There is a wonderfully powerful exercise that has been practiced in China for centuries. It’s based on your smile. Putting on a smile, even if you don’t feel like it, can make the whole world seem brighter. Smiling actually makes you look more attractive and is great for reducing stress. When you smile at someone it makes them feel that you are pleased to see them and brightens up the day for both of you.
Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore your body
But let’s forget about other people for the moment and focus on your relationship with yourself. What is the relationship between your mind and your body?
Sounds like an odd question I agree but many people either don’t like their body or they simply ignore it. This creates a divide between body and mind and both kung fu and qigong are largely about getting all the parts of yourself to work together.
Rather than ignoring your body or telling it how much you hate it try smiling at it. Better still try smiling into it.
The whole body smile
This exercise has been practiced in China for centuries. It uses the power of a smile to relax you and fill your whole body with happiness and energy. You should learn to wear your whole-body smile like you do your clothes. Put it on when you get up in the morning, and keep it on all day.
Reading through the instructions below may sound like it can take a while but with a little practice you can go through the whole procedure in just a few seconds.
- Smile with your mouth, feel it grow and extend it up into your eyes. Your eyes will take that happy movement of the mouth and boost it around the rest of your body and outwards towards everyone you meet.
- Let the smile fill and open up your whole face, particularly around the mouth and jaw.
- Feel the smile in the tight muscles of your neck. Let it linger there for a while, opening up and energising this vital area.
- Drop your smile down into your chest. Open up the muscles of your chest and upper back. Smile directly into your heart and lungs. See if you can feel their movement in your chest.
- Lower the smile into your abdomen and lower back. Open up this chronically tight area. Breathe into it and combine the smile and breath to bring light and power into your centre.
- Smile into your hips and groin area. As always, use your mind to try and feel inside yourself. Whatever you can feel, then energise with your smile.
- Smile all the way down through your legs and into your feet. Then all the way down through your arms and into your hands.
- Feel the smile everywhere inside you. Feel it grow and grow until it radiates outwards into your surroundings. The brighter it glows, the more stresses it will be able to protect you against. Soon you will be almost impervious to the effects of fear and stress. You will be able to feel which parts of yourself lose their inner smile and can focus on re-energising them.
Your whole-body smile will send positive signals down through your body, helping you to accept yourself as you are. This will help you to open up and release many deep tensions.
This is the real power of this exercise. All too often, the signals we send ourselves are critical and these negative signals serve only to close our bodies up and cut ourselves off from our minds. It’s important that you overwhelm those negative thought patterns with the positive energy of your whole-body smile.
Find out more about traditional Chinese exercises to develop a relaxed and powerful body and a focused mind through the tai chi and kung fu classes I run or sign up to our site to learn the wealth of material we have here.