Problem Areas Around the Eyes? Try Facial Yoga at Home
It only makes sense: we exercise the rest of our bodies, taking care to isolate and tone certain muscle groups, why not do the same with the muscles in our face?
The pace and rigor of life today takes its toll on our bodies, the face no less than any other part of you.
There are over fifty muscles in your face, and exercising them in a systematic way can tone the skin, reduce wrinkles, relieve eye strain, and release neck and facial tension. A facial workout program, in short, will allow you to present a fresher and more confident look to the world.
It should be no surprise that a class of professionals has arisen to meet the needs of today’s busy consumers in this area. These facial coaches provide a range of services from direct massage of the muscles, to classes in facial yoga, to programs tailored to your specific problem areas.
These coaches, while of good heart and good cheer, are in it to make a living, and to judge by their hourly rates, do not do bad at all.
It should not be hard however for the prudent consumer to save money and time by establishing a workout program of his or her own.
You can do these exercises in the privacy of your own home, using your own equipment and proceeding at your own pace. Properly executed they will give you the same glowing results you might expect from a professional facial coach.
Many exercises simply use as their baseline the ordinary expressions and facial reactions of everyday life. The following exercises are recommended for the beginner.
Exercise 1. Lines Around the Eyes
Enter the stock market at its peak. Allot every dime you have to the outcome and bet your family’s future upon its ever-upward course.
Gaze in wide-eyed wonder as it climbs and climbs and climbs. Use that wide-eyedness as a tool to release the tension around your eyes. Narrow and widen your eyes in series, for three sets of ten.
Next try to do the two eyes separately but simultaneously. If you look like that one lizard who looks two different directions at once with his crazed-out eyes, you are on the right track.
Gaze in wide-eyed horror as the market plunges, stops to catch its breath, then plunges again. Then plunges again. Really feel the sickening lurch as you watch you pitiful little pot of gold shrink to thimble size. Continue the widening and narrowing of your eyes, again in three sets of ten.
Rub your eyes – carefully! – in disbelief that you have been such a fool.
This strengthens the tissue around the eyes and gives you an attractive alarmed and fearful look.
Exercise 2. Stiffness in the Neck, Sagging of the Neck Skin
Attend your high school reunion. Make certain that it is one of those that is several years down the line from your graduation proper. You want to see how people have turned out.
They’ve turned out pretty damn good! You haven’t!
You see, whereas others have found moderate to spectacular success in their lines of endeavor, you more or less – it is hard to explain to a non-expert – take piles of paper from one side of your desk and do some damn thing or another to each of the pages and then put each on another pile of paper on the other side of your desk. You do this every day. And that is about it. Though you have built a plausible lie regarding its important to the economy in case anyone asks, it’s really a bit hellishly pointless in a French existential play kind of way.
You now find yourself among classmates who have achieved fabulous things and have attained ungodly riches. You’re so happy for them! Sort of. You decide upon reflection to keep your whole pile of papers thing to yourself.
As they speak, these classmates of yours, your head whips from side to side trying to keep track of their tales of greatness.
This one fellow helpfully brought along his latest invention – yep, he’s a billionaire inventor – that currently is lifting Mary Jane Blankefelter off the floor, sending her squealing around the upper reaches of the room, and then gently bringing her down. “And that,” he helpfully explains, “is why we call it an anti-gravity device.”
Whip your head to the other side and see this other fellow who has wheeled a fair amount of telecommunications equipment into the room and is working a live feed with a country in the middle of some godforsaken hinterland of the world. The tribes here have been warring for centuries but now they are talking to this fellow, this classmate of yours, and they are starting to see the other tribe’s point of view and in fact are declaring peace right in front of your high school class and as it turns out, the entire world, which is looking on.
Rapidly turn your head to view the one gal who brought The Periodic Table of the Elements along as a visual aid, with one blank square circled in red; she is creating a new element right before the eyes of all your classmates! It has something to do with time travel and has sent a hamster borrowed from the old science lab back to an infant state.
Now, harness all that head-whipping! Continue to fling your head in a quick rotating notion, taking care not to completely revolve your head around its axis, like that girl in that one scary movie. Repeat as many times as there are more successful people than you at this damn reunion. This should take a while.
Optional cool-down: Now reflect upon what you have seen. Sit in a chair breathing heavily and shake your head slowly and dolefully from side to side wondering where you went wrong in your career.
Exercise 3. Thinning of the Lips, Small Wrinkles Around the Mouth
Gather the pittance you have left and invest it in the stock market again, this time at its low point. Or what seems to be its low point.
Study the market in the paper daily. Purse you lips as you chart the course of your portfolio. Remember to do this every day! You have learned your lesson. Last time you just let the market take you where it would. Not this time, my friend, not this time. Purse those lips over and over again, say fifty sets of ten a day. Anyone observing you should guess that for reasons of your own you are attempting to imitate a guppy, perhaps for a theater class, and have gone a bit overboard.
Again watch the market plunge – well it can’t really plunge from this flat desert floor it has been resting at, there’s just not that far to fall, but you take my point – and continue to madly purse and unpurse those lips.
Your mind will be in a frenzy at the end of this period, but you should notice more suppleness around the mouth and lips area as you stand in front of the mirror and gaze hopelessly at your own fool self.
Exercise 4. Tightening of the Jawline, and the Neck, Mouth, Lips, and Cheeks
These ‘full face’ exercises can be executed in any number of ways.
For instance, say that you allow your daughter to date at age 17 and the man she brings home for you to meet wears a stocking cap of some sort, a backpack, a scraggly beard, and is carrying a skateboard. He looks to be about 56. She tells you they are engaged, but in a new kind of way that seems to include a commune and a cult leader. Just two crazy kids against the world! Good God.
Wait drearily in an auto repair waiting room for your oil to be changed. Sense a dangerous change in the atmosphere and look up to see two – two! – guys with their first names stitched into the front of their shirts approaching you solemnly. It is never a good thing when two of them come out. Never. One of them is there to catch you.
Answer the doorbell and stand there disbelievingly as this nice but relentless guy from the Department of Transportation explains that your house is being condemned to make way for the new interstate that will run right through your yard – ‘right here,’ the guy explains, pointing to your bed of roses, ‘right here’ – and he seeks only your signature so that you can be awarded the pittance that the state has determined that you deserve, or of course you can go to court over the matter and be ruined.
Sit disconsolately in your tax guy’s office as he holds up a tax form and listen to him ask you plaintively, ‘look, I know you’re the client and all, but do you know how to fill these things out? I know I’ve told you that I’ve been doing it for you these fifteen year, but I was kind of faking it, and now the IRS wants to talk to you and take all your possessions. I mean, what exactly is a deduction? Do you know?’
In each of these cases, slap your hands against your cheek and look on in unabashed open-mouthed horror, just like that guy in that one painting, what’s it called? The Scream! That’s right, The Scream.
Hold this position for some length of time, in some cases for the rest of your life.
This increases the elasticity of the underlying tissues of your face and gives you the healthy glow of flat terror. Or sometimes an attractive deathly pallor.
You see, it’s easy.
Simply by employing your natural emotional reactions to everyday events you can bring that smiling face of yours back to youthful vigor. Or at least an interesting look of frozen horror.
