Okay so I'm gonna start sharing some tips that might be able to help you with the secret smile and I'll break it up into smaller audio files and but the first thing is that was really helpful for me was learning about dose which is dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphines which is basically the happy chemical in our bodies and I've shared like a little image that shows you what produces the different things and I spent a long time figuring out what created positive effects in my body and so that I could manufacture any feeling that I or any innovative state that I wanted to over time and I'm sharing this because you mentioned that you have this guarding like trauma guarding type thing it's very common in the beginning before you kind of heal from trauma and do nervous system work and it's very common not to be able to feel your emotions or get into elevated states I have been part of this self healing community for six years now and I know a lot of people that have healed themselves in all weird and wonderful ways like really cool miraculous stuff and one of the key things is the dose chemistry and being able to create elevated positive states in your body and it's so common not to be able to feel anything in the beginning or like I think I mentioned before for me I could feel things but mine was cross-wired so for example if I tried to intentionally create a state of joy it was cross-wired with adrenaline and I would get really start like start of reflexes and I'm just a heart would start pounding and it just activate me sympathetically and the same if I tried to access what was it there was another cross-wiring that happened which I can't remember joy yeah so it was also sometimes cross-wired with sadness when I felt tried to feel joy I would feel sad so I had to do a lot of unpicking there and basically what I did was I focused on one state at first and for me I needed to feel calm before I went into joy and it's different for everyone and and I focus on just trying to create a sense of calm in my system and being able to create that feeling on demand and I'll go into some other techniques in another message but I just wanted to explain a bit about this dose chemistry because it's really the basis of all of this it creates a dose chemistry makes your brain more neuroplastic which means you can more easily create new neural pathways and you can create so basically so the cross-wiring that might happen is because two neurons have kind of wired together so the one for joy and adrenaline so you have to work on on coupling those with associations by practicing something new and by elevating your state that makes your brain more neuroplastics so it makes it easier to make that change and the other thing was that I mentioned that it's really really common not to be able to feel anything in the beginning when you have trauma and this guarding when basically I don't know if you know about poly whip vagal theory but when you're kind of in freeze functional freeze also vagals shut down access to your emotions it's like it's just so many different ways like for me I might get like a blanket on top so I can't access everything or also I have a dissociative for system which is a trauma response and so I might all of a sudden just feel really distant and I can't feel my emotions anymore I'll feel numb or there's so many different states in the nervous system that can cause it but if you work on regulating your nervous system it will help over time so doing trauma work like tail head suggested like Peter Levine's work is great but there's so many other things you can be doing as well and it's finding what works for you but creating dose also re-regulates your nervous system just that in your self-regulation nervous system so effectively okay so there's lots of things you can do to work on your nervous system which will help and then also continuously practicing creating elevated states and dose chemistry it will over time improve it and make it easier to create any emotion that you want but it does take practice in consistency you have to do it repeatedly over time okay so I'll leave it at that for this part about dose you can look at like there's so much information about it if you want to know more and but yeah it's like a foundation for all of this yeah okay okay so one of the key ways so I'm gonna mention lots of different ways you can use and it's all about again finding what works for you so it's trial and error and it can change over time and all of a sudden one technique might work for you and another it might stop after a while you need to change it up for a bit everyone's different right and I've already mentioned don't expect big changes in the beginning it's common to not feel much to only feel little bit but over time I promise you will get better the more regulated your nervous system gets the more you can work on the trauma the more you'll be able to access your emotions and so what I did in the beginning was I would focus on just any change in my state so if that was aiming for neutral if I wasn't a neutral and just aiming for neutral that would be a win any change in your state if it's just feeling a little bit more calm that's a win whatever it is feeling just tiny tingles but just just you need to change your mindset around it in the beginning it's all about practicing it calming your nervous system and repetition over and over and over again and working on the trauma working on your nervous system all those good things and then over time it will shift and you'll be able to create bigger emotions and also the big emotions aren't necessary actually it's more about creating a state change if that makes sense okay so one of the first things I'm going to talk about I will share lots of different techniques that might help but using visualization and mental rehearsal can be really effective but everyone's different you have to try it out and see what works for you but things like creating visualizations