Our faces are inherently expressive. They help us connect to each other and to ourselves. They face outward - speaking to those around us of our feelings and internal states. But they also reflect back in, to us, helping us understand and relate to the feeling states of others. This is called mirroring and is the tiny, almost imperceptible shifts we make in our own facial expressions to help us recognise and interpret the emotions of others. It’s a vital part of our ability to empathise and connect with one another.
Our facial expressions can also shift or modify our own internal states. If, for example, we smile when we are feeling sad, it helps reduce the feeling of sadness. On the other hand, if we cannot laugh when someone tells us a joke, we won’t find it so funny.
Pursed lips, tight-lipped, raised eyebrows, wide-eyed, a sideways look, a dirty look, a long face, looking down your nose at someone - these all convey emotion, opinion, judgement: a communication without words about something we are feeling. Facial expression is often spontaneous, but we can “put on” a face - making it blank, or deliberately adopting an expression which is at odds with what we feel. We can smile with our lips but not our eyes, for example - which means we can seek to fake or hide something through our own facial expressions.
We can also misread the facial expressions of others. Our perceptions, and our ability to interpret what we perceive are not foolproof - which means we sometimes misinterpret what we see.
And then there is tension. We all hold tension in our facial muscles: the lines of worry, the frowns of concentration, the tight jaw, the furrowed brow. Over time, these become habits of facial tension - and these too feed inward, and have an impact on our moods and emotional state. Here’s where yoga comes in :)
To help release tension from the jaw and tongue, the Roaring Lion is one of the best known poses:
Here are some other simple practices to help release facial tension:
“cleaning your teeth with your tongue”. This gets the tongue to move all around the mouth and is also an effective release of tightness in both tongue and jaw;
moving the jaw slowly and smoothly in a little sequence: side to side, in and out, and “chewing the cud”, where the jaw draws a wide half circle. Yawning makes a good final release.
moving the tongue, from the outward reach of the roaring lion, back into the mouth, and then curling it back so the tip of the tongue extends towards the back of the mouth. This is called kechari mudra and stretches the underside of the tongue.
one of my favourites: resting the face in the hands with the weight of the head forwards. It works really well in child’s pose. Here, we “give” the face to the kindness of the hands, helping our eyes to soften, lines and frowns to become smoother, and allowing a softening space into the mouth and cheeks. Adding a little bhramari (humming bee breath) brings an even more soothing effect.
Here’s one final piece: if our facial expressions affect us and those around us, and colour our experience in ways that might not always be helpful - partly because they can become habitual and also because we can misinterpret them - then we might usefully reflect on what Zen Buddhism calls our “original face”, as in this koan:
“Without thinking good or evil, in this very moment, What is your original Face?
…. Show me your Original Face, the face you had before your parents were born.”
“Quickly, quickly, without thinking right and wrong…”
“…before your parents were born”
…what is your original face?”
It’s such a great question! As I understand it, a true Zen master never asks the student to see something that isn’t already there. This koan suggests we take a step back - whereas so often we feel we should move forward - into a kind of “nowhere”. It’s a place that is stripped back: without thought or emotion, unencumbered by all our history, without the pull of family, culture and everything that has come before and that we think we know. It asks us whether we can return to (or imagine?) this vast, open space where who we (think we) are does not matter, and something deeper and more fundamental might (re)appear. It’s a meditation, a puzzle, an on-going enquiry and I like it a lot! In a kind of reversal of the Emperor with no clothes, it asks us to respond, in this moment, from this place of vastness, so that we might “gaze with our original face on the original faces all around us” (Sukesh Motwani).
Awesome Frankie. I'm going to try and practice that enquiry! And those mouth, tongue exercises. I've been struck by the power of the throat and facial muscles in what they can help us access that we did not know or could not reach. Clare x