~ by Lolisha GLT Chaney
The difference between wearing a smile and living a smile, is depth.
It takes minimal effort to wear a smile – simply applying it to your face as one would apply makeup. Wearing a smile can be ‘made up’. It can be inauthentic, incongruent with the song of your soul. Many smiling faces have committed suicide. Just like wearing a smile can be put on, it can be easily taken off.
Life has unique complexities that tend to overthrow smile appliqué.
To live a smile is to be fastened to reality and grounded in truth. The truth of how you feel. The truth in uncovering unresolved emotional pain and acknowledging frustrations. The truth of owning the full spectrum of your emotions and allowing them to flow freely through the echo chambers of your heart. Free to express the beautiful dichotomy of life: beauty and pain.
This smile can never be stripped because it was never applied. It comes from within, it is expressed. It is the natural state of your heart, before those ‘unique complexities’ got to it. It is confidence that I can ‘be’ as I am. I can cry when I’m sad, I can allow myself to feel anger and disappointment, I can give myself permission to feel.
The freedom to feel is the freedom to purify the fountain of your heart. Through a natural process of introspection and acceptance, all that impedes the truest smile within is drawn up and out, leaving crystal clear rivers of inner peace, clarity, and joy (aka your living smile).
The first step to your living smile is recognizing the absence of joy…
The first step to smiling from your soul is identifying and allowing unpleasant emotions to express themselves (ideally in a constructive way). This is most important because suppressed pain will block your shine, every time. Suppressed pain (I use this as a collective term to describe the spectrum of unpleasant emotions) has a way of seeping into every atom of your existence.
This is not the case with liberated pain. What I have discovered in my own journey is that the ugliest emotions, when I acknowledge, accept, and allow them to be expressed, are just visiting.
Think of this process like a friend meeting you for coffee to vent. To vent is literally to discharge and expel. Venting (liberating emotion) relieves your soul. When you’ve relieved yourself of the pressing or buried emotional issue, you now have room to emanate your sunshine.
Here’s some good news: You don’t have to complete this phase before enjoying the benefit! You don’t need to get your whole life together before you can smile from your soul.
All you need to do is begin. As you begin to uncover suppressed emotions you will start gaining bandwidth giving the smile that lives within you, room to come through.
About the Author
Lolisha Chaney is a freelance writer and inspirational speaker from the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. As a depression survivor, she draws upon the wealth of knowledge gained from her journey to emotional wholeness. Lolisha has accepted the call to a higher lifestyle with a focus on helping others by telling her story with refreshing candor that resonates with the human experience. This work is used to inspire others to remodel their lives from the inside-out; getting life together, one thought at a time.
