smiling energy to help heal their patients? Perhaps our hospitals
should hire clowns and jesters to make their patients smile. More
important, why hasn’t smiling been used as preventive medicine?
In smiling at our friends, families and loved ones, why have we not
learned to smile to ourselves?
In ancient China, the Taoists taught that a constant inner smile,
a smile to oneself, insured health, happiness, and longevity. Why?
Smiling to yourself is like basking in love: you become your own
best friend. Living with an inner smile is to live in harmony with
yourself.
One look at our western society shows that we do not know the
secret of smiling. The lack of harmony within ourselves is tragi-
cally apparent. We are plagued with an increase in physical and
emotional illness that ranges from cancer to anorexia nervousa.
Our loves are always shadowed by a world filled with violence and
self-destruction. Both the individual and the collective society are
threatened by rampant drug abuse and nuclear waste. Somehow,
somewhere, we’ve lost sight of the Tao. We’ve broken the natural
flow of life, and with it the power to heal ourselves.Smile Love into your Vital Organs
The complexity of global problems can be so overwhelming that
most people simply give up trying to understand the whole picture
of their life. Our heads reel from an overload of information that
spews out from television, newspaper, radio and computers. The
challenge is to simplify all this information into digestible form. This
process of literally “digesting” reality is made difficult to the extent
that we’ve separated our minds from our bodies.
If the body is healthy, it can easily assimilate the stress of mod-
ern living and even find it a creative challenge. But many people
ignore their natural balancing mechanisms between the body and
mind. They attempt to digest the world with their minds, piling up
concepts, thoughts, and desires like giant mounds of mental bag-
gage.
They ignore the fact that their body must carry this extra mental
baggage around twenty-four hours a day, and eventually tires of
the extra weight. Exhausted, the body gives up prematurely result-
ing in heart failure, stroke, arthritis, or liver dysfunction. The col-
lapse is blamed on a poor physical body, but the overstressed mind
is the true culprit.Chapter III