Lifeletter #184: The Invisible Smile

The shingles virus has been visiting me, on and off, for the last year. When it is active, it inflames the nerves in the right side of my mouth and jaw, and makes it very painful to smile. It’s been strange, interacting with people, and not being able to smile. During a recent skype session with a friend, she said, “Oh, I miss your smile!” I told her that I was missing it too.

After that conversation, I had a moment in which I realized that I didn’t want to live without smiling. And then it suddenly became clear that there were other ways to smile. Lips are not essential, when it comes to the art of smiling. I began to practice smiling with my heart, with my belly, with my shoulders, with my hands… The more I practiced, the easier it was to actually feel the smile spreading through me. I began to contact the essence of the smile, before it takes a particular form on the face. I discovered things about my smile, where it came from, the secret dimensions of it, that I never knew in the days when I could smile carelessly, without a thought.

Around this time, my relationship with the virus itself began to change. I couldn’t talk as much when my jaw was inflamed, so the virus also brought me the gift of being quiet. Slowly, gently, I recognized in a real way, the gifts that were being offered to me, in the form of this illness. I was in a position to see, as Malcolm Gladwell put it, in his book, David and Goliath, “the advantages of disadvantages (and the disadvantages of advantages).” Things in my world were sliding around, standing on their heads. I wondered why it had taken me so long to feel the hidden radiance that lies beneath a smile.

I want to speak about that quiet thing
that stays
and allows the moon to hang in a deep black sky
on a crisp winters night
that thing that stays
and allows a smile to return
after a long time hiding
beneath the depths of a private sorrow
–Shonna Wells

 In Chinese medicine, there is a whole dimension of their practice that involves the art of the inner smile. I’d been aware of that practice for years, and never done it. I had no need for such a practice when I was feeling strong and healthy. (This is the disadvantage of advantages.) Without the shingles virus, and all the pain it brought me, I never would have discovered for myself what I was really missing. Which was not the visible smile, but the invisible smile. The invisible smile looks out on a different world, measures things with a different eye, rejoices for very different reasons.

A powerful healer put is like this:

“Once you understand the difference between illness and symptom, your approach to illness becomes transformed. No longer is the symptom an enemy to resist and destroy. Instead, you discover in the symptom a partner that can help you see what you lack and overcome your illness. At that point, the symptom becomes a teacher, helping you take responsibility for the growth of your consciousness–though one that can show severity, because illness knows only one goal: to make us whole.”

-Ruediger Dahlke

And it’s not only illness that is calling us to wholeness, it’s everything. Every feeling, every situation, every belief, every relationship offers us this opportunity: to step through what we think we know, into what is waiting right here, beyond the narrow hallways of the mind. It’s the same endless invitation. It has no expiry date, even if we wish it did.

with love,
Shayla