The Inner Smile

In Greek language we often say, "his face is illuminated by a smile" or he or she are being transformed by a smile". It is common truth, that humans start smiling allready in the first days of their life and long before learning how to laugh.

In Greek language we use the word medeama=smile and the word derives from the word metis =thought and care (Metis= the Mother of the Goddess Athina- Goddess of Wisdom , Medea = the wise woman)

Recent scientific researches have proven that Baby's first Smile is the evidence that they start to making reasonable Thoughts.

We start smiling though allready in the womb of our Mother, bevor we have even developed a face. This Smile is what we call Inner Smile to expressing joy and happiness just because of being alive.

This innative ability of a human to smiling to his own cells, continues after birth and develops in what we call External Smile, making possible for us to showing feelings also to other people around us.

As adults we smile to express Emotions and improve or establish relations. We can express gratitude , joy and acceptance, sympathy, admiration, appreciation and many other feelings.

Through the influence of the personality though, which we form later, living in the society, we start using the Smile as well as a way to manipulate others or to succeed our goals and satisfying our ambitions. Is then when we invent many kinds of Smile like the ironc, the hypocritical, cynical, mocking, demanding, begging smile. Very soon our Smile becomes a Smile much different from what we call Inner Smile.

The first years right after our birth, we live in harmony with what we call our Original Spirit. The Inner Smile is actually expressing our Original Spirit and so the Inner and the External Smile those first years of our lives, are one and the same thing. The small children have an innocent Smile even when they try to hide or to play.

Inner Smile is something the humans are born with. For that reason it appears spontaneously any moment in our life. And these moments, are moments of Love.Love and acceptance towards ourselves or other people, places, the natural enviroment, a beautiful landscape. The essence of Inner Smile is Love.

Inner Smile is also the most honest way to love God as this can connect us directly with our Original Energy, our divine part.

Very often though , the difficulties of the everyday Life allienate us from our divine nature and we loose connection. We start hating, envying, or being competitive and most of all to fearing. Those Emotions are hurting not only other people around us, they hurt most of all our Original Self. This moment is when we need to learn again what we call Inner Smile, in order to rediscover our True Nature, to remember again all the things that make us worthy to being loved and being respected and to healing ourselves in every part of our Body, Spirit and Soul that is hurt.

The Chinese many centuries ago have invented(?) a Practice they call Inner Smile. Inner Smile is part of the great Taoist teachings and has been rescued till our days by a long generation of Taoist Teachers.

With this practice we learn to use Inner Smile with Intention and mindfully. It teaches us the way to direct our Inner Smile towards our Inner Organs but also every part of our body , and to healing them.

When we talk about love, affection and acceptance we usually mean a kind of energy (=which, as anyone now knows, is another form of the mater), with the power to renew the tissues, repair the damages and to healing our Body, Soul andr Spirit.

Inner Smile is a healing energy, possible to be directed to ourselves but, in good time, also towards other people, or the natural enviroment, the plants, the trees and the animals and to healing them. Love is growing by exchanging it and never benefits the one person on the account of another. Love is a treasure multiplying and growing allways in abundance, when offered and not the opposite and doesn't make the person who offers, a person without Quality in life, or with less Love. in his or her life.

The child in the womb enjoys continuously his mother's Inner Smile, which helps it to grow. Have you ever seen pregnant women smiling to their bellies? They are doing it all the time. And even though a whole organism grows into their body, is being noticed that their energy, strength and self-healing power grows bigger during that period of their life. Many diseases they might have being suffered before, can be healed during pregnancy and labor, like inomyoma, hormonal disorders, skin diseases etc.

Inner Smile, close related to our Original Self, cannot be used as a tool to manipulate others or to prevail over situations.This can only make us loosing the very meaning of this practice, which is the Inner Smile itself. The Inner Smile cannot pretend or lie because it is related with very high frequency emotions and hypocricy is not one of those feelings.

Love and greed as well as Love and self-distraction contradict to eachother.

Starting the practice of the Inner Smile we beginn to working first with our own body and learning to love and appreciate it again. After we have learned how to love ourselves we can really love the others. Love excluding and diminishing ourselves cannot be True Love. True Love includes necessarily ourselves. Virtue of Love is to unifying and smoothing the oppositions. We are born as separated Beings, in order to learn how to respect our individuality, but also the individuality of the other people. Because everyone and everything in the Universe is unique and irreplaceable. Respect is precondition to Love and in any other case Love would look more like Imperialism.

In Greece during the archaic period, the 7th and the 6th century BC, the faces of the statues were allways decorated by a Smile, known also as the Archaic Smile. Gods, Humans, mythical creatures like Sphinxes were dipicted allways smiling. Archaic Period is what we call the Childhood of the Ancient Greek Art. Was the time of the Innocence, the time of Peace. The time of the great Optimism and Developement in every field of Science or Art. After the Persian Wars though, the first big War Greeks have ever experienced, the Archaic Smile disappears from the faces of the Statues, to express the Sorrow that prevailed over Greece during that time, for the lost of many young people, brothers, husbands, sons.

The Eternal Smile though, on the faces of the Kouros and the Kores of the archaic period, still glow and enlighten our days, expressing in the best way the Inner Smile of a whole Nation.

Written by Athina Georgiadou