inner smile: an enlightening ancient healing practice

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh

smile

I love when during meditation, Master Teacher Tara Brach offers the que, "imagine a smile in the heart". She clarifies that this inner smile is 'not as a way of cover up anything, but rather to make room for what is.' This is very true for me. When I 'imagine' a smile, I feel an opening, a softening, a somatic expansion in my body. I feel more spacious.

Actually, smiling is used as a healing and meditation practice by many ancient cultures. Taoists have long believed that having a smile on your face and directing it inwards towards your organs and inner body is essential to good health and longevity. Balinese healers believe that a smile clears away negative energy and practice smiling meditation as a simple way to calm the mind and bring healing to the soul.

Thich Nhat Hanh often teaches on the power and practice of smiling, from many different approaches. One of the staple meditations he offers is: “Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile.” He explains that, 'smiling concept is not to force a change in your mood through smiling, but to allow it to unfold through acts of meditation and mindfulness. This allows your smile to naturally open you to all those corresponding layers of being: calmness, happiness, peacefulness.'

He offers many meditations to help work with breathing to reach a natural smiling state. If you try the smiling bit and your heart isn’t into it, he doesn’t say to fake it til you make it. Instead he coaxes you to explore what that might be all about. Since smiling is an expression of our natural balanced state, why might it feel difficult for you to smile?

Enjoy Thich Naht Hanh's full meditation on remembering to smile.