What Is a Gua Sha Facial and Can It Transform Your Skin?

Making Ageing a Blissful Experience

By Deepak Chopra MD

What if you could make ageing, the bane of human existence, a blissful process instead of a painful one? This question is almost never asked, certainly not by researchers into ageing. No matter what new scientific track holds promise—and there are dozens of them—one assumption is never challenged, the assumption that ageing is a negative process, like getting sick. The two go together, since the elderly are subject to conditions like cancer or heart disease far more than the young, and eventually most people die from a final illness.

To turn ageing from a negative to a positive process seems impossible in the current medical context. But pause for a moment and place to one side all your beliefs about what ageing is. For centuries in the Vedic tradition of India, ageing has been viewed as a mistake, and the mistake isn’t made at the level of genes, cells, tissues, or organs. The mistake is made at the control center of life, which is consciousness. In effect, aging is a shared illusion that everyone falls for, and once you are taken in, you have no choice but to age, simply because everyone else is.

To break free of the illusion, we can start with a single sentence in the annals of Yoga: “Time is the consumer, and we are its food.” That’s a startling image, no doubt, but it is also the best starting point. The ravages of time diminish mind and body, which is why ageing is so feared. But an escape route opens up when you see that tie isn’t the enemy. The enemy is mind-made. In our minds we make ourselves the prisoner of time instead of choosing to be timeless.

At this moment you are living out your personal story, which begins at birth and will end at death. You view your body somewhere on its own trajectory from youthful vitality to aged decrepitude. At the psychological level you are motivated by beliefs, wishes, hopes, dreams, fears, and desires. All of these processes needed time to come into being. By basing your identity on time, you are trapped in mind-made constructs. Even the world “out there” is projected by the mind, since the world, viewed from the human level, is a construct of experiences. Time is consuming you because time consumes everything that is time-based. Even the cosmos is the food of time. Yet making time the basis of your ego, your bodily functions, your constant thinking and desiring, isn’t inevitable. The timeless is near at hand; in fact, it is closer to you than time itself. This is the most critical insight in Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, and every other tradition based on consciousness. To put it in a nutshell, existence and consciousness are one. As long as anything has existed, consciousness has been there, too.

I won’t take up space by pointing out why physicists are beginning to see that consciousness indeed is a permanent fixture of the universe, like gravity or relativity. This understanding came about because no theory could explain where consciousness came from. It is impossible to locate the point in time when atoms and molecules learned to think. Creating mind out of matter is a dead end. It began to seem that there is no way forward except to agree with the notion that consciousness exists at the very basis of creation.

The Indian tradition took a bigger leap, saying that if the timeless is nearer than time, and if consciousness is fundamental in the universe, we have a choice. We can choose an identity based on time or an identity based on the timeless. In terms of everyday life, what does that mean? Here are the main considerations if you choose to be timeless.

•You stop aligning yourself with mind-made constructs. • You consciously dismantle your ego-based story. • You reject the dualism of life and death. • You view your body as a living process that takes place in consciousness. All notions of the body as a machine waring down over time are thrown out. • You embrace existence as the flow of creative intelligence. • Aligned with creative intelligence, your baseline experience is bliss.

Taken altogether, these steps open the path to practical immortality. Existence is immortal; therefore, so is consciousness. Since nothing is closer to you than existence, you have access to the source of creation. Nothing that time ravages is worth hanging on to. Indeed, reality doesn’t unfold in a series of straight lines going from A to B, following the law of cause and effect.

Reality is more like a multi-faceted diamond, and what you are here to experience are the facets that consciousness reveals. The names we give to various facets—love, compassion joy, creativity, empathy, insight, transcendent spiritual experience, beauty, truth—form the ground plan of an ideal life. To experience any facet is blissful. But glimpses of bliss aren’t the same as being in possession of the whole diamond.

The whole diamond is pure awareness. This is the source from which creative intelligence emerges. Everything that time has created or destroyed is really the coming and going of experience, and all experience eventually leads back to the source. This is the founding principle of Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, and all the other consciousness-based wisdom traditions.

