Thrive [ Persona ] She Can Tell by the Look on Your Face December 2006

by Dan Shafer
Images by R. Byrne

Donna Briley brings an eclectic mix of skills to her practice and to her interactions with others, including the ancient art of Chinese face reading. What she can tell by looking at you is uncanny!

Ancient medicine is meeting and, in many cases, healing the modern world, often in ways that strike today’s Westerners as, well, more than a little odd. One of the more unusual of these venerable techniques is the art of Chinese face reading and one of that art’s most accomplished practitioners is Donna Briley, a Monterey Peninsula acupuncturist and Chinese herbologist.

“This approach to healing has 5,000 years of carefully recorded Chinese medical history behind it,” says Donna. “When you understand the many ways the face is a window into the inner workings of your mind, you can make use of face reading on many different levels.”

Donna, who says she’d rather teach people to do face reading than to do readings herself because “I enjoy the interaction with groups of people,” can recite a litany of uses for the art of face reading.

Essentially, face reading involves looking at the physical characteristics of a person’s face, including such things as eyebrows, eye placement, ear size and shape, chin shape, nose shape, proportionality of the face, and lines and wrinkles among other things.

From those indicators, someone who is trained in face reading can learn surprising amounts and varieties of things about a person.

Where Chinese Face Reading Can Be Applied
“I have primarily used face reading as a diagnostic tool for my acupuncture and herbology practice,” Donna says. “Certain kinds of conditions people have show up in their faces in interesting ways.” For example, she says that dark circles under the eyes doesn’t mean you’re not getting enough rest. Rather, it can be seen as an indicator of problems related to water on at least two different levels. “Physically, that’s an indicator that water is not moving, which generally indicates a problem with kidney or bladder. Metaphysically, that unmoved water is often taking the form of uncried tears.”

But Donna has taught others to use Chinese face reading — and used it herself — for lots of other purposes.

For example, she has taught classes for attorneys to help them pick a sympathetic jury or to know when someone is likely lying to them. “Just by way of example,” she offers, “if a prospective juror has small, tightly compressed lips, it’s not usually a good idea to select them. People with that facial characteristic tend to be unlikely to change. I used to tell the lawyers that if the prospective juror has lips smaller than a chicken’s butt, don’t pick them,” she laughs.

Donna has also taught retailers and sales clerks to read the faces of customers to help determine whether they should use an emotional or mental approach, how practical-minded the shopper might be or to what degree an appeal to hedonism might work better.

Education is another area where Donna thinks Chinese face reading could have great benefit, though she admits it’s not often used there. She thinks it is possible to tell how best to approach a child’s learning needs by careful study of his or her face. “My daughter, for example,” she says, “has eyes that are close to her nose. That means she can be focused on a task or a subject like an eagle, but is likely to miss alternative ideas and broader perspectives. My son, on the other hand, has wider-set eyes, so he’ll see the big picture but he’ll probably have trouble focusing on a single task because he’s more easily distracted.”

Very often, Donna says, people who learn Chinese face reading will remark that it helps them to validate a vague or intuitive feeling they may have toward someone. “They have a sense about something, but they can’t verbalize it or put their finger on it. But when they learn face reading, they look at the person and they can immediately see their reaction and understand why they had it.”

Some of the most telling signs in reading a face come from facial hair, she suggests. “Facial hair in general makes people somewhat suspicious. Mustaches in particular are often used to hide emotions, because they cover up the central part of the face where emotions often appear.” She says this is why many men in law enforcement and security positions grow mustaches. “It makes them harder for suspects and others they come into contact with to read.”

Eyebrows are particularly telltale, Donna says. “What is called a ‘unibrow’ — where the two eyebrows meet over the center of the nose and are pretty much a straight line — is almost always an indicator of significant aggression. High, arched eyebrows, on the other hand, suggest a high degree of drama. Lucille Ball had such eyebrows and you know how she was!” Thin eyebrows on either side of a prominent indentation line vertically over the center of the nose often means deep rage, she added.

Interestingly, Donna says that when she works with clients and helps them change aspects of their personality or character through herbology and acupuncture, she can detect the improvement in their faces. “When people change, their faces change as well,” she says.

How Did She Get Into This Business?
Donna moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s to join her brother and become a hippie, but a chance encounter with a composer in a grocery store led to a whirlwind romance and an elopement. “He was in show biz, so I started taking classes and discovered I loved being in front of the camera, acting and modeling.”

At some point, her agent fired her, a not-uncommon occurrence in the dog-eat-dog world of Hollywood. It seemed like a tragedy at the time, but like so many such events in life, it was a blessing in disguise for Donna. “I had a small child then and I didn’t want to be gone from home a lot, so I decided I had to figure out something new to do with my life. I was taking a lot of healing classes, nursing my wounded ego. At one of these classes, we had a guest lecturer who talked about acupuncture. Lights went on in my head. It just clicked. I’d always wanted to change the world — that’s why I moved to LA in the first place! — and this looked like a great chance. I sure wasn’t going to change the world doing TV commercials speaking someone else’s words.”

Immersing herself in the study of acupuncture and herbology — the two were tandem subjects for the purposes of state licensing at the time — Donna took on six years of part-time study and got her Master’s Degree. She then passed the rigorous test to earn her state license.

In 1998, a divorce and the smog in LA (“no way to raise a kid,” she recalls) brought her to the Monterey Peninsula. “I didn’t know anyone but I had a wish and a dream. I believed that starting over in a new environment would be easy. So I just moved in, found a place to live, joined the Professional Women’s Network (where she’s still active and on the Board of Directors) and built a small practice.

Somewhere along the line, she picked up Chinese face reading. “Having been an actress, I had spent a lot of time in front of the camera, so I was very visual and I had spent a lot of time thinking about how people looked, what attracted people to one another.” Face reading was just a natural outgrowth of that background.

She still has a few patients she tends to in their homes, and word is getting around that she’s available for acupuncture, massage and herbology treatments and consultation again. But in the meanwhile, she’s enjoying the freedom and flexibility to be able to spend time with her high school senior son, Ari, who is active in sports and other activities at Robert Louis Stevenson High School in Pebble Beach. °