The Tao of Natural Breathing_ For Health, Well-Being, and Inner Growth - Dennis Lewis [43]
The “Inner Smile”
Given the empirical evidence we have of the extraordinary power of a smile to bring about such changes, it is astonishing that so few of us intentionally smile on our own behalf. Taoist masters have long recognized the power of the smile to help transform our attitudes and energies. And this observation led them to begin to practice what Mantak Chia calls the “inner smile.” In this practice we learn how to smile directly into our organs, tissues, and glands. “Taoist sages say that when you smile, your organs release a honey-like secretion which nourishes the whole body. When you are angry, fearful, or under stress, they produce a poisonous secretion which blocks up the energy channels, settling in the organs and causing loss of appetite, indigestion, increased blood pressure, faster heartbeat, insomnia, and negative emotions. Smiling into your organs also causes them to expand, become softer and moister and, therefore, more efficient.”46 One finds the inner smile used in a variety of Taoist meditations and other practices, including tai chi. One also finds versions of the inner smile in Buddhist literature (for example, in books by Thich Nhat Hanh), and artistic representations of it in the budding, self-aware smile of the Buddha or the Mona Lisa.
Voluntary Smiling Can Alter Our Emotional State
It doesn’t take much observation or common sense to realize that intentionally “putting on a smile” can help change our emotional state. In his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin observed that the free expression of an emotion by outward signs serves to intensify the emotion. Writing in the late nineteenth century, the great psychologist William James laid the foundation for a more complete understanding of this subject when he pointed out that emotions are dependent on “the feeling of a bodily state.”47 Change the bodily state or expression, and the emotions will change. More recently, Moshe Feldenkrais, one of the pioneers in physical rehabilitation and body awareness, has written that “all emotions are connected with excitations arising from the vegetative or autonomic nervous system or arising from the organs, muscles, etc. that it innervates. The arrival of such impulses to the higher centers of the central nervous system is sensed as emotion.” 48 By changing the excitations coming from these parts of ourselves through a conscious change in our movements and postures we actually change our emotions, especially those emotions that support our self-image.
One could say, and quite reasonably, that there is a big difference between “spontaneous smiling” and “voluntarily smiling.” In a recent scientific study on the effects of different kinds of smiles on regional brain activity, however, two researchers found that voluntary smiling actually changes regional brain activity in much the same way that spontaneous smiling does. In a discussion of their findings, the authors conclude: “While emotions are generally experienced as happening to the individual, our results suggest it may be possible for an individual to choose some of the physiological changes that occur during a spontaneous emotion—by simply making a facial expression.”49
Relaxing Our Self-image and Regulating Our Organs
From the Taoist perspective, calling up a pleasant image that will bring about a smile—or even just putting a smile on one’s face regardless of how sick or negative one may feel—has an almost immediate