NONVERBAL COMMUNICATIONS: THE JAW

hi dr karen wilner here and i'm excited to be with you today to talk about the jaw the first thing i want to say about the jaw is we can hold a lot of anger in our jaw so the jaw can be very tight you can grind your teeth at night it can feel like you have steel bands in your in your mouth why we hold anger there i don't know but it's a place anger loves to go so one exercise you can do if you're a person that has tension stress negativity of any sort

in your jaw and you'll know that because it's tight or you grind your teeth is you can begin to make small circles down this muscle we call it the master muscle small gentle circles massaging your face and maybe do that two or three times a day just at the beginning eventually you want to bring out the fierceness that you hold in your jaw so that may mean you have to do something which is somewhat uncomfortable and may appear silly to you or weird and that is growl so by growling you release a lot of the

tension so i'm going to give you a growl right now see if you can do a growl back to me thank you that's great the next thing i want to talk about is the protruding lower jaw so when the jaw jumps forward and it's not because of genetic or physical reasons it's because that person doesn't feel like they will be heard they have to stick their neck out so to speak to be seen or heard so that person tries to be forceful maybe inside they're not feeling very forceful but they intrude and protrude through the

jaw so if your jaw is like that again you want to stretch it exercise it bring it forward bring it back and begin to move your jaw and learn how to be more flexible with your jaw another issue is the disappearing jaw some people's jaw lower jaw moves back into their mouth so that their upper jaw protrudes in that case that person may be giving the message i'm nice i won't hurt you you can be safe around me now in reality that person may hold anger and not even be aware of it but they were

taught probably when they were very young not to show their anger so the draw lower jaw holds back those are the three things i wanted to share with you today i'll add one final thought the jaw in structure mirrors the pelvis so that's very interesting that we have the same structure here if you look at a picture of the jaw as in the pelvis there is a connection so if a person has sexual issues or other pelvic issues we may see some semblance and resemblance of that in the jaw and sometimes as a psychologist we

can even work with sexual issues by starting with the jaw so i want to thank you for being with me today and i hope you work with your jaw and give it the exercise and flexibility that it needs have a great day