Regular practice of the Inner Smile meditation leads to calming the mind, developing concentration, getting rid of all types of depression, and creates a powerful healing and rejuvenating potential. This meditation is a powerful tool that helps transform negative emotional energies into positive virtues, higher vibration, improved health, and a more balanced person.
Tao and Smile
Tao practitioners have noted that the energy of a smile has a high and positive level of vibration. When we smile, joy and wellbeing radiate from our eyes and our energy feels soft and welcoming. Smiling is a universal language that extends compassion to others, without the need or use of words. An open smile offers positive energy and speaks directly to the hearts of others. When we radiate a genuine smile, it opens our Anahata chakra and stimulates warmth deep within us.
Taoists believe that when done consciously, smiling can be literally a healing practice. They have discovered that there is a connection between emotional energies and organ systems. They developed methods to transform negative emotions to positive from their practical and intuitive understanding of the human body. Many of the Taoist teachings are supported by observations and evidence from modern psychology and medicine.
Taoists believe in the power of healing energy generated from a smile. When we smile, our eyes transmit this energetic force outward to others. Similarly, when turned inward, a smile can help us heal ourselves.
The Inner Smile meditation is a Taoist technique that focuses on five organs or organ systems: the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the liver/gall bladder, and the stomach/spleen. This meditation also helps to remove the consequences of stress and psychological trauma. Early Taoist texts suggest that maintaining a constant inner smile ensured health, happiness, and long life.
Inner Smile Meditation as a Self-Love Tool
The Inner Smile meditation is a wonderful self-love and self-care tool which helps us to become more connected with ourselves and feel more loved.
When you smile to yourself, you become your own best friend. Befriending your inner self helps you feel more grounded, settled, and stable no matter what else goes on around you. It helps you to find inner harmony that cultivates contentment.
The Inner Smile meditation will help you to become more conscious of what your organs do for you and establish a loving relationship with them. You will become more grateful to these faithful servants who keep us alive and healthy. That will make you stop taking your organs for granted and start appreciating them more.
Each of us should always keep in mind how amazing your body is, how intelligent and kind it is to you, what an incredible job it does to keep you alive! Without this attitude, you will eventually become sick and emotionally imbalanced.
Organs affected by emotions
According to Mantak Chia’s teachings, the health of our organs can be affected by negative emotions we feel. Based on this connection between negative emotions and the health of the organs, let us share with you the five major organ systems and their associated emotions and properties.
#1: The heart
The health of our heart can be affected by such negative emotions as arrogance and hate, and such positive virtues as kindness and love. Recent scientific research shows that feelings of love and appreciation strongly affect the heart’s rhythm and its relationship to the body’s physiological systems.
#2: The lungs
The health of our lungs can be affected by such negative emotions as sadness and depression, and such positive virtues as courage and righteousness.
#3: The kidneys
The health of the kidneys can be affected by fear and such positive emotions as gentleness and kindness.
#4: The liver
The health of the liver can be affected by anger and such positive emotions as generosity and forgiveness.
#5: The stomach/spleen
The health of the stomach/spleen can be affected by such negative emotions as worry, mistrust, and anxiety, and such positive emotions as fairness, trust, and openness.
The Inner Smile meditation directs our attention to the body’s organs and associated qualities. When practicing this meditation, we visualize each organ, cleansing it, and transforming negative emotional energies into positive virtues.
The Inner Smile Meditation
According to the Taoist tradition, each person assumes responsibility for the emotions that arise within, regardless of the external events that trigger the emotions. The Inner Smile meditation takes us into our bodies and transforms emotions by transforming the associated physiological systems. It helps us balance and integrate our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, promoting health, resilience, and vitality.
Below is a variation of the traditional Inner Smile meditation which helps you direct the energy of a smile into any part of your body.
Instructions:
- Sit comfortably near the edge of your chair with your feet flat on the floor. Keep your back straight, but not stiff. Stay relaxed, and clasp your palms together in your lap. Press your tongue against the upper palate of your mouth.
- Close your eyes and become aware of the soles of your feet. Feel their connection to the Earth.
- Create a source of smiling energy up to three feet in front of you. You can just visualize an image of your own smiling face or any memory of a time in which you felt deeply at peace. It can be anything – feeling of sunshine, being by the ocean, or walking in a forest.
- Focus on the midpoint between your eyebrows. Draw that abundant smiling energy to that area. Let your forehead relax. Feel how the smiling energy accumulates at the mid-eyebrow until it eventually overflows into your body.
- Visualize this smiling, warm energy moving throughout your entire body. It comforts and heals your muscles, joints, and internal organs. Take your time. Visualize each organ being soothed by this smiling, warm energy.
- After you have spent time connecting with and smiling into your organs and muscles, focus on the sensations in your body. Perhaps you feel energized, content, or warm. Allow the smile to drift where it wants. Or you can also direct it to any place you’re feeling discomfort.
- Continue visualizing the warm and golden essence of that smile within your body. Bring your awareness back to any place you may have missed, or any place you’d like to heal, and let it flow over and through your organs and soft tissue. Imagine this warm, smiling energy spreading throughout your entire body.
- When you’re ready to bring the meditation to a close, focus on the feeling of peace and contentment in your body by placing your hands over your heart. Take several deep breaths and simply relax. Now it’s time to release any visualizations, images, or thoughts, and simply be, without thinking or doing.
The Bottom Line
Try to practice this meditation every morning as soon as you wake up. This will charge you with positive energy for the whole day. Love for your body will help you love yourself and other people more, and feel full of vital energy.
When you feel pain or/and discomfort in any part of your body, in any of your organs — smile at these parts of the body, talk to them, tell them how grateful you are for such a wonderful job they’re doing, get a response from them.
Also, practice the Inner Smile meditation during times of stress, irritation, fear, or depression. Smile at the parts of your body that are experiencing tension and pressure, and you will gradually feel the negative energy being converted into the positive force of vital energy.
The energy of a smile can turn the energy of negative emotions into vital energy that will heal and rejuvenate all organs and tissues. Therefore smile as often as possible!