around or mentally rehearsing like a future event that you really want and something that you would love to happen in your life and then it doesn't have to be visualization it could be imagining it like some people aren't visual it doesn't have to be visual I think that's just like the word most people would recognize right so that's why I also put mental rehearsal that you're basically running through a scenario in your mind you can feel it in your body you can see it you can hear the sound whatever works for you it's different sometimes it's just a sensing or knowing and off some state you would like to feel in the future so it could be anything it can be a realistic thing something that could actually happen it could be something that your wildest dreams that might be more unrealistic it can be short-term goals it could be long-term goals it can even be fantasy type things that is not possible to experience in this world so I've done a lot of I love fantasy generally as a genre in books and stuff so I've created all these visualizations that is set in like a magical world it doesn't matter our brains don't know the difference between what's mentally rehearsed like visualized or what's in 3D reality doesn't know the difference so if you imagine yourself in these states it will prime your brain and the neural pathways in your nervous system to have those sit like experiences and it will create the relevant dose chemistry in your body if that makes sense so that's one thing it's more the future stuff or fantasy stuff and it for example for me I even created ones that was actually that's more memory stuff so you can also go back and use your memories from childhood or any time in your life that were positive and they can be real ones if you have positive memories this is often where I would get crosswired when I had joyful moments that I could remember then it would get crosswired with grief and sadness and all these other emotions so I had to kind of not stay clear of memories more and I would focus on you can basically change them they don't have to be accurate it doesn't matter you can do anything like bring up anything that you enjoyed in the past it can be a really detailed example it could be like a snippet or something remembering how you felt in a given moment whatever like you can use if you want to go for joy for example or calm or whatever state you want to achieve in your body like feel in your body think of a time when you actually felt that in real life and then you use that memory as a gateway into feeling that if that makes sense love like you can think of things that you really love like I don't know from puppies if you have children anything that you don't have any negative associations with I think that's really key because if there's negative associations it might bring up other feelings as well which isn't what you want to go for but memory visualizations or mental rehearsals can also be things that hasn't happened so for me I don't remember much of my childhood and there was a lot of things I didn't get in my childhood so I would make up this grandmother that was really warm and loving and we would bake and do all these things that would have been nice to have had or I would like create all these scenarios I even did like fantasy ones actually as memories but because the brain doesn't know really different you can use anything like literally anything as long as you have a positive association with it you can try it out it's experiment and be as creative as you like and see if you can create a positive state in your body using different things like mental images sound all these different things like I've also had success with just using a word that was a bit later that didn't work in the start in the start and start I'm quite a visual person so for me visualization worked quite well but now I don't visualize I'm more I can just because I've done it so much I can just feel into what state I want to create and I can just feel it I can create any state quite easily in my body now which is quite cool but further along with my journey I started using just the words so for example if I wanted to feel peace and calm I think it's the one that is used in the secret smile I would see the word for me or say the word calm and use that as a gateway to kind of feel it in my body but I think maybe that one is trickier to use in the beginning but everyone's different so who knows yeah I think that's it under visualization but you can ask me questions if you have any another really powerful tool is using music and to put you into different states you probably already tried this and but there's so much different music that will produce different states in you and it will be different for everyone right but also what I used a lot was ambient sounds on YouTube you can find ambient sounds for any emotion and it will have like soft music but also nature sounds or yeah all these other sounds on there as well and that kind of puts you into the state more so if you're an auditive person that's really helpful and you can do that and kind of use that as a gateway into the emotions and all of these things like in the beginning it's helpful to use props of tools to achieve the state and then over time when your body kind of gets used to producing these emotions it's easier to just access it automatically or or it will if you want without anything I don't necessarily need to use tools or props anymore and I do like to still use music I use that every day and so with the soundtracks I found it really helpful to add on alongside my visualizations as well so if I did I don't know let's say I visualized I really love being in nature and it has like it gets me into that really calm connected state and so I would put on like a nature soundtrack just Google call something like on YouTube I think I found most of them and then that would help me to get into that vibe and be able to feel those emotions while I visualized myself in this rainforest or