The Inner Smile Is Less “Cute” and More “My Nervous System Said Enough”
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I’ve been doing the Taoist inner smile technique for about six weeks, and I’m not here to sell you a glowing organ system. I’m here because I’m a 39-year-old queer artist and research assistant who uses ritual the way some people use spreadsheet filters: to make chaos briefly legible.
The basic idea, as I understand it, is that you “smile” inward — not with your face, but with attention. You let a soft, warm acknowledgement move through the body, sometimes from the belly or heart centre, sometimes toward specific organs. It sounds adorable. It also sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would make my inner critic ask, “Are you trying to compliment your liver?”
But I kept doing it because it worked in a boring way. Not mystical fireworks. More like my nervous system stopped treating every small stressor as a personal betrayal. I’d feel tension in my jaw, and instead of narrating it for an hour, I’d let that inward smile pass through it. The jaw would loosen. The story would get quieter.
That’s where I think Jung gets useful, if only a little. Not in a “your spleen has an archetype” way, but in the sense that the body stores repetitive emotional patterns. The inner smile isn’t magic; it’s a way of changing the relationship to those patterns. You’re not deleting them. You’re refusing to keep feeding them with resentment.
As a tarot person, I read the practice like The Star. Not the dramatic, lightning-bolt Star. The quieter one. The one that says: you’re allowed to be tender with yourself without turning tenderness into performance. There’s also something of The World in it — a kind of completion, not grand, just “the circuit is closed, and I’m not falling apart.”
My favourite part is how anti-dramatic it is. I don’t need a candle, a chant, or a 40-minute ritual. I can do it on a tram in Melbourne while pretending to look mysterious and not like a person muttering “smile” at their own stomach.
I’m not claiming it cures everything. It’s a tool. A small symbolic gesture that tells the body, “You’re not the enemy, and I’m not going to leave you in the dark.” Which, honestly, is more than most of my creative projects get.
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