I have browsed quite a few of the messages of the forum and have noticed that although it has been mentioned a couple of times it doesn't seem to come up very often. I thought that I would share my experience about smiling, but first a little background.
I'm reasonably intelligent and am in my head quite a lot. It has recently been pointed out to me that while I do have a good mind it seldom experiences fun. Thoughts such as "why" and "but what's the point" often seem to get in the way of fun. As such I feel to be somewhat lacking in love. That's the ultra short condensed version of background.
I've a few health issues I'd like healed, so I thought I'd give this a go. I have followed the active exercises once through so far and did the small universe sitting meditation tonight. Wanting to follow the process as closely as possible I used visualisation and the masters energy and followed the instructions.
I noticed several times that I forgot to smile so gently made myself do so. I noticed that to smile felt somewhat uncomfortable and unnatural to do in a genuine and relaxed way, but the technique says to do so so that's what I did. After making myself smile and breathing deeply, moving the energy for what couldn't have been more then a few minutes (getting towards the end of the meditation though) I felt uncontrollable emotions surging up in me and bringing several tears to my face. Next thing I know I was openly sobbing with tears rolling down my cheeks.
I felt very strongly overwhelmed by this experience and had to take several deep quick breaths to calm down again. I find this highly odd that something so simple as smiling seems to have triggered this sort of response in me. Clearly the SFQ seems to be doing something for me yet I also seem to be finding the process of accepting a contented joy and love that comes from just smiling to be surprisingly difficult.
I don't know if any others have found anything happen from smiling and certainly it does not seem to be focused on much in this forum so I thought I'd start a new topic for it to share what I thought was an unusual experience. I will continue with the practice and from what I have read in other threads, I'm sure I will get good results with it if I stick to it.
And thank you everyone for the interesting reading through the various topics in this forum.