whatever in nature yeah sounds of the ocean anything birds singing there's actually research done that says if you listen to nature sounds especially birds chirping it calms your nervous system because if there's birds around there's no predators around so it's a signal to us as humans to be calm and to calm the calms on nervous system and regulates a nervous system so nature sounds to me was a big one it's been it's really helpful and also looking at images actually I'll get into that in the next one but like to matching it up with images of trees that also research that shows that that has a common effect on the human systems so that's pretty cool okay so I'll get into this next part so I've also used images and videos a lot and so again if you're visual person this might help and I have used it in all different ways but like okay for example I've created these albums that I had on my phone and I tried all different things to see what states it would create in me for example I collected all these images of smiling people and I found that by looking at these smiling people I it would trigger my neuroneurons and I would instantly feel happy and joyful just from looking at these images of people smiling so that depends on whether you have strong mirror neurons I respond really strongly to it but everyone's different I also created like an album of cute or funny I think actually it was more funny animals they were making silly faces or whatever and that would also bring me a lot of joy and what else did I had I also had an album of like landscapes that I would look at like nature landscapes that would kind of have this calm in effect so I'm focusing a lot on calm and joy here they were kind of the first ones that I worked on and love for me came later that once I kind of developed the neural pathways for these other two it's much easier to get into love and and connection and all these other stuff so for me calm was the first one I needed to work on and and then joy but it sounds like yours if you your garden maybe joy could work better but you'll have to see because often when you're in a free shutdown state calm isn't what you need you more need more and to gently start bringing yourself up towards ventral vagal like gentle movement and and all of that and joy and social connection in a positive way and all these kind of things and so images a lot of nature images that I would put on and it would be easy for me to visualize myself there or create like a state in myself also use videos this like all these sites I can't remember what they're called but there's one way you kind of get a tour of like a city or place and it's like you're walking the camera walks and you're in it so it's much easier to kind of put yourself in that so if it's hard to visualize you can use something like that where it's like from your perspective and you're walking through a landscape or city or something that looks really beautiful like it was stunning scenery so that was quite helpful for me and I think there's also put just someone on YouTube properly of nature walks or whatever from that POV where I'm I've also used so I created like a mind movie I don't know if you've heard of it but basically where you take all these clips I just use stock video clips and then you pair each clip with like an affirmation or something that you want to achieve and then I clipped it together and I would watch that so I would kind of look at what do I want to feel in life what do I want to be like how do I want like what state do I want to be in if that makes sense and then I would find corresponding videos and like a statement or some kind that I am this or I feel like this and I would watch that and it would have like a soundtrack to it like some song and like they would like two three minutes long at best like not that long and I would just watch that and get me into the desired state what else and I think that's it for that one actually I think that one to be more straightforward so for this one with postion body mint is the tail talks a bit about it as well in his videos about using posture and it really does work just trying different stances different ways of walking and seeing how that affects you in your body to create those things and another thing is with embodiment what I mean by that I think it leans into what you're really posted about with the technique that actors use but in this self-healing community that I was in a lot of people and if you've spent a whole life not being able to feel a certain way sometimes you need that modeled to you so if no one in your life was confident or you know had all these qualities that you're trying to recreate it's difficult to try and feel it so what was recommended and was to find videos of people that possess the qualities that you want to feel let's say it's confidence I think that's a good one for that and and find someone that resonates with you and look at videos of them and then try and embody that state like almost like you're trying to be that person and you embody them as a character I think it's similar to kind of what you talked about and you can kind of access these emotions from that way because if you've never felt these things before that strongly it can be really hard to kind of try and create it in your body yeah so I think that went more straightforward tears already talked about it so I'll stop there and for feeling confidence what helped me a lot was to do some journaling to look back at times when I had achieved something and I will start like at the time I was not in a very good state like I was in complete survival I was bedridden like I was in a hospital bed living at my mom's needing 24-7 care like I was not in a good state my world was so small so it didn't feel like there was that many things to that I could pull on but it could be tiny things and I would look at evidence at things I'd done that would kind of give me a sense of achievement and I will track it I would literally use real life