Smiling is Good for Your Health

A friend sent me this photo but neither of us could identify the source. It relies heavily on principles in a book that I refer to often when I teach, especially when I say, “Smiling is good for your health.” The name of the book is Habits of a Happy Brain, by Loretta Graziano Breuning (2015). The original title of the book was Meet Your Happy Chemicals (2012).

Regardless of how young or old we are when it occurs, as soon as we become emancipated, each of us is in charge of our own care and feeding on a mental, spiritual and physical level. The problem for me, however, was that until I discovered Dayan Qigong, I had only a limited view of what that meant. I lived the first 40 years of my life survival based, living by the principles and habits I grew up with, augmented by whatever else I learned along the way. I was chronically depressed, didn’t know it, and that was my functional, personal norm.

About six months after I started learning Dayan Qigong I started noticing some remarkable changes. My entire experience of life seemed to be changing and I was experiencing something that could only be called “contentment.” I was experiencing calm moments of quieting. I started feeling “grounded” in a comfortable, rather than a stress-filed way. And then one day, I suddenly realized, ”Oh my gosh. I have a past.” I was chronically depressed in my past. But I now have a completely different experience of life.

The magic of Dayan Qigong lies in the body-mind-spirit alchemy that occurs when we practice.