Making Faces

Making Faces

Dr. Stephen W. Porges, the world’s leading expert on the relationship between the Autonomic Nervous System and behavior, says that we wear our hearts on our faces and in our voices. When I began to understand this, it impacted my experience of humans very deeply. We say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. What does it mean if the face and the voice are the windows to the heart? We had an intriguing conversation about this, because in the poster we created together, I noted his tendency to favor more academic language: he is, after all, a scientist. “We project our emotions and physiological state on our face and through our voice” is the language we finally agreed on. Yet I want to invite you to really feel the simplicity of what this actually means. We have, in English, the colloquialism of someone wearing their heart on their sleeve. But that’s not where we wear our hearts. We wear our hearts on our faces and in our voices. The Polyvagal Theory explains the relationship between the Autonomic Nervous System and social behavior. It explains that the Autonomic Nervous System is the neurological architecture of the mind-body connection, and that through its sensory and motor components it provides the physiological foundation of embodiment and the neural basis for feeling. It notes that we, as humans, possess various neural circuits (two of them vagal) that have evolved at different points in our evolutionary history to help us respond to threat and create social bonds. This social bonding system is a physiological system called the Social Engagement System that literally wires together the neural regulation of the face, the voice, the eyes, the tuning of the middle ear, and the turning of the head and neck with the heart and the breath. This ventral vagal system literally means that your heart is wired into your face and your voice. It is possible to measure your heart-rate variability (what is happening inside your heart) from the prosody (melodic quality) of your voice. Our faces and voices are the transparent expression of what is happening in our hearts.

When we feel safe, and are open to connection, our faces become fully expressive, and our voices fill with prosody. When we shift into threat response states–defensive states–our faces lose the ability to express warm and positive emotions, and our voices lose their melodic quality. If you reflect on the people you know really well, you can hear it in their voice when something is wrong. Sometimes you call someone on the phone, and within a word, you can tell something is not right. What’s wrong? you say. Sometimes the person on the other end of the line is surprised, “What do you mean?” they say. “Nothing’s wrong.” And yet you know– you can hear it in their voice.

What is happening in the heart lives in the voice. So, as a restorative practice, Making Faces is about using the full expressivity of the face, which is a doorway into this Social Engagement physiology— a doorway to Turning on the Connection System. In some cultures, social locations, and social milieus, we are socialized to be more or less expressive with our faces. Physiologically, greater expressivity is healthier. Period. I’m a white person, and part of the assimilation narrative of whiteness is that you aren’t supposed to be too demonstrative, too emotionally expressive. I dislike this, and yet it has been pointed out to me by colleagues, and particularly colleagues of color, that I often wear what we’ve affectionately come to call ‘Resting Glare Face’. It’s something I’m working on. Both because I don’t realize I’m doing it, and because it has impacts. Both on me (it is a reflection of my own physiological state), and on whom I’m relating to (who are impacted by my lack of affect).

You can practice making faces in a mirror, you can practice Mirroing Facial Expressions with a partner, you could get involved in Theatre, or take an Improv class. It can be a powerful awareness practice to simply sit in front of a mirror and make various facial expressions, and take note of how they impact your visceral state (how it feels inside your body). You might try this while you are having a phone conversation with someone, and watch your face reacting. Or you might record yourself in conversation with someone and watch your face. When does your face light up? When are you attuned and engaged? When does your face go blank or lose expressivity? All of this is information. If you learn to see your face as the doorway to your heart, you’ll begin to realize that watching faces (your own and other people’s) is one of the best ways to develop a perceptual competence that is called nunchi in Korean. Nunchi is the ability to accurately recognize the emotional state of another person.