Let Your Soul Smile 

Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.

Paramahansa Yogananda

How is your smile? and more specifically how is your inner smile…the smile that you give to yourself.

Research studies have suggested that smiling can have a positive effect on your mood and help to reduce stress levels, and because smiling is often contagious it even make everyone around you feel better.

Most people embrace the idea of a smile in theory, however the realities of modern living suggest that in practice our stressful lifestyles tend to reduce the number of the times that we actually might be smiling during the course of an average day.

It’s not always easy to start or maintain a genuine smile in times of stress however studies published in the US national Library of Medicine report that exactly that has health benefits. When recovering from a stressful situation, study participants who were smiling had lower heart rates than those with a neutral facial expression.

Smiling is also highly beneficial because you release endorphins when you do, and in simple terms these are chemicals that help you to feel better about yourself. Additionally smiling can strengthen your immune system by making your body produce white blood cells to help fight illnesses.

Another published study found that hospitalized children who were visited by entertainers who made them smile and laugh had higher white blood cell counts than those children who weren’t visited.

As with many things in life, it’s a great idea to be pro-active rather than retro-active about these things. So, rather than waiting for something in your external reality to prompt you, start smiling from the inside. There are many simple ways to do that, like having a photo on your computer/bathroom mirror/bedroom door that makes you smile each you do it, or simple programme yourself to start smiling more,

The ancients Taoists knew the value of smiling, and they directly related it to advantages for health and well. They practised a delightful technique called the Inner Smile where you smile at your inner organs. Whilst it might strange to some people, I recommend you give it a try for it is a delightful technique that works amazingly well. I learnt it during my Tai Chi studies about 12 years and have been practising it on and off ever since.

You can download a copy of my Inner Smile recording for free from my App Hypnosis for Transformation which is available from the App Store and container many other Life Enhancing Audios