Is Your SMILE VISION On?

If you’ve ever been to my class before, you have heard my incessant reminders to smile….whether we are in meditation or Downward Facing Dog.  So today, I want to take the opportunity to tell you WHY.  WHY is smiling the consistent theme in EVERY single class that I teach?  Why do I believe smiling is as essential to the practice, as pages are to a book?  Shouldn’t we frown if we feel like frowning you might be wondering….or, “what if my pet just died, or my mom is sick, or I bombed in the stock market or my relationship is in shambles?”  Are you REALLY still telling me to smile?

The answer is an UPPERCASE, bolded YES.  YES I am.

I am telling you to smile at the one who lost their pet, to smile at the one who is caring for their mother, to smile at the one who is in financial distress, to smile at the one who feels alone and scared.  Smile to the one who is YOU, because you need your own support through all of the unpredictable, crazy, experiences this life IS GOING to throw at you. 

Now let me be clear about the actual kind of smile I am talking about.  It’s not the one SO pronounced that you can’t even open your eyes from a mere squint (although, those kind of smiles are most certainly welcome.)  And it’s NOT the kind of smile your five-year-old gives you when you tell him to smile for a picture, you know the one, so forced, it’s like he’s at the dentist holding his mouth open for 5 minutes straight.  IT IS: a slight and subtle, but noticeable, lift of the corners of the mouth in the upward direction.  It’s the one that immediately undoes the grimace between your eyebrows.  

This kind of smile is beyond liking and disliking, sad and happy, entertained and bored; this is the smile of SEEING.  THIS IS SMILE VISION.  The VISION that allows you to SEE that your emotion is literally, in-motion; it is simply passing through, like tourists crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. This kind of smile is the one that recognizes the transitory nature of surface level conditions, like the weather.  These conditions are ever changing; they ebb and flow with the seasons of our lives.  This IS the smile that is DIRECTLY connected to your heart, which makes it connected to whatever you consider to be your higher power.  This is SMILE VISION! It is the portal to your soul.

And through this portal, the smile transcends culture, language, and unhelpful programming. It is the ULTIMATE ANTIDOTE to ignorance.  SMILE VISION is the most PROFOUND, SYNCHRONISTIC, and INSPIRED action that exists universally.  It has the RARE power to, in an instant, integrate body, mind, and spirit. Through this integration both your GIVING channel and your RECEIVING channel are immediately opened AND cleared.  It’s like an ambulance barreling down the highway clearing the traffic from both NORTH and SOUTH bound lanes.  Those lanes are the access ways to your heart, to the divine intelligence that inherently lives within you and SO badly wants nothing more than to just BLESS you and EVERYONE you come in contact with.  

BUT, so often, we live within our own traffic jam, our lanes are so clogged with our opinions, desires, what if’s, what’s nexts', our regrets, and our blames that we are at a standstill, impatient and unfulfilled, with everything, everyone, and most of all, OURSELVES.   

So, if you don't want to sit in traffic anymore, you have got to change the traffic patterns.  You’ve got to open up BOTH lanes.  So turn your siren ON to the potential that lies only within this VERY moment.  Use your SMILE VISION to see that your happiness is not off some future exit.  It can only ever be NOW, in the slight upward turn of the corners of your mouth.

Blessed BE you beautiful human.

Remember to dance and sing and laugh TODAY.

-Andrea Dawn