Exploring the fascinating facial nerve
The face we offer to the world. Let’s face it! Face your demons. On the face of it, face the facts….how much our vernacular uses this word.
And the great cosmic joke that we never get to see our own face. Only a mirror image.
Huge amounts of tension can be held in the face - jaw tightness, eye strain, furrowed brows. Easing facial tension can be profound. Allowing the light of true essential nature to pulse through.
We have 12 cranial nerves. They come in pairs.
The 7th is the facial nerve - Roman numerals attributed to these 12 - sacred numerology perhaps…
And the most googled cranial nerve? It’s the facial nerve.
Isn’t that a curious thing. In the world of yoga, trauma healing and somatic embodiment, I would have thought it was the vagus nerve (the 10th cranial nerve) given how much press it gets. Not so.
Ploughing through the many functions and branching anatomy of the facial nerve recently, its wonder is vast!
Drink in the below visual. Imagine lighting up these nerve fibres in your own face, right here, right now.
Some functions of the facial nerve:
*Innervates many muscles of the face, therefore predominantly motor function - i.e movement resulting in facial expressions
*Involved with taste as as it speaks to the anterior 2/3 of the tongue
*Secretomotor functions - meaning involved in parasympathetic nerve fibres to produce saliva and tears - see how it sparks up near the eyes and hence the lacrimal glands - they produce tears. How does the world taste. What makes us cry?
*Small branches of the facial nerve moderate sound, its relation to the stapedius muscle (remember the stapes being the smallest bone in the body? Small as a grain of rice?)
What does your imaginal realm whisper and conjure about this nerve? How we might reach out to touch a person we love and cradle their cheek softly. That feeling of safety and support.
Perhaps it evokes memories of laughing so hard you had face ache! Or remember the character in The A-Team - Face. Maybe you had a mysterious episode of Bell’s Palsy.
What was the body communicating? Tight facial muscles can create so much tension in the rest of the body. It is also the most visible part of what we show to the world. Our face. Consider how careful facial surgeons need to be.
How does it feel to just let your facial expressions drop. Have a play now. Over-emphasise a yawn, a roar, stick your tongue out. Widen your eyes.
All of this changes the inner landscapes.
How do other peopl’s face appear - kind, angry, relaxed, sad…simply noticing. Paying attention. Given we have mirror neurons, this explains why we can be so impacted by other people’s faces e.g crying scenes in films
Also it’s important to consider facial expressions can be misunderstood. It might be misinterpreted as something that it wasn’t. Culture influences this. Context influences this. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett speaks more on this if you fancy exploring.
The potential for the face to make thousands of combinations of expressions means we must pay very careful attention to the development of AI and facial recognition. It’s dangerous territory as the whole body and how it expresses, is deeply layered, nuanced and infinite in possibility.
I’d love to hear about your face stories. Maybe that face you made on that roller-coaster ride. Or the little face pressing against a window with bright expectant eyes (maybe your dog?!) Or the face you made when you got to the top of the mountain that day. Or the day your face crumbled into a big relieving sob….all the stories we hold and that long to be shared…
Ciara