A Fun Exploration of the 7th Cranial, or Facial Nerve and Muscles
Does your face feel tired after a day on Zoom? My face used to feel like a sack of sand at the end of a Zoom day. Trying to relax it just drains what little energy I have left.
I’ve learned how to wake up my face, access emotions, and relax my body through working with the cranial nerves. I’d like to share what I learned with you.
Opening your heart and letting your feelings show through your facial expressions is energizing. Unfortunately we instinctively try to relax our face and make it neutral when confronted with our own image on Zoom. This is suppression of energy masquerading as “relaxation” – and it’s quite stressful!
This post is about your seventh cranial, or facial nerve which is responsible for the voluntary and involuntary control of 43 relatively small muscles in your face, head, and neck. It’s colored yellow in this illustration:
My video guides you through a two step process to wake up this nerve:
- Calming your body by releasing energy down through the spine and legs into the floor.
- Leaving your body quiet and open so there is no strain as you activate the 5 major groups of muscles in your face.
Facial muscles can be categorized by 5 functional groupings:
- Buccolabial muscles in and around your mouth: These help you kiss, change the shape of your mouth for expression or sound and chew skillfully.
- Nasal muscles around your nose: These help you move the tip of your nose, wrinkle your nose, and lift your upper lip, showing happiness, disgust, fear, anger, and even joy.
- Orbital muscles surrounding your eyes: These create any movement of your eyelid, raise and lower your eyebrows, protect your cornea, close, open and blink your eyes, and express tears from your lacrimal gland.
- Epicranial muscles of your forehead & skull: These raise and lower your forehead and eyebrows, showing frustration, anger, surprise, and many micro-expressions.
- Auricular muscles around your ears: Most folks have only involuntary control, but we all have a friend that can move their ears at will. These help you be alert to surroundings, express curiosity, and even fear.
That’s a lot of fun movement to play around with! Scientists have done amazing studies showing that there are upwards of 10,000 different facial expressions, and 7 basic ones that seem to be understood universally, regardless of culture and language.
Educational videos about the body on YouTube are usually focused on two major topics:
- What can go wrong with your body and how to fix it
- How you can change or improve your body
There is very little content on how you can:
- explore your body
- celebrate your body
- accept and take care of your body just as it is
My mission is to add as much content as I can on these more positive topics! Why? Because negative attention brings negative results, and positive attention brings positive results. Accepting, celebrating, and taking care of your body is still the best plan even if you do have something wrong! If you want some support in this area, you can check out my offerings and book a free 15 minutes consult HERE.
I make these videos to give you a taste of my Cranial Nerve Sequencing work. It’s designed as a 12 session package. I include visual, charts, and informational materials to keep you practicing once you’ve completed the course.