Smile

My man is chillin. 

Humans have the God-like ability to control our facial muscles by choice, no matter what the circumstances.

Smiling triggers the brain to send subtle vibrations through the body that everything’s all good. The body responds with subtle vibrations, signaling the brain to shut down the lower-mind stress response. This creates a positive feedback loop, freeing up massive amounts of energy and making space for Presence. 

A tiny smile, like the Mona Lisa, is all it takes. 

Yogi have known about the importance of a pleasant countenance for millennia, which is why the Buddha’s always smiling.

∞

I don’t love being hot. I don’t love being cold. I prefer warm but not too warm, like on a mellow May morning while sipping chamomile tea and lounging on a veranda overlooking the sea-splashed cliffs of a sun-drenched isle nestled in the Mediterranean.

Yet now I live in Minnesota again, where it gets mega muggy in the summers and bone-chillingly cold in the winters. One of my spiritual guides says the weather here is training to toughen us up. I still don’t love it.

Given that I don’t love being hot or cold, I didn’t want to do saunas and cold tubs because they make you mega hot and mega cold.

My wife recently started doing saunas and cold tubs with her plant medicine friends, and one day, I asked to tag along. Part of why I went is because I tend to mate guard, and I didn’t love her being in a bathing suit in close confines with strange men. I’d have a tough time living in a society where folks left more of their bodies uncovered than covered. Maybe I’ll start one someday as training to toughen myself up.

In this society, the first round of the sauna felt like hell, and the cold tub was like purgatory.

I don’t know which was worse between the metal piece I wear on my neck heating up in the sauna and burning my skin, or the meat piece I wear on myself shrinkling up beyond all recognition in the cold tub.

I was miserable and wanted to give up. But I hung in there, and it started to feel kinda good before long. So good that I was called to do another two rounds in the cold tub and three more in the sauna. The experience was invigorating, and when we were done, I felt like breakdancing.

The pivot point was when I remembered to smile in the cold tub. Doing so calmed me down, and I started to relax. Then I found my breath, got in a soul power warrior groove, and talked in some kind of dialect of a light language that sounded like my wife’s, who joined in, it was beautiful, and things went baby butt smoothly from there. 

I’ll be going back for more saunas and cold tubs. Now that I have my smile game on point, I could post up in that cold tub for days.

But I won’t. Smiling is a superpower that protects against negativity, but I’m unaware of one that protects against shrinkage.