Like a hamster running in place in its cage because it thinks it is getting somewhere, a life trapped in the cage of time is a loop. We can call it a feedback loop because the more you keep consuming time, time keeps consuming you. Right now everyone is a consumer, using up time, wasting time, worrying that there is never enough time, racing to meet deadlines, and trying to keep aging, illness, and death at bay, which takes time. The loop goes nowhere; it just generates more of the same mindmade illusions.

I realize that being stuck in time is a choice no one thinks they actually made. Instead, the way the world works, including how your body works, seems like a given. No one would consciously choose pain, suffering, illness, aging, and death. But these are byproducts of passively accepting a time-bound existence. To escape the whole setup should be your goal if you want to make aging a blissful experience. The secret is to abandon ageing altogether, which means abandoning time. Do this, and you discover the bliss that is accessed in the timeless.

What Is a Gua Sha Facial and Can It Transform Your Skin?

By Brianna Lapolla

Facial Gua Sha is technically nothing new, but it's having a major moment in the beauty world. And while it feels just as lovely as it sounds, the benefits actually extend way past relaxation and lessened tension - it's linked to clearer skin, fewer wrinkles and a more sculpted youthful appearance. What is Facial Gua Sha?

Pronounced gwa sha, it's a facial treatment that involves scraping a flat jade or rose quartz stone over the skin in upward strokes to relax stiff muscles and promote tissue drainage. But unlike a traditional Gua Sha massage, it won't leave bruise-like marks on your face as it's done with a much lighter hand.

Oh, and you can do it yourself at home. What are the benefits of Gua Sha?

It moves lymphatic fluids and breaks down tension in muscles. That means improved blood flow and less puffiness. Per NYC-based aesthetician and owner of Inderma Studio, Nichelle Temple, you'll see “noticeable results while preventing and treating the signs of premature aging - namely in the appearance of wrinkles, dark eye circles and puffiness, and sagging and dull-looking skin.” The increase in circulation is said to up hydration for that coveted youthful glow, and it even helps the skin to naturally purge blemish-causing dirt and oils. How do you use a Gua Sha tool?

You should start at the neck and work your way up to the forehead. This way, you're creating a clear path for the fluids in your face to drain. Follow these steps to perk up your complexion:

1. Prep your skin with a facial mist and oil. 2. Start at the neck and work your way up to the forehead. 3. Use upward and outward strokes on the neck, jawline, chin and mouth area. 4. Sweep across the cheeks, press gently under the eyes and across the eyebrows. 5. End with upward strokes on the forehead to the hairline

How do you choose the correct Gua Sha tool?

The teardrop-shaped Gua Sha tool is often touted as the best one to start with, as it's easy to grip in your hand and has a large surface area for the cheek and neck. If you want to focus on the jaw bone, the square Gua Sha features double prongs that help specifically target that area. For smaller, more delicate parts of the face (like the under-eye or the area around the lips), look for a tool that has a very precise and petite edge, like this jade version from Hayo'u. For a tool that mimics an actual massage, look for one with a scalloped edge, like this rose quartz one. “The side is designed to mimic my knuckles, and the goal is to re-create [the] facial massage I do in my clinic with the gua sha,” explains aesthetician Angela Caglia.

How often should you do a Gua Sha facial?

You'll notice the best results if you do it every day, but since even taking our multivitamins every day is hard enough, experts say two to three times per week will do. And the time of day you add Gua Sha to your routine matters, too. “In the morning, it's about treating puffiness and energizing the skin, while at night you work more on relaxing the muscles and releasing tight connective tissue,” Katie Brindle, the founder of the Hayo'u Method told Porter. What kind of results will you see on your skin?

Less puffy eyes and sharper cheekbones are two immediate results (cheers to instant gratification), but doing it three-ish times a week might yield an improvement in acne, dryness and wrinkles.