Dog’s are always happy. They are good listeners, and they never judge.  They keep it simple.   I know this might sound weird but sometimes I look at my little sweety pie, Zoe, and I think to myself, “ I wonder if Zoe is a reincarnated version of someone I know”.  I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous... but, you never know...10 million Buddhists can’t be wrong...right? 

I know this will sound crazy but, sometimes I say to her, “Zoe. Are you my Grandma?”  You know, just to see if she responds.  Or I’ll ask her if she is so & so.  She just looks at me with a stare that says to me, “Clearly, my human is a moron”.  Sometimes I’ll send her an ESP Mail, “If you are ________, then put your head down”.  One time she did put her head down after I thought it, and almost fell off the sofa. I’m convinced she has ESP. She has this way of staring me down and somehow I just know what she wants. 

How come we haven’t learned anything yet from our little sweeties?  Why can’t we all just be kind and happy all the time? Dog’s know how to do it right. If the sun is shining, they want to lay and feel the warmth.  Zoe always smiles when she suns her self.  So today, I laid with her on the warm brick patio.  I felt happy when I came back in.

It drives me crazy when I see people who have a permanent   frown on their face.  I always think that if I can catch their eye, I will smile at them. It is almost a game for me. It’s like, I give myself two points for making that lady acting like a bitch to turn her  attitude around.  I’m thinking, “Lady, turn that ugly frown upside down”.   Some people have such a frown embedded in their face that even when they do smile, they still have a frown. 

I know people who used to be beautiful, but they have been so unhappy, for so long that they become ugly because they have frowned for most of their lives.

I make an effort all day, every day to manage my smile. If I catch myself frowning, I always turn it around as soon as I notice. 

They say, “What are you smiling about, Stacy?”

“it makes people wonder what your up too,”  I answer.

The truth is, I feel better if I smile.

That’s just Crazy, Stacy!

Well, just when I thought I had lost every one of my ‘normal’ marbles I found an article in Scientific American that says,

“Charles Darwin first posed the idea that emotional responses influence our feelings in 1872. “The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it,” he wrote. The esteemed 19th-cen­tury psychologist William James went so far as to assert that if a person does not express an emotion, he has not felt it at all. Although few scientists would agree with such a statement today, there is evidence that emotions in­volve more than just the brain. The face, in particular, appears to play a big role. This February psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is comp­romised by cosmetic botox inject­ions are happier, on average, than people who can frown. The researchers administered an anxiety and depression questionnaire to 25 females, half of whom had received frown-inhibiting botox injections. The botox recipients reported feeling happier and less anxious in general; more important, they did not report feeling any more attractive, which suggests that the emotional effects were not driven by a psychological boost that could come from the treatment’s cosmetic nature.

  It would appear that the way we feel emotions isn’t just restricted to our brain—there are parts of our bodies that help and reinforce the feelings we’re having,” says Michael Lewis, a co-author of the study. “It’s like a feedback loop.” In a related study from March, scientists at the Technical University of Munich in Germany scanned botox recipients with fMRI machines while asking them to mimic angry faces. They found that the botox subjects had much lower activity in the brain circuits involved in emotional processing and responses—in the amygdala, hypothal­amus and parts of the brain stem—as compared with con­trols who had not received treatment.

The concept works the opposite way, too—enhancing emotions rather than suppressing them. People who frown during an unpleasant procedure report feeling more pain than those who do not, according to a study published in May 2008 in the Journal of Pain. Researchers applied heat to the forearms of 29 participants, who were asked to either make unhappy, neutral or relaxed faces during the procedure. Those who exhibited negative expressions reported being in more pain than the other two groups. Lewis, who was not involved in that study, says he plans to study the effect that botox injections have on pain perception. “It’s possible that people may feel less pain if they’re unable to express it,” he says”.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smile-it-could-make-you-happier

So the moral of the story is, SMILE.  Smile as often as you can, be aware of the face you show not only to the world, but also to yourself. Smile while you are paying bills, drinking your coffee, washing dishes, sitting on the toilet...whenever you notice that you are not smiling, make an effort to smile.   You may find that it genuinely makes you a happier person. 

I hope you ALWAYS have a reason to smile. 

And, if you don’t...well, there’s always BOTOX!

Love

Stacy

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