Looking into Happiness
The research of Paul Ekman, a colleague of Julie Henderson (one of my own most important teachers), has shown……that if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion. In other words, emotions work from the outside in as well as the inside out. The trick with happiness is that while everybody can smile, most people can’t move one crucial muscle around the eyes that must be moved to generate the physiology of happiness. With anger or disgust, though, everybody can make the right facial movements and turn on the physical sensations of those emotions. In a fake smile, only the zygomatic major muscle, which runs from the cheekbone to the corner of the lips, moves. In a real smile, the eyebrows and the skin between the upper eyelid and the eyebrow come down very slightly. The muscle involved is the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis… people can learn to do this in under an hour.
via nytimesIf looking at mind in a meditative way, or simply humming aaaahhhh… and letting the vibrations travel up into our brainstems, optic nerves, and eye muscles, makes it either easier to relax and untorque that one eye muscle, or to release brainstem enough so that the muscles around it loosen and make its contraction easier… in a way that we experience and recognize as “happiness,” then it would be consistent with common advice about happiness and “view, attitude, perspective, outlook, etc.” It seems in line with the links between happiness, mystics, ecstacy, and “seers.”
If we can develop new habits with this one muscle, then it must lead other easings and openings… heart, chest, pelvis, diaphrams, breathing, speaking. This state must also enable compassionate behavior, literally seeing and opening to other people, allowing them to be as real as to us as we are to ourselves. Perhaps this “happy” view makes more space for self and other? In any event, this all makes it easier to understand how a small shift in the human genome could quickly ripple out through the whole of our everyday reality. aaaaahhhhhhhh…