Smile Yoga

On Sunday St. Paul’s church council met for the first time in 2024. As is customary at the first meeting of the year, I led our opening prayer/centering practice to begin our time together. On this day, I chose to ask our church leaders to engage in a brief session of smile yoga.

Smile yoga is something I learned about in a book I’m reading by Tarah Brach, Ph.D. titled “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.” In the book, the author introduces the concept–shared widely by Thích Nhất Hạnh–and speaks about its practice.

“Smile yoga” is what Thích Nhất Hạnh most often refers to as “yoga for your mouth.” The zen master shares that holding a smile, then releasing it, and then repeating the practice several times a day is one way we can open our hearts and improve the quality of our breathing. So often, the zen master teaches, we experience pain of any variety–through stress, grief, hopelessness, and trauma, to name a few–and our bodies begin to close off from the outside world. Our breathing becomes shallow and our heart becomes dammed off. Smiling changes those realities.

Thích Nhất Hạnh has been practicing smile yoga for much longer than I have, but I have noticed that the kind of smile I put into this practice matters. When I engage a smile that is more of a forced grin–the kind of smile that I use to respond to others to try to make it seem like everything’s just fine–the openness doesn’t seem to come–or at least not as fully. But when I close my eyes and smile the kind of smile that I share with someone I love, or the kind of smile that can’t help but erupt into laughter, I feel it in my whole body. 

The tension in my shoulders is released. My breathing moves from those shallow upper lobes of my lungs down into the depths, until it feels like I’m breathing from the center of my body. And my heart–my heart that is often so closed for fear of feeling the full sting of whatever pain that is present with me–begins to open–gently, slowly, chamber by chamber–like an iris blooming in the springtime. It all starts with a smile.

It sounds easy enough, I know, but truthfully, sometimes a smile simply doesn’t come. Or it does come, just not easily. If you live long enough, you’ll know these times occur far more frequently than we would like. Which is why I like that smile yoga is a practice. Something that can be done anywhere at almost anytime with anyone–during one’s commute (eyes open, of course), while lying in bed in the morning, in the shower, balancing the checkbook, while typing your 100th email of the day at work, alone or with a friend, with someone your own age or someone far younger or older than you are now. Smile yoga can be done to help us open our lungs for deeper breath, our bodies for deeper connection, and our hearts for hearing deeper truths. 

And yes, I know we aren’t Buddhists, however, as John Shelby Spong once wrote, “God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.” If this spiritual practice helps point me or any one of us to God in deeper and fuller ways, certainly it is a practice worthy of our time and our attention, regardless of its origins. 

Because when it boils right down to it, life is full of pain in its many forms–the kind of pain that closes us, curls us in on ourselves, and separates us from anything other than that pain. And if there is anything that–in the presence of such pain–keeps us pliable, opens us outwardly, and draws us further from our isolation and into the mystery of God, then I don’t know about you but I’m leaning into it. I’m going to practice opening toward it. I’m going to smile. 

Smiling my way into openness with you,
Pr. Melissa 

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