Has life become too serious for you? Do you find yourself going days or weeks without laughing?
I generally laugh easily and often. It is a great stress reliever and I have a few very funny stories about the times where I laughed my way into some very embarrassing situations – more about that if you decide to take our “Laughter Yoga Prescription: lifestyle medicine” course.
One memorable evening laughter cured, at least momentarily, the grief of a sad threesome as we shared time and a beloved friend’s terminal diagnosis. We had a new and profound appreciation for the old expression that “laughter is the best medicine.” It was as if our merry sounds massaged aching hearts and somehow restored a most welcome perspective. We were amazed at how light we could feel that day.
Later that night I was reminded of my university students’ fascination with the practice of laughing meditation, a form of meditation fast-growing in popularity around the world. In one particular yoga teacher training class two students guided the rest of us in their regular, disciplined practice of focused laughter. How refreshing to participate as increasing laughter disperses emotional and physical stress. Inhibitions, hang-ups, and self-absorption succumb to humour. It's contagious, fortunately. With sharpening focus on the feel and sound of a laugh, mental clarity takes gentle hold. It’s as if the body laughs on its own and resets its equilibrium. Many students who resolve to meditate through laughing twice a day report what a valuable addition to their lives these minutes become, how they look forward to “just laughing, nothing else, laughing and breathing.”
Two Nobel Peace Prize winners extol laughter’s benefits. The Dalai Lama speaks and passes on his wisdom, and shares laughter with other panelists, audience members, and every child in his path. Aung San Suu Kyi constantly reminds herself and her followers of humor’s key role in providing balance and objectivity: “If you’re used to laughing at things, you start laughing at your own problems. You get used to seeing the absurd and funny side of things and you don’t take your troubles so seriously anymore” (The Voice of Hope). It takes the sting out of difficulty for Suu Kyi, and I watch as humor and a laugh uplifts hospital patients, those struggling with financial difficulty, anxious athletes before competition, nervous students before exams and new mothers. It works for me every time.
In 1998 I read a newspaper article about a group of people that gathered every day in a public park to laugh. It piqued my interest because they shared no jokes and didn't use any form of comedy. Instead they laughed purely for the sake of feeling good, just because.
By 1999, I was introduced to Osho’s work and began practicing the “Mystic Rose Meditation”, laughing for one hour a day for a week, crying for one hour a day for a week and then sitting in quiet meditation for one hour a day for a week. Game changer, talk about cathartic, it was a way to purge the back log of emotion that was my everyday life at the time.
I began sharing this meditation at public schools, at public school teachers retreats, at yoga and community centres. I discovered how good laughing could make me feel and how easy it was to laugh, even when everything in my life was in turmoil. It was profound and just the right tool for myself and many others. Talk therapy is just not the right tool for everyone all the time.
The more I practiced and taught this exercise regime, the more I discovered complementary techniques that help to bring joy into everyday life. I also started to understand the underlying wisdom from both the East and the West that these techniques pointed to. In time I combined this knowledge into a method that I call the Laughter Yoga Prescription. It includes the Laughter Yoga approach of simulated laughter exercises, and expands its approach by offering a clear process that is easy to follow, and adding a greater variety of techniques and activities, insights, games, dances, songs and more interconnected with lots of laughter.
Here is a link to a great article, one of many that we reference in our teacher training course, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125057/#bibr1-1559827614550279
The course will be available this spring. We will be live online and if possible in person - you will be able to do the course with us or at your own pace after the first course runs as we will be video taping the course.
What you can expect in the Laughter Yoga Prescription Teacher Training Course …
This course will introduce to you the founding principles and key techniques of Laughter Yoga and the Laughter Yoga Prescription: how they can help you as an individual laugh more and how to incorporate laughter into your yoga classes, design group laughter meditation experiences and use these techniques therapeutically with clients.
It will remind you of the scientifically proven benefits and history of laughter as lifestyle medicine.
It will help you remember how easy it is to laugh, and how good it can make you feel. You will learn many ways and techniques to create and maintain a personal and daily laughter practice and how to support others in doing so as well.
It will show you how to use laughter as a skillset to maintain a positive attitude even in the face of adversity, and redefine stress as a challenge, not a threat.
It will share valuable insights on how to best use the power of your mind with the actions of your body to add more laughter and joy into your life, improving our quality of life and that of our students and clients.
It will share valuable insights on how to achieve a healthy, happy and successful life from the ancient wisdom of yoga and modern scientific findings from the world of positive psychology.
Open to all who aspire to more laughs in life. Try this: Just raise your eyebrows and feel what happens to your face. Next stop: the funny bone…
Email Kaylee, Director of Registration, at [email protected] for more information about this upcoming course.