Laughter Yoga - by Maria Rainier

Since discovering Moymoypalaboy (see October and November 2010 posts) I have been playing and replaying their videos almost every day for a dose of laughter. Not only do I laugh, but I am delighted, rejuvenated and encouraged. We know laughter has this effect on us, so why don’t we do it more? Maria Rainier tells us more about the effects of laughter and how one doctor has made it into a Yoga form. Here is her guest post for Healing Philosophy.

A child laughs 400 times a day; an adult laughs 15 times a day.  What gives?

This is the entire premise of laughter yoga—restoring laughter to those who have forgotten or lost reason to laugh.  

Dr. Kataria and Hasyayoga 

Medical physician Dr. Madan Kataria began his research into laughter after reading the findings of Norman Cousins, an American journalist who purportedly cured his degenerative heart disease with massive doses of Vitamin C and by training himself to laugh.  Inspired, Kataria began encouraging his family members and friends to laugh by telling jokes, but as the jokes ran out, Kataria resorted to psychosocial and playful techniques to arouse laughter.  He then discovered hasyayoga (laughter yoga), which he made popular in 1995 from Mumbai across the entire globe.  Today, 60 countries together boast over 6,000 Social Laughter Clubs.

What is Laughter Yoga?

Laughter yoga combines unconditional laughter (laughing for no reason: no jokes, no comedy, no innuendo, merely joy) with yogic breathing (pranayama).  Laughter yoga is exercised in a group of people who, with eye contact and childlike playfulness, turn little giggles into laughter from the belly.

What Are Its Benefits?

Other than it being fun, the benefits of laughter yoga are many.  Clinical research from University of Graz in Austria; Bangalore, India; and in the US indicate that laughing—even fake laughter, which the human body cannot differentiate from real laughter—lowers stress hormones like epinephrine and cortisol in blood.  Regular reminders to laugh also allow individuals to deal with stress more productively by putting stressful situations into perspective with the rest of one’s life: what’s a burned pancake in view of one’s overall health?

Who Benefits?

In fact, the benefits of laughter yoga have been recognized to the extent that many schools of Surat, Baroda, and Bangalore (India) have introduced it into their curriculum.  Schedules include ten minutes of hasyayoga in the morning assembly and five minutes of hasyayoga at both the beginning and end of each day in classrooms.  Students’ grades as well as theirs and teachers’ moods have improved; they work better together with more positive attitudes and improved communication, discipline, and attendance.  American college students at Ithaca College are quickly catching on to the trend.

If children and young adults can stand to gain from laughter yoga, so can businesspeople.  Humor is a common tool in the office to break tension and keep workers going through the day; laughter yoga is a reliable and effective method that allows even adults to laugh wholeheartedly for 15 to 20 minutes with short breaks of yogic breathing.  India, Denmark, and many business environments in the U.S. show benefits of reduced stress and improved productivity after only three weeks of laughter sessions.

Seniors, medically ill patients, and patients with physical and mental challenges also benefit from laughter yoga.  Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease make it difficult to comprehend humor, but with hasyayoga, no humor is needed to laugh, exercise, and feel pure joy.  Coping with pain and trauma becomes easier for cancer patients such as those who perform laughter yoga during chemotherapy sessions in the Swedish Cancer Hospital in Chicago.  Children with mental and physical handicaps enjoy improved motor and expressive skills and health.  

Laughter yoga has even been introduced to the prison system.  British actor John Cleese visited Mumbai Prison in 2001 and found that prisons—concentrated hotbeds of negative emotions and thoughts—of all places could use laughter yoga.  Reduced violence and improved moods and prisoner/staff relations have ensued in several prisons in India, Europe, and the U.S. with regular practice of laughter yoga.

Watch this clip from BBC’s Human Expressions, which explores the benefits of laughter yoga.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she's been researching online music degree programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

The Bailout Bubble

In my last post Amy Luft’s question on Answers I said ‘the lack of morality in the financial system has brought us to the brink of disaster.’ I was speaking from the generally accepted viewpoint that the worst of the credit crisis is over. But perhaps the worst is still to come.

My view of the present financial crisis, as conceived by my being a regular reader of certain financial sites, compelled me to move from equities to cash in my retirement plan many weeks ago (since the TSX reached 10,200 and the Dow 9,000). So I was already very sceptical about the strong recovery priced into the market at this level and expected a pullback. But the last few days (just as the mainstream media is getting lathered up about ‘the end of the recession’) I have come across some articles that frankly give me the willies.

First there was this post at Danielle Park's Juggling Dynamite, Risk aversion is back on :

At present levels, the S&P 500 is pricing in a significant earnings rebound for 2010 and emerging markets have been pricing a hearty resumption of western consumption. Both of these assumptions are seriously in doubt.
Today the Singapore Minister of Trade and Industry threw a blanket again on resurgent decoupling hopes, saying there were "few signs of a decisive turnaround in final demand in Singapore's key export markets." (…)
This time, thanks to the massive credit overhang, rate cuts alone are not able to revive the housing sector. Without the housing catalyst to kick-start and lever renewed consumption, growth has a massive headwind.

Danielle includes a clip, ‘Housing Mess is not over’, which gives a sobering update on US housing.

Then it was Marketwatch’s Paul B. Farrell and his article New bull, new bubble, new meltdown by 2012.

