with some new scientific research supporting the already fairly agreeable benefits of smiling.
All this came about as I pondered the relationship between mind and body for the pratice of deliberate manifestation. It seems to me that if I can do something to consistently and efficiently convince my biology of what my mind knows abstractly to be true or possible or simply desired, then I can experience it physically and therefor realize it in the outer, co-experienced reality. The HuMandalas is one of my favorite technologies for doing this, and so I’ve been inspired. I have become very passionate about making simple and easy means to achieving more bliss and joy accessible to all our beloved co creators. I recognize that a certain neurochemical balance and electromagnetic threshold is key to the effective materialization of mind-heart visions. Its my sincere joy to believe that conscious smiling is the single most potent method for doing so. The reasons for this are many, including but not limited to; its cheer simplicity, availability, its ability to combine and enhance almost any other conscious activity, its universality and more but the focus of this article is the power of the neurology behind it.
Its fairly common knowledge now that the neurological cause and effect relationship between brain/mind and body/emotions is bi-directional. That is, you can and do effect your body and emotions with your thoughts and you can and do effect your mental state with your body movements and emotions. Therefore, if you smile when you’re feeling nostalgic or gloomy, and continue smiling, pretty soon you wont feel so nostalgic or gloomy. You can literally trick the brain into cheering up, or chilling out and relaxing, calmly and contently, simply by forcing a smile for a specific time period. I find that that is the key, if I’m already joyful, the smile automatically amplifies my experience of joy and if I’m stressed or moody then depending on how upset I am it would require more time for the neurons to switch into gears and produce and communicate a new trend of signals.
“Smiling when distressed was most prevalent in conditions in which participants reported the greatest emotional distress. Specifically, while viewing distressing videos, men reported experiencing greater overall distress and also smiled more than women, especially in social conditions and while viewing intensely (as opposed to moderately) distressing stimuli. In general, smiling was related to more negative affect while viewing distressing videos but to more positive affect after viewing such stimuli. Study 2 explored raters’ social perceptions of participants from Study 1, confirming that people judge distressed smilers as less socially appropriate and less likable than nonsmilers. Findings suggest that although distressed smiling serves a probable self-regulatory function, it may also bear some negative social consequences.” (Matthew E. Ansfield) . This study implies that not only that smiling helps to regulate your neuro-chem but also that there is some taboo in our culture against what can seem as fake smiling. I trust this wont discourage anyone from smiling bright.
Here’s where the fairly new info comes in, not all smiling produces the same effects:
“We used measures of regional brain electrical activity to show that not all smiles are the same. Only one form of smiling produced the physiological pattern associated with enjoyment. Our finding helps to explain why investigators who treated all smiles as the same found smiles to be ubiquitous, occurring when people are unhappy as well as happy. Also, our finding that voluntarily making two different kinds of smiles generated the same two patterns of regional brain activity as was found when these smiles occur involuntarily suggests that it is possible to generate deliberately some of the physiological change which occurs during spontaneous positive affect.” (2.Paul Ekman)
This supports what I was experiencing in my meditation. If I simply sat there smiling whilst thinking about random stuff, it didn’t have nearly as powerful of a result as when I held the smile and in a way, Became the smile, inhaled consciously and with gusto and meditated on Divine Union. In qi qong and acupressure, they teach us to smile into the meridians or send an inward smile towards the organs, one by one. That is because they understand the relationship between the muscles in the face, the nervous system, and what they call meridians (highways of energy that run along the nervous, circulatory and endocrine systems). Smiling while breathing consciously produces a cascade of effects that set forth the balancing, harmonizing and synchronizing of your brain’s hemispheres and neurochemistry. Adding conscious breathing, intention and visualization to the mix really generates a new high from which to produce dreams come true.
What I am suggesting here is that we can all add The Smile Mudra to any activity that we already do daily. If you walk or run, or meditate or do pranayama, paint, read, cook, clean, yoga, what ever it is. And reap the rewards of a tremendous increase in joy and abundance in our lives. If you use the law of attraction, try holding the Smile for 15 min before and during the intentional meditation period. The longer you hold a
conscious, divinely engaged smile, the more Joy and Abundance you pour into your life and our Heavenly Earth through your very own bio-energetic physiology. You also delete more and more physiological patterns and signals that produce experiences and behavioral patterns of stress, worry, and depression. This results in freed up energy, and bio-resources that the brain then uses to create new patterns or signals and neural pathways.
In my next article I will introduce some guided techniques for a fruitful and practical application of the Smile Mudra as well some Extra Smiley HuMandala.
1.Mathew E. Ansfield, Lawrence University, http://psp.sagepub.com/content/33/6/763.abstract
2.Paul Ekman, UCSF/Psychiatry, http://pss.sagepub.com/content/4/5/342.short
