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Smiling from the Inside Out

Lilias Folan shares the secrets of a powerful source of healing energy

A smile is a gift that radiates not only through the smiler, but also to the smiled-upon. I recently learned about the powerful benefits of generating a sincere smile, when I was taught an ancient yoga technique for relaxation and healing called the “Inner Smile.”

Traditionally, Chinese masters considered the Inner Smile so precious and sacred that they whispered it in secret. The sages’ high esteem for the gesture was based on their observation that perhaps the most accessible and immediate form of positive healing was a sincere smile.

The Chinese masters regarded negative emotions as low-grade energy. This low-grade energy would drain a person’s life force, causing stress in the organs and instability of the mind. But a true smile, they believed, produces a high-grade, positive, and healing energy, which is easily transmitted to the internal organs, glands and nervous system. Equally important, anyone can transmit this force to another person simply by smiling—and the sender will benefit as much as the receiver does.

Today, the human smile has become the subject of much study. During two decades of research, Paul Ekman, Ph.D, a psychologist at the University of California at San Francisco, has concluded that there are 18 types of smiles—but only one is the true smile that produces positive emotional benefits.

Eckman’s research has shown that when we voluntarily “create” this true smile, we can also tap into its fee-good benefits. In one study, Ekman instructed college students to deliberately mimic the specific movements of a true, deep smile. The students’ brain activity was monitored with an electroencephalogram (EEG), and it was found that these laboratory-produced smiles caused the same pattern of brain waves that had been observed previously as a marker of true, spontaneous enjoyment.

You can easily recreate your own happy and harmonized emotional state by practicing the exercises to the right. These are the simple secrets of the Inner Smile.

How to practice your Inner Smile…

Begin by closing your eyes.

Focus attention on your mouth.

Recall someone or something that brings a genuine smile to your lips. Let the positive energy turn up the corners of your mouth and crinkle up the corners of the eyes.

Radiate that smile up into your eyes.

Radiate the energy up to you left ear then your right one.

Smile into your brain.

Smile into your tongue.

Send the smile down into your voice box.

Smile down into your heart. Feel your heart smiling back at you.

Smile into your left lung, then into your right lung.

Smile into your organs, bones, muscles, and nervous system and feel them all smiling back at you.

Smile that warm, healing energy to a spot that wants a little extra help today.

Finish by smiling back up into both eyes.

Lilias Folan is a PBS host and author of the highly acclaimed “Lilias! Yoga Gets Better With Age.” Her guided relaxation meditation CD, “The Inner Smile” is available at www.liliasyoga.com.

- Country Living Magazine November 2007