After 17 days of yoga, I find that I’m smiling more. I’m not doing this on purpose. Yoga is rearranging my facial structure.
By nature, I am not a smiling kind of person. It might be a very happy day, but friends and relations ask, "What’s wrong?" When I attend weddings or smiling kinds of events, I come home with my face aching from unusual muscular effort. My 10-year-old-son used to tell me to turn up the corners of my mouth when I picked him up at school so I wouldn't look so mean. He poked his finger at my lips to show me how.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s smiling meditation interests me. In "Eat, Pray, Love" her Balinese medicine man prescribes sustained smiling meditation every day. He tells her that not only her lips, but her entire body and especially her liver must smile. This was after meditating daily on her death in the ashram. Death meditation I understand. Smiling meditation sounds too hard.
That seems to be changing.
The new positive energy reminds me of a certain high I experienced while practicing for an organ concert at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Each day, I spent long hours playing an enormous and beautiful organ that was situated in the loft of the basilica. The building’s soaring height, flooded with stained glass light, intoxicated me with pleasure. One afternoon, in the middle of this intensive concert preparation, I ran into a priest friend - a fairly ancient man who was a bit slow moving and stooped. "How are you?", the old priest asked. I obviously had radiance bursting out of my body. "Fantastic!" I replied. Then the old priest asked, with a twinkle in his eye, "How is your husband?"
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