evidence but thinking small it could be big things if you've got lots of big things but I think sometimes we can kind of get in the state of thinking it has to be big like same with what we feel in a body that has to be dramatic to mean something or to work but it doesn't it can be small things same when you do a gratitude list if you've ever done that like it could be tiny things like I'm really grateful that the sun is shining today right so with confidence I would go and I would look at all the things that I'd done that I kind of felt that sense of oh yeah I did that and then I would look back at all the things I kind of had built up this whole thing and and then use that as a gateway into confidence if that makes sense and yeah and then also the embodiment thing I talked about before can help with that feeling and postures I think too talks about that as well that helps a lot as well I think especially walking for me like I experiment a lot with like how I walk and like how the different types of ways that I walk affects it and just generally movement it can also be kind of a gateway into feeling those well I don't really know which of the emotions you find more tricky is it all of the emotions because sometimes some of them can come easier to you than others yeah okay and with the more kind of heart type feelings for me it started way before I did any of the other work and I would literally write down minimum three to five things I was grateful for every day I did this experiment that people said you need to do it for six months to notice in the fact and I set myself a goal of doing it every day for six months just to see what would happen and at the time I had very negative thinking I was very cynical and my mind kind of felt like a prison in a lot of ways and I would always could like just think of I was a pessimist I really was but within two months probably two to three months a few months of doing this every day all of us have started noticing that my thoughts started changing automatically without me trying and we have this particular activating system I think is called in our brains that when you start feeding your brain with things like purposely it will start to automatically look for more of those things in your environment it's just how our brain works it's like a patting recognition machine and it's a survival brain and that's kept us alive like for you know all these years for example you probably know it if you've bought a new car and then all of a sudden after you get that new car you see it everywhere it's like a filtering system so when something becomes more into your conscious and awareness then your brain will automatically look for that everywhere so that's how these gratitude lists work but it works for anything anything that you focus on your brain will automatically find more of and I mentioned this because it's not just about practicing the secret smile when you're trying to create the positive states in that moment if you can do all the legwork the rest of the day as well it primes your system for being able to even feel those emotions because it will become a natural state and you will have the pathways so how I see it is like you might have like a tiny little pathway for love let's just pick love or joy it could be anything right like if you imagine like a trail through a forest and it's not very used so it's overgrown and it's tiny and that's might be how it starts but then the more you walk that same path the more it becomes like like a proper trail and a path and then the more you use it later it will become like a road and then eventually it becomes like a highway and then a super highway and then it'll be easier to go down that like open that pathway up and feel those emotions I hope I'm making sense but anyway so for love for gratitude that's how I started I wrote these lists and I definitely noticed improvement and I just started becoming a more positive person and I would automatically think I'm more of an optimist now and and that was like just an automated thing that started happening for me so I don't have to have to look as hard anymore it just comes naturally to me now but that really helped me as a gateway into feeling love as well because if you feel gratitude it's all kind of heart-centered right and another gateway into love for me and I've heard for a lot of other people is to find something that you really love and imagine it or feel it or like direct it to that person it can be to a person or an animal or it could be a color I've used colors like the color green I love that color and I would feel that color all around me and I would just feel the qualities of that color and feel the love for this color green you can use anything an object it can be anything but often with all these emotions it's easiest in the beginning to kind of have something that's your gateway into it and it's just finding what that is for you and also I did a lot of hard-opening meditations which really expanded my capacity to feel love and I had like a whole hard-exploding thing and like heart brain coherence like I do a lot of that kind of thing there's also meta and meditations that can help and you could also receive a coherent healing I run like a healing group it's all for free but if you're interested let me know you can get a session we book like two weeks out and but that can be really hard opening for people if that's like an emotion that you find difficult to feel and it's completely free we just ask that you complete like the feedback form but yeah okay I'll leave that yeah I don't think I have anything else to add but that one so yeah okay okay so another thing that I found helpful is using props and you may not need this like I was in quite a difficult place when I started doing all this work and I literally needed to do everything I could to try and create positive emotions because it was pretty dark at the time and difficult and I was in complete survival because of what was happening