Happy is the real pretty. This segment is about something called the inner smile. The first time I’d ever heard of this concept I was actually a little girl in the backseat of the car probably sulking on my way to school and my dad would turn around and say put a smile on your face until it becomes real and at the time I wasn’t in a good mood I was grumpy and I was like whatever dad as time went on I started to practice exactly what he said and believe it or not I noticed that that smile actually creates a feeling of happiness in your body.

As a yoga instructor years later I was taught that our natural state is joyful and happy and yoga is one way to peel back the layers of grumpiness that keep us from experiencing our true nature. As time went on I came across Chinese meditation techniques that were called the inner smile so I kept getting this from all these different sources.

I continued to look it up and Charles Darwin of all people actually started a research project called the facial feedback hypothesis and it’s quite fascinating. His work has been reopened in the last century and it has been scientifically proven that when you smile even if it feels fake and it probably will feel fake it actually creates the same reaction of endorphins aka happy juices in your body.

So you cannot do both at the same time, smile and frown. So if you’re gonna do one you might as well smile. One more funny story a good friend of mine she knew about this project and she was at her sister’s wedding and a photographer kept taking her picture when she wasn’t looking and she said to me, Caitlin help me with my resting grumpy face.

When I’m not trying to be grumpy I look unhappy maybe sulking poor posture wrinkling the forehead. So over time with practice you too can learn how to find your inner smile so that when you’re relaxed and not thinking about anything, you look happy.

And therefore you will feel happy. We’ll start right now by taking a deep breath. You can even close your eyes. Open your mouth wide and go, relax your shoulders and try to let go of tension. Begin putting the tiniest smile on your face.

It doesn’t have to be huge and animated. And notice that by turning the corners of your mouth upward, just a little bit, you feel your eyes soften. This is always gonna be a work in progress. I just wanted to plant the seeds so you would have something to work with.

It’s called Inner Smile and it’s easy to find.