Deep within each of us is a heart crying to be held. Deep within our hearts is an undeniable longing to be beautiful. The eternal search for beauty is a dream that beckons us, a mystery shrouded in a veil of secrecy. Or is it? There are times we must travel a great distance to see what is right before our eyes.

Beyond the vestiges of civilization, far past the end of the road, the sun shines, the air is crisp, and the lush green leaves stand out against an ultramarine sky. You meander on walking paths forged by generations of dear in a world full of birdsong and colorful blooms scenting the air. Trailing chipmunks darting away with your every step and flanked by butterflies flitting above wildflowers and trout splashing about in burbling creeks, it is here, in nature's nest, where you find harmony. It is here you find beauty.

Beauty is not a mystical, abstract quale. Nor is it a certain color of skin or particular height and weight. Beauty is harmony, balance, and peace; it is developing the way nature intended. Did you develop the way nature intended? Are you beautiful?

Your beauty comes from something you cannot see but is in front of you. The upper jaw or maxilla is a bone in the middle of the face. It extends from the upper teeth to the eyes. Proper maxilla development is critical to facial aesthetics and function, as every other bone in your skull is directly or indirectly connected to it.

Growing a maxilla is natural and straightforward. Breathe through your nose, and the maxilla expands like a balloon, growing forward, outward, and upward. By growing forward, a strong jaw projects confidence and strength. By growing outward, the sparkle from a smile stretching from ear to ear fills hearts with love. And by growing upward, a perfectly proportioned nose and supremely high cheekbones herald an aura of the aristocracy. Mona Lisa would blush.

Breathing through your mouth paints a different, darker picture. It's as if the balloon pops and your face deflates. The maxilla retreats backward, inward, and downward as air, in a sense, leaks from the mouth. By growing backward, a diminutive jaw signals weakness and impotence.

By growing downward, a long face and big nose make you look and feel like a candy-colored clown.

Could there be more to you than just that? Like an onion, is the first paper-thin, unwanted, unpalatable chaff layer only a guise that masks a more desirable core? Is a beautiful swan waiting to break free of an ugly duckling's shell? Can out of the repulsive hide of a beast step a handsome prince?

I'm afraid not. Fairy tales are best left for children in the evening in front of a warm fire. Your descent into the abyss only begins at the surface. You are b-b-b-b-bad to the bone.

All your life, you have strived to be exceptional. To be, in the absence of a more descriptive term, human. But the deviant effects of mouth breathing have morphed you into something altogether unexpected, into a caricature, a satirical, exaggerated, and unflattering version of yourself.

Is a caricature, like a fine work of art, more true to life than life itself? Peel away the veneer and see the lasting truth dwelling beneath the surface. The crack in your smile reveals crooked teeth. In the hollow of your mouth rests a scalloped tongue. Tucked away in your nose is a bent septum. It's as if all the bits and pieces inside your face are crammed together. The truth is, they are.

Mouth breathing is a disease that maims, mutilates, and mangles. It has the undeniable effect of making the maxilla and the spaces within it smaller. Destined by DNA to grow to their full size, the teeth, tongue, septum, and the other little parts within the face have little choice but to bend, buckle, and bulge. Inflammation from allergies and infections engorges some of those same body parts that have already outgrown their cranial space like an overstuffed suitcase.

Have you ever overstuffed a suitcase? Some overly fill their suitcase with clothes, grooming products, medicines, books, charges, and other knick-knacks. Others stuff their suitcase with emotional heavyweights like unhealthy relationships, bad habits that hinder success, and jobs that hold no future promise. Your overstuffed suitcase happens to be your face and all the little things tightly packed inside it.

Having a good head on your shoulders is important. What if, in a literal sense, you don't. What if you have an overstuffed, jam-packed, bursting at the seams head on your shoulder? It's not easy to quickly and adeptly lug an unwieldy load. It hampers you from skillfully maneuvering through life. It complicates your existence and precludes you from living in peace as you strive to fulfill your purpose. It weighs you down and holds you back from the delightful feeling of lightness.