with my health and all this stuff so I really really had to get creative but using props can be really helpful for example things like standing in front of a lamp like not like not one with like really bright light but like more of a warm light and then you close your eyes and you feel that light in front area could also be the Sun if you are able to get the Sun on your face and then just feel that warmth and the love or calm whatever that produces in you so you can experiment with different props different things like I have like a heating like a heating blanket I think they're called and I'll put that on me and feel the warmth of that and that really has a calm and effect on me and I can feel like that feeling of calm or wrapping your like a blanket or do very around you to feel like the comfort and also that could be calm or love I guess I'm focusing a lot of calm because that's like one of the main ones my system was very much in survival and sympathetic when I started so that's what I had to focus on the most in the beginning but it could also be similar to how I mentioned about images and videos if you want to try and enhance like if it's difficult to visualize just in its own you can use props to kind of get you into that state and mentally rehearse let's say I don't know and what could it be you wanna imagine yourself in a meadow full of flowers and you hold some flowers in your hand and you can smell them or it can be you can use smells so like essential oils with different smells like citrus and in your visualization or whatever it is that you're putting yourself in there is I don't know citrus trees or you're eating I don't know whatever like it could be anything really you could be holding so for me I have a lot of nature stuff I love nature is where I can feel connected the most feel the most calm and most regulated so I have a lot of plants to like holding like touching the leaves of the plants and like the texture of it it could be feeling different textures if you have like cushions or blankets like soft ones or different like pleasant textures that might create like a different sense in here and so these things might also be a gateway into experiencing an emotion enhancing it and it's not like you will need to maybe do that forever but in the beginning it can be helpful to to find the gateways into the different emotions for you until you've practiced enough and like have enough repetition on your belt to make those pathways like superhighway so it's easy for you to access those things I've talked a bit about joy in the other messages but there's one more thing I remembered which is a gate finding a gateway to your joy a helpful tip can be to look at what you enjoy doing as a child and then exploring trying to do those things now either exactly as it was or in some sort of adapted way it could be anything literally play but also like building legos or I don't know whatever it might be like as a kid if you enjoyed singing then singing can be your gateway into joy it's a really helpful thing if you have access to memories as a kid and but if you don't then in general just having more of a play like mindset and trying things out and seeing what brings you joy in order to be able to access those because sometimes you might not have that many clear memories of joys that you can use in a visualization or maybe visualizations doesn't work for you and then it can be good to create new memories that you can remember where you feel joy in the moment so yeah just a little tip for that one I don't know if you've heard of the experiment with Pavlov's dogs where he took some dogs rang a bell and fed them so the queue was the bell and every time they heard the bell they would get fed and then eventually over time so he conditioned this response in them so they would create this association of bell food and then eventually he will stop giving them food when he rang the bell but the dogs would already be starting to produce saliva because their bodies were expecting to get food so this is like the whole basis of neuroplasticity how you can wire certain responses together and create new neural pathways to take two things and wire them together and that's why I keep talking about these gateways and all these things and so I tried to use that on myself because one of the things I had trouble accessing was joy like I was in and had been depressed my whole life I didn't realize at the time I just knew I would go into like clinical depression and experience winter depression but after I did this I cured the depression and then realized oh shit I had experienced depression my whole life so the times when I felt better and I thought I was fine that was still like low grade depression but I didn't realize until I had healed from that if that makes sense so what I did was I got this watch that I wore which had like a vibrating timer kind of thing that I could set and they don't make those anymore it was called mind watch but I don't think you can get them anymore I I'm not sure so what I use now instead is a potty trainer watch I can't remember what they're called but they used for children to remind them to check whether they need to pee so they go and go to the toilet to help them body train and it's not as good to see other one but it's fine but I use that and I would set the timer from anywhere between 20 minutes to two hours and basically at those intervals it would then vibrate and that would be a cue for me to do something that would bring me joy or create a feeling of joy in myself so that's how I started using this initially you could also use like a timer on the phone but the sound would trigger my nervous system at the time so I needed something that was subtle and I would have this watch on me all day and I didn't have my phone necessarily with me and so what I did was I because I was bedbound at the time so I created these cards with tiny little things practices that it might be as simple as smiling like it's proven there's