If I asked you to observe your face without changing it first and without going to the mirror, could you do it?
One of the most useful things I have ever read, that if you use specific muscles in your face to produce a micro-expression, your emotions will follow.
I first heard something similar some 40 years ago: one of my co-workers got pregnant and she walked around with a smile on her face. I didn’t know I was an empath at the time, but I knew she was faking it. I knew that inside she wasn’t smiling. In fact she was sad. Why? I didn’t know her well, didn’t know her circumstances. Maybe she was disappointed, she had imagined her life different, and there it was, she was working full time, pregnant, and that wasn’t fair.
For some reason incongruencies like this stuck in my head, and kept me busy revisiting them. I spent time in front of the mirror trying to figure out what made those facial expressions a lie. I tried to feel the face and watch the feelings.
I didn’t know about micro-expressions, the tiny involuntary muscle contractions that last a split second but belie the real feelings masked by poker face, a smile, or whatever the mask is.
This discovery and this practicing, learning to feel my face became, as it turns out, a tool that has assisted me in identifying the “demons”, the lies, the pretenses in me. The beliefs that were killing my life.
One of these facial expressions is a very young face: corners of the mouth curve down, the area under the nose is tense, and the outside edges of the eye brow also turn down. Five muscles, if I am not mistaken.