Shortly after a prayer, God appears to you in a dream and invites you to ask for anything you desire. In your quest for answers, you asked for wisdom. You wanted to be a balanced queen at peace with herself and one who dealt justly with her village. God was pleased with your request and granted you the counsel of three wise men. Following His star, the three wise men met and present you with gifts of wisdom, hope, and destiny, foretelling your queenship, high priesthood, and suffering. The following are the lessons they taught you.

In the 1800s, a German engineer, Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen, and a French physicist, Jean Louis Marie Poiseuille, gave the first lesson as to how a deflated maxilla filled with engorged soft body parts hold us back in life. The Hagen-Poiseuille Law formulates an inverse relationship between a tube's radius and the flow rate through it. The nonlinear algebraic dynamics of the Hagen-Poiseuille Law can be related to a simple straw. Reducing a straw's radius in half increases the resistance to flow in the straw by a factor of sixteen. Practically, you can feel the difference between drinking water through a coffee stirrer and a regular straw. Worse, wrap your lips around a coffee stirrer straw and breathe through it day and night. It sounds harsh, but in some ways, that's precisely how you are breathing now. Your diminutive maxilla is suffocating you.

Yet, you stand steadfast in your defiance, believing it is acceptable to breathe through your mouth, regardless of what ills may come your way. You do it with glee. If breathing through the nose is hard, is it not better to breathe through the mouth? If some air through the nose is good, is not more air through the mouth better? So you open your mouth like a public toilet, shrieking like a frantic canary as you flush the air from your bellows.

Then came the second lesson. In 1904, Danish physiologist Christian Bohr eloquently described your logic's fatal flaw. Hemoglobin carries oxygen to the body from the lungs. The Bohr effect explains the inverse relationship between hemoglobin's oxygen binding capacity and the carbon dioxide concentration. Mouth breathing is over-breathing and reduces blood carbon dioxide levels. With lower carbon dioxide levels, oxygen binds tighter to hemoglobin, releasing less oxygen to tissues and organs.

This seemingly absurd paradox bears repeating: Mouth breathing is overbreathing, and overbreathing is underoxygenating. The more air taken into your lungs, the less oxygen hemoglobin delivers to your body. Sometimes, less is more.

In 1738, Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli foretold your suffering with the third and final lesson.  Bernoulli's principle states that when the rate of a fluid increases, the pressure at the tube wall decreases, and vice versa. How does this relate to mouth breathing? Mouth breathing diminishes the maxilla in all dimensions: length, width, and height. Sucking air through an undersized maxilla increases air velocity, decreases pressure against the airway wall, and consequently collapses the airway as the pressure outside the airway remains unchanged. Don't just breathe less, breathe slow. . 

Everyone wears a mask. Some to disguise. Some to hide. Some to pretend. The mask you don is one forged by the cruel and untoward effects of mouth breathing. It changed how you look and how you hold your head. It changed your health and how you felt. It changed the course of your life in exchange for the one thing you wanted and needed more than anything else: air.

You did it all for the love of air. You did it to breathe. However, for all you have endured - the suffering, servitude, and struggle - to wear this mask of disfigurement, it betrayed you. While the mask allows you to breathe by day, the same sickly mask smothers you at night. For all the ways your face and body compensated for accepting in earnest a deviant new manner of breathing by day, it was wholly inadequate at night.

In your sleep, you can be a child, dreaming of things past that will never be again. In your dreams, you have comfort, freedom, and love. Perhaps, in another life. Perhaps, in a better life. No one can grasp the labor of your breath, the shallowness of your sleep, and the brokenness of your nights. No one can feel the burden you carry through the night and into the day. No one can know the darkness that lies behind the mask.

But I do.

Chapter Four Conclusion