research that shows if you smile like the physical act of smiling and curling up your lips creates a response in your brain that releases feel good hormones like chemicals even if you don't feel it that's also why laughter yoga works fake laughing will actually create positive things in your body so I would have like a little card that might say smile or think of one thing you're grateful for or sing a song for me singing is a big one it makes me really happy sing a song or and watch a funny tick tock or whatever like video and I would have like a library of funny things that would make me laugh or what else did I have I had so many things I basically made a library of all the things that I knew work for me to create that feeling of joy in myself and so every time I felt the vibration happen I would pull a card and I would do what it said because I also have a neurodivergent brain ADHD so I had a hard time it had a lot of resistance so by creating this game out of it I'd already kind of bypass some of the resistance because I just told myself whatever I pick I have to do that one thing and by having it be a new card every time it kind of helped with the novelty aspect and create a dopamine so for me that worked but since then I've shared this with so many other people and there's some people might find benefit in just having one thing they do not necessarily having the cards that was a way for me to hack my brain but you could just have like one activity and you could change it every week or every day but like one thing that every every time you hear the alarm or feel it that you do that one thing throughout the day not just when you're trying to cultivate the secret smile because it's all about creating those new pathways as we talked about before so I would pull a new card do the action it's literally take five seconds ten seconds twenty seconds like thirty seconds it was short things maximum a minute and I would do that every day every time vibrated and on days when I was just had less stuff going on I would said it or if it was a particularly tough day said it to every 20 minutes and I would literally just do it every 20 minutes and other days when I have more stuff going on I might set the or if I was just feeling better I would have a long graduation in between and in a very short period of time of doing that over a few months I noticed that I created an auto automatic response in myself that when I felt the vibration I instantly started feeling happy immediately I didn't have to try anymore I didn't have to do anything I would just feel happy and then I basically after I did that I didn't feel depressed anymore and the depression completely went and I looked back at my whole life and that was the first time I realized shit I've been depressed my whole life it wasn't just like these bouts of depression I had low grade depression all along anyway since then I've also used this method for other things so I tried picking it up again a year between like a years interval and still because I was like I'm gonna get into this again just because I know it's good for my body it like literally down regulate stress hormones it does so many great things in our bodies and instantly again the response was still there and I would smile and feel genuinely happy inside every time I felt the vibrating I didn't need to do the action anymore so then I tried using the watch with other things like calm or to remind me to be more present or to feel love or anything you can literally do it with anything it's just a cue for you to remember to do something because to change this and create these new plastic states you have to like there has to be repetition you have to repeat it over and over and over again that's the key anyway I just wanted to share that because it's such a game changer for me and also changing the mindset for example I used to meditate in a very specific way that was all about creating elevated emotions and it was recommended that you meditate between 45 minutes an hour minimum a day but a lot of people that were following this they would just do that and then the rest of the day they would just go back into their old conditioning and it didn't last but it's really important outside of your practice to continue doing things if you want to create create lasting change because it's all about practice and repetition and practice practice practice basically so I just want to share that and then I also just thought of one more thing which is about heart math and I don't know if you know about them but it's this company that does they have these devices that can measure your coherence and there's an app and you have to pay for that but they've created a new app that's free called Global Coherence app and you can basically use your phone's camera to check your coherence levels and one is good coherence two is really good and three and above is excellent but it can be a really great help it's a to get that feedback to see if you're able to create those so basically heart math is all about love and gratitude and along with your breathing so you breathe rhythmically and they have instructions on the website and in the app I think for how to create these feelings I think this video is probably on on on YouTube as well but again maybe it's a bit more of an advanced technique like if you don't have access to that much love maybe I would wait with that but it can definitely be really good to have that feedback to see what is needed to create that coherence that loving feeling in your heart but I do also think that it's more yeah I guess it is more advanced because it it's also impacted by your breath and also your thought so if you start losing focus coherence drops because it's not just your heart it's heart and brain coherence connected together so I for example as soon as I start having thoughts about something else my coherence drops but I just wanted to mention it it's called the Global Coherence app if you're interested at a later time you