Smile

Smile

I was in a training with a group of facilitators recently, and someone pointed out to me that I have "resting glare face.” This was a polite way of saying it. When I’m not aware of my facial expression, it can go affectless. I’m not sure if I’ve always been like this–I’ll have to ask my parents. I do know that all I have to do is smile to emotionally re-connect. Now, that said, I’m not a ‘fake it ’til you make it’ kind of person. I don’t want to act in a way that doesn’t feel authentic, and I’m not talking about putting a smiley face on things that are sad, or hard, or uncomfortable. What I’m talking about here is more physiological. It’s simply the recognition that smiling activates neural circuitry. As a practice, smiling can begin inwardly. It can start by recalling something that makes me smile. An interaction I had with a child, for example. Or it can be mechanical—without an object—simply moving my face. The odd thing about this mechanical smile–is that if I’m out in the world, and I do this with some degree of authenticity, where it’s not forced, often the person I’m talking to smiles back. And then the strange thing about that returned smile is that it often elicits a genuine smile from me. I can tell it’s genuine because it takes over, and I can feel my eyes smiling. Dr. Paul Ekman, the esteemed emotions researcher, explains that the difference between a social smile (forced) and a genuine smile is in this engagement of the eyes. He explains that we can’t fake the engagement of the eyes. Dr. Porges, in writing about the Polyvagal Theory, explains that the muscles of the upper part of the face, in particular the Orbicularis Oculi, which controls the closing of the eyes–imagine an egg-sized area of control centered on each eye–lose their tone when we shift into defensive responses. When the eyes come online with a social smile, it is because, physiologically, this upper part of the face is engaged. As a side note, if you are trying to track someone else’s neural platform (e.g., connection, fight, flight, shutdown, etc.), look at the upper part of their face. In defensive states, we lose expressivity particularly in the upper part of the face. This awareness can help you develop your nunchi (see Glossary).

The Connection (social engagement) System is an integrated physiological system that wires together the face, the voice, sucking and swallowing, the tuning of the middle ear, and gesture with the heart and the lungs. We observe that each of these aspects of the system are doorways into bringing the whole system online. For this reason, getting the face active, responsive, expressive, tends to bring us into social engagement. I would propose to you that one of the reasons Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has observed such powerful trauma healing results through Theatre is because of this phenomenon. When we act, we must learn to embody emotion and allow it to register through the face. To speak Shakespeare’s lines and transmit their meaning, we must let them come through our faces and our voices. In Greek tragedy, the actors wore oversized and exaggerated facial masks that registered pathos and deep feeling. The audiences watching these performances assuredly found their mirror neurons activated, assuredly found themselves making the same faces, feeling the same emotions. Etymologically, compassion means suffer with. This phenomenon of emotional contagion, whereby we find it difficult not to mirror back the facial expression and emotional tone of others, speaks to the engagement of this visceral circuitry in social mammals, and reflects our earliest co-regulation. This is why, in our work generally, we eschew the term self-care. With humans, in relationship, it is co-care we are after, because we are co-regulatory creatures. To understand ourselves, we must feel ourselves from inside, and we also require to be witnessed. It is partly through being reflected back to, through noticing our impacts on others, seeing the hurt or anger that registers on someone else’s face when we say something that hurts them, that we come to know who we are, and how we are. This is partly why digital technology is having such a devastating effect on the emotional development of young people, and particularly on their capacity for empathy and co-regulation. When we text someone, we don’t see our words landing on them, and in this we are deprived of one of the primary avenues of reciprocity in communication. Without my ability to see my words land, my speech is untempered. I might say things I would never have the cruelty to say to someone’s face. My friend and colleague Tiara Maldonaldo says we’re creating a generation of Instagram gangstas. Without the sobering and attuning feedback coming from the person we are addressing, we literally don’t even know what we are saying. Threats and insults fly. Things we would never say to someone’s face, because we couldn’t stomach watching them land.

In my spiritual tradition, we say that if you want to know how someone is doing, you should ask their companion. In a way, we know ourselves reflected back by others, not simply through our internal awareness of ourselves. Knowing ourselves inside is necessary, yet it isn’t enough. I always used to wonder why Jesus said, For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. As a serious student of meditation, I wondered why there had to be two. Why wasn’t one enough? Isn’t this what we are told in meditation–that it is an inward journey? And yet I believe that part of the reason Jesus says this is because love requires another. We know ourselves in relationship. I and thou. A mindfulness movement that doesn’t teach relational mindfulness, and that doesn’t directly address oppression and othering, can never really teach people to wake up. Because though we must know ourselves deeply and intimately from the inside, we also must know ourselves through our impacts on others, human and otherwise.

Part of the dawning recognition of reciprocity in nature is to realize, for example, that the moment we walk into a forest we are being observed. I don’t mean this abstractly, or in a metaphysical sense, like the trees are watching you, although the more we learn about non-human cognition, the more it becomes obvious that in some way they probably are. When you walk into the forest–the moment you step outside, in fact, the birds in particular, and other animals as well, are immediately moment-to-moment aware of your particular energy, your particular qualities of awareness the moment they detect you. Most modern people enter a forest creating a “zone of disturbance,”a chaotic and disordered field that reflects their chaotic and disordered mind: their lack of genuine presence and attunement to their surroundings. Predators in an ecosystem utilize disturbances to hunt. I witnessed a fascinating example of this on a trip last year to study bird language at the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington. Deep on the property is a beautiful pond, about three acres across, and one morning as we were collectively engaged in a bird sit–forty of us spread across the property mapping the bird language over discrete intervals of time–four Canada geese landed on the pond. The ruckus that ensued was astounding. They were the loudest, most aggressive, territorial, raucous visitors you can imagine. They chased each other around the pond, honking interminably, lashing one another with their wings, grabbing at the back of one another’s long necks and trying to drown each other. The uproar was deafening. A Cooper’s hawk–that we had been tracking for several days but had not yet seen–took full advantage of this chaos to hunt. It got close enough to the geese to use their chaos as a foil, and when other birds were distracted by all the noise, it picked them off one by one. Cooper’s hawks are the accipiters that most often prey on songbirds. These small hawks are agile enough to fly through dense forest, and they are extraordinary hunters. They regularly use cars and motorcycles to wake hunt. There are many stories of these birds flying just behind a Harley and picking off the startled songbirds that bolt as the motorcycle winds through a canyon, blasting out a concussive shockwave of programmed misfires that pop off like artillery. Jon Young tells the story of a colleague of his in San Francisco who discovered that Cooper’s hawks in the Presidio were wake hunting behind joggers. Imagine–here comes a young San Francisco tech worker running through this forested urban park, earbuds in, oblivious to their surroundings, coming around turns and startling birds, while five feet behind them and totally unknown to them, a Cooper’s hawk is opportunistically using their zone of disturbance to pick off birds.

Better than having a zone of disturbance is having a zone of awareness. To enter a wild place conscious that we are in relationship with it–that it is watching us back. This is what the indigenous art in the Pacific Northwest comes teaching us. The gaze is directed back. Notice the eyes embedded in so many of the forms. This is the reciprocal gaze: the living world looking back at us. For more on this theme, check out our film How to Talk to Everything.