This face is the road map of my life and I don’t want to erase a single detour.
May 2004 | Choice Health
Wrinkles: Easing the Lines of Life
by Linda Burnham, ND
Aging is an inevitable process, and our faces tell the complete story of our lives. After all, our face is our calling card — one we cannot slip into a back pocket; it’s there for all the world to see. We often notice wrinkles, ours or someone else’s, and we’ve come to make that the measure of aging. So let’s look at wrinkles.
Why does our eye land on one person’s wrinkles noting the lines of stress and tension, yet glides over with scant recognition the creases in another’s face? In my clinical experience of physical and spiritual medicine, I find the answer locked within the wrinkle.
Years ago as a young practitioner, I had a visit from a little, old lady...literally. She was not quite five feet, with a gentle curve to her spine that brought her head forward. I guessed her not a day under 85 but her electric blue eyes, wide and steady among her wisps of coifed silver hair, bored directly into mine as she said, “Yes, it is a mass of wrinkles and I don’t want to lose even one! This face is the road map of my life and I don’t want to erase a single detour. Just relax my heart and give my body a little of that healing juice, and I’ll have gotten what I came for.”
I worked on faces — not with facials or massages — but a process of rejuvenation that offered a lessening of wrinkles and a lift to the facial muscles, something I thought everyone would want. Yet this lady’s absolute acceptance, even celebration of her wrinkles, her sags, her bags triggered a new paradigm for living — and of aging — for me. I realized that beauty, vitality, radiance, wholeness of being is, first and foremost, an inside job. That epiphany forms the core of the work I do today.
Wrinkle Making
Thousands of times in a single day we use our facial muscles to communicate. Slowly creating lines of expression — crow’s feet at the eyes, laugh lines around the mouth, creases across the forehead. The wrinkles we see on the skin are obvious, but it is the muscle contractions that cause them. Wrinkle making is a domino effect. A thought flashes through us, followed by feelings. In a best-case scenario, if this moment of thought and feeling is delightful, empowering, uplifting or inspirational, we open and let it flow through us, we expand, we move toward life. If the moment is a rough one — sorrowful, bitter, angry, frightening, shameful or the like — we tighten, we withdraw, we protect; we contract on all levels: physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual. On a cellular level, this contraction can be seen as an emotional “crystallization,” a hardened knot of unresolved experience that causes muscles to contract in response.
As moments build on moments in our lives, similar traumas trigger the same areas of contraction and we become stuck, building habitual patterns of response — physically (a permanent scowl, tight lips, hunched shoulders), energetically (erratic, flighty, manic), emotionally (victim, bully, caretaker) or mentally (stubborn, indecisive, inflexible). These emotional crystallizations are manifested in our musculature, in our organ systems, in our auric field and...on our faces. Disappointment or hurt feelings, for instance, might cause the same narrowed eyes, pursed lips or clenched teeth each time we feel disappointed or hurt.
When a response becomes habitual, the face may “freeze” into lines of expression. Freeze into an expression enough times and you’ve got a wrinkle, a micro-muscle contraction that creates a crevice of skin where blood flow to the tissues is limited — nutrition and hydration are unable to reach the cells and the metabolic elimination is slowed. Over time, the tissue around the contracted musculature is damaged, not only from the lack of circulation but also from the “crystallized” emotions or thoughts that began the process. We age deeper than a wrinkle. We age inside, in our spirit — and we look and feel old.
If you are not happy with the lines of strain and sadness that you see in your face, the techniques below can help you rediscover the radiant face that expresses your true beauty from beneath the surface of your skin. Yet, how we embrace our aging is key. Choose to radiate the vibrancy of who you are and, in the presence of your own verve for life, wrinkles become insignificant.
Linda Burnham is a naturopath whose new book The Natural Face-Lift is based on the practical application of her own systems and physical-spiritual medicine.Visit Burnham’s Web site at www.burnhamsystems.com.
This material is for information only and no part of its content should be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, recommendation or endorsement.
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