The Living Face

January 29, 2025
(written in Danish by Jeanne and translated with the help of Google and Bonnie Gintis)

The living face offers one of our most important social functions.

It is our social surface, our facade, our expression, and we use each other's facial expressions and mimicry as an indispensable part of our communication.

When we communicate with others, we see and feel into their facial expressions. We mimic or mirror each other’s facial expressions and we are able to feel the emotions and sensations of the other person. This promotes empathy.
We not only reflect ourselves in each other, the face also influences and creates concrete emotions in us, and the greater empathy we have, the better we are at reading others.

A flexible and living face can therefore not only express more emotions, it can also receive and accommodate them.

The face consists of bones, connective tissue, cerebrospinal fluid and muscles, all of which circulate nutrients and waste products to and from the face. In the same way, the sensations from the mimicry muscles that affect our nervous system are communicated via the cranial nerves.

We have 43 muscles in the face that are directly connected to our mimicry and facial expressions. When we smile, we use 20 muscles, and when we look angry, we use 40 muscles.

For example, if you make a face that expresses great anger, and then you sense what it does in the rest of your body, followed by making a face that communicates great joy and openness, and then sense the effect on your whole body again, you will experience that two very different states are created in your system.

Both parts are information that run through the cranial nerves, from the face down through the upper body and with branches out to the organs. In this way, a single facial expression, consciously or unconsciously, can create a great change and impact on how we feel, as well as impacting those around us who also experience the effect of our facial expression in their own bodies.

We read and connect with each other, via the face, for better or worse.

The Face and the Social Nervous System
It is through the face that we meet each other, read each other, and are read. Is there joy, sadness, anger or irritation? One of the first things we learn to decode is whether our mother is angry or happy, stressed or present.

The face is also where the body has the most “ports” or sensory openings that detect what you receive and express: ears, eyes, nose, mouth.

All the microscopic movements of our face and our body tell us where we are right now, how we meet the world and how we are met. We need those reflections to receive and to give.

If we want a well-regulated nervous system, it is important to use our face authentically, so that we do not have a constant mask on, but constantly let the face renew itself, and thus also regulate our nervous system.

A Dive to Experience Your Living Face:

• Sit on a chair, focus on your sitting bones and make a small wave movement between them
• Sense your body and your breath
• Touch your face with both hands like butterfly wings and send the Theta-Breath into the tissues
• Let one eye rotate (move your eyeball as if you are following a circle around the outside edge of your eye socket) with the Theta-Breath. Pause. Then the other eye
• Repeat it and sense the difference
• Open attention
• Make spirals with Theta
• Breaths up through one nostril to the 3rd eye and down through the other nostril, and back again
• Open attention
• Make Puffed O’s and SH-sound, playing with your lips allowing them to move like flower petals. Alternate these 2 sounds, 3 times
• Then allow your upper lip to move in all possible ways
• Open attention
• Then allow your lower lip to move in all possible ways
• Open attention
• Imagine that your skull is like a ball in a deep plate that slides gently on top of the top neck vertebra. Notice how you move with this image of free movement
• Open attention
• Notice the sensations in your body, your breathing, and your face now.

To see a video demonstration of this dive, go to: https://youtu.be/p2O92K-89aw?si=fNEs6VP4x8CHzyIP

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