Gail Walter

Shall I say what I mean?

Gail Walter

Gail Walter
Location
Boulder, Colorado,
Birthday
February 13
Bio
Trying to say something, not sure what.

MY RECENT POSTS

SEPTEMBER 15, 2011 8:55AM

Making Faces...Or Hanging Out With Our Cells

Rate: 4 Flag

Try this for a moment. Using your impeccable cellular memory, close your eyes and arrange your face into a scared expression, an angry one, even hating. Don’t get caught up in your mind’s idea of some sort of story that should go with the expression. Just wear it like you were trying on something to see if it fits. Use just your cellular memory. No-one is watching.

Focus your attention on the way that each arrangement of cells makes you feel.

Now arrange your face into the cellular expression that is your closest approximation of loving. Loving a sunset, loving a place, loving a person, anything you can retrieve from memory that has to do with the act of loving. Feel how that feels. Turn up the corners of your mouth very slightly, just the shadow of a smile. Now slowly widen your mouth, expand. Feel what a grin feels like, undistracted, from the inside.

Arrange your face the way it remembers how to be when you feel good about yourself, when you absolutely love yourself. If you feel stymied by this, remember the warm way you feel about something simple that you love and turn it towards yourself as though it were a light. Be very aware of the quietly exquisite Try of each and every one of your cells radiating love at you. Move casually from the cellular arrangement of loving yourself to that associated with hating yourself, between anger and joy and fear. Wear all these cellular arrangements like masks. Feel yourself slide from state to state.

Now wear the face that adores you, adores everything. Sit there and bask in in it for awhile. Wear as often as you like, it’s yours.

 

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Comments

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This is a must morning exercise
a beautiful piece of writing, gail, and a lovely lesson.
So good to see & read you again, Gail - you're a long time between drinks, you are, but always refreshing.
Illustrating children's stories puts me through these paces all day long - in & out of characters' heads ( & after 20 years of it, giants & dragons & witches & warlords, well ... ) - body language too.
I hadn't ever once thought of practising it on myself - what a lovely idea - thank you, now I will :-)
Gadzooks, the wind changed when I was doing the horrified hateful one (imagining Newt or Santorum or Romney delivering a State of the Union address)...where was I? Oh, yeah, the wind changed and, as my mother always warned me, I...ran to the mirror to make sure my face hadn't frozen that way, and...whew, it hadn't...I don't think, but the fear is still a blink or two away.