The Tao of Natural Breathing_ For Health, Well-Being, and Inner Growth - Dennis Lewis [44]
Based on my own personal experiences, I believe that a sustained smile, especially a smile directed toward one’s own organs and tissues, triggers the release of beneficial chemical substances from the remarkable pharmacopoeia that is the human brain—chemicals that can have an immediate healthful impact on the body. When I described the process of the inner smile to neuroscientist Candace Pert, and asked her if she believed that it could produce substances beneficial to the body, she replied “Absolutely.” In going further into the question, she pointed out that peptides “modulate feeling,” and she suggested that as we are “feeling,” as we are “focussing on” an organ, as we are “paying attention to the autonomic circuitry” involved with it (curcuitry which is composed mainly of peptides), “we have the potential to regulate the organ.”50
COMBINING THE INNER SMILE WITH SPACIOUS BREATHING
When the inner smile is combined with deep, spacious breathing to create what I call the “smiling breath,” the effect can be even more powerful, since breathing can also influence the production of beneficial chemical substances in the organism. In the same conversation referenced above, Pert told me that one possible mechanism for the power that breathing has to alter our emotions and chemistry may be through the production of neuropeptides. She pointed out that the center that controls breathing is located at the fourth ventricle of the floor of the brain—the same location that also secretes many neuropeptides. And she suggested that by consciously altering our breath we may be able to influence which neuropeptides are released.
However one explains its power, the inward-directed smile is, experientially, like a beam of energy, of sensing and feeling, that guides the spacious breath deeper into the organism; and the spacious breath is like a carrier wave that transports the energy of the smile into all the organs. The “smiling breath” is for me a fundamental practice of both self-awareness and self-healing. The sensitive, relaxing energy field that it produces helps me observe by contrast the unhealthy tensions, attitudes, and habits that undermine my health and vitality. What’s more, the practice helps to detoxify, energize, and regulate the various organs and tissues of my body, and thus helps not only to strengthen my immune system but also to transform the very way I sense and feel myself. The following smiling breath practice is based on my own experiments with combining certain elements of Mantak Chia’s inner smile practice with what I call the spacious breath.
PRACTICE
To prepare for this practice, sit quietly for several minutes with your eyes closed. Sense your whole body simultaneously, including any tensions and emotions. Let these tensions and emotions begin to settle, like impurities in a glass of water. Don’t stir them up by thinking about them. Include your breathing in your sensation of yourself. Then open up each of the three main breathing spaces through spacious breathing. Sense your whole body breathing.
1 Sensing and relaxing your eyes
Sense your eyes. Gently rotate, or spiral, them several times in each direction. Then stop and let them relax back into their sockets. As Mantak Chia points out, “The practice of the Inner Smile begins in the eyes. They are linked to the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the action of the organs and glands. The eyes are the first to receive emotional signals and cause the organs and glands to accelerate at times of stress or danger (the “fight or flight” reaction) and to slow down when a crisis has passed. Ideally, the eyes maintain a calm and balanced