Don’t Sell Your Smile For Peanuts

I was recently asked a question: What can you learn in 1 minute that will be useful for the rest of your life? This post is in response to that question.

Many of us don’t smile enough. It takes so little effort and delivers such good benefits.

Yet often we see that as people grow older, the smiles become fewer. If you see a baby, he smiles so often! But adults, especially “mature, serious” adults, smile sparingly.

What does a smile do?

Smiling

• increases your energy
• makes you more friendly
• brings joy into your life
• lights up the room around you and can make others feel more at ease

It takes so little time. Less than a minute actually. And like all things, it’s just practice.

Only this time, practice is painless. Usually, practice is difficult. It involves painstaking attention to detail and consistent effort.

If you want to become an expert at baseball, you invest countless hours running, sweating, throwing, catching…it is similar with music and other arts. You don’t learn a skill in just a minute.

Painless Practice

However, with a smile, one minute of practice will make you feel lighter and happier (Smile! It Could Make You Happier, from Scientific American). And the more you smile, all the better.

So once you learn in a minute to smile more, then the real skill becomes smiling from within. When you practice this, you can stay connected to your source of happiness, regardless of situations and people around you.

In order to smile from within, breathing practices and meditation definitely help. They make a huge difference in our quality of mind and ability to keep smiling.

🙂

Interested in learning more about programs at the Art of Living Retreat Center? Check out our annual catalog here.