Yes, folks, a new bubble cycle is already in motion. You can feel the energy building, the kind that fuelled the meltdowns of 1998, 2000 and 2007. We never resolved the problems fuelling the dot-com insanity. We made matters worse feeding the subprime credit-derivatives disaster with cheap money, Reaganomics ideology and two costly wars. Lessons were never learned, nothing was resolved. Today matters continue deteriorating.
Behind the hoopla, the Wall Street conspiracy has dumped $23.7 trillion new bailout debt on taxpayers. The bill will come due.

What we are seeing is a new market bubble in the making fuelled by bailout-money. Instead of lending, banks are putting the money into the stock market. (I read that 75% of trades since the March low have come from the desks of Goldman Sachs). When this bubble bursts, it will be ugly.

Expect a major house-cleaning, a second American Revolution. We predicted the "Great Depression 2" around 2012. Well, we doubt taxpayers will passively sit one more time, like in the 1930s, in 2000, and the past few years. Next time voters will take a page from the history books about past revolutions in the American Colonies, France and Russia. A perfect storm will erupt in a massive global credit meltdown, bringing down Wall Street and the clandestine $670 trillion shadow central banking system.

But the article that really gave me the willies was this one from Global Research, Entering the greatest depression in history, by Andrew Gavin Marshall.

While there is much talk of a recovery on the horizon, commentators are forgetting some crucial aspects of the financial crisis. The crisis is not simply composed of one bubble, the housing real estate bubble, which has already burst. The crisis has many bubbles, all of which dwarf the housing bubble burst of 2008. Indicators show that the next possible burst is the commercial real estate bubble. However, the main event on the horizon is the “bailout bubble” and the general world debt bubble, which will plunge the world into a Great Depression the likes of which have never before been seen.

Marshall ties together many threads and introduces us to Gerald Celente, head of the Trends Research Institute, the major trend-forecasting agency in the world.

Celente’s forecasts are not to be taken lightly, as he accurately predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the 1998 Russian economic collapse, the 1997 East Asian economic crisis, the 2000 Dot-Com bubble burst, the 2001 recession, the start of a recession in 2007 and the housing market collapse of 2008, among other things.

And what is Gerald Celente predicting will happen in the present financial/economic/moral crisis?

Phantom dollars, printed out of thin air, backed by nothing ... and producing next to nothing ... defines the ‘Bailout Bubble.’ Just as with the other bubbles, so too will this one burst. But unlike Dot-com and Real Estate, when the "Bailout Bubble" pops, neither the President nor the Federal Reserve will have the fiscal fixes or monetary policies available to inflate another.

And just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse. Guess what? It gets worse:

Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war... While we cannot pinpoint precisely when the 'Bailout Bubble' will burst, we are certain it will. When it does, it should be understood that a major war could follow.

You can watch a video of Gerald Celente embedded in the above article, and at the end of the video there is a selection of related videos.

I know all this has very little to do with my blog about Healing Philosophy, but I felt I had to share it with you since we are facing very challenging times and the more we can all be forewarned the better chance we have of getting through it.

And then again, perhaps it has a lot to do with philosophy and, eventually, healing.

My Medicated Cartoon Life, by the Bitter Animator

Browsing regular reader Susan’s links on her blog If you’re going through hell, keep going, I discovered My medicated cartoon life.
The author describes his blog as ‘The ramblings of a bitter animator, living and dealing with depression on Planet Doom.’ This and the cartoon self-portraits immediately let you know you are in the space of a talented artist who obviously has not let depression take away his creativity or his sense of humour.
Further exploration confirms this impression. The bitter animator, a creative director of animation, gives us eloquent and humorous insights into his profession, his life and ultimately our life, illustrated by some of the best and funniest cartoons I have ever seen. Here is an example A project begins:

Things actually start off a little slow. For that first minute or so. But then the true volume of what needs to be done becomes apparent.

It's like an old-fashioned tale of heroes. Like Conan the Barbarian in that film, Conan the Barbarian.

You have people who will help. Assist. Contribute positively. The little magician guy, the thief and the sexy warrior lady.

And then you have some people who live to do everything they can to get in the way. To destroy a project. They are the villains of the piece. James Earl Jones and his henchmen.

And sometimes the odds seem insurmountable.

You may even lose a comrade in the journey.

But unless you take down James Earl Jones in his giant snake form, that project will be absolute cack when it makes it to air. If indeed it ever makes it to air.

A little overdramatic? Yeah. Yes, it is. But, as anyone at the higher end of a production will know, it's not far from the truth. We make the most gentle, silly shows about lovely things happening to lovely characters. And, in doing so, we're forced to become warriors.

I hope I'm the little magician guy. He's the one who lives to tell the tale.

As you can tell, the bitter animator has a heart of gold and a brave one and the skill to tell his journey with compassion and humour. In the same way as he draws a metaphor with Conan, we can all relate to his situation. The superficial visible details are different but the invisible spiritual forces are the same.

The search for meaning is never far from the bitter animator’s thoughts and the reader is rewarded often with little gems of art and insight. My favourite (so far) is this one, What I saw, which I feel beautifully captures one of those Zen moments we have in everyday places:

Tiny specs in space. Lives appearing and then vanishing without a trace and barely a memory. Are they even lives? Is it not just a burst of activity, our thoughts, feelings, desires all just by-products of a system simply to get us moving and procreating?

As key to the Universe as the brief life of a sperm on some hastily grabbed tissue somewhere.

I was thinking this... seeing this, thinking about the nothingness and I knew - this is not a good road of thought to follow. It does not lead to a good place. But, nevertheless, that's what I saw.
Yet, when actually I came to draw it, as empty and pointless as the feeling was I was trying to illustrate, I couldn't help noticing just how beautiful that infinite nothingness around us is. And I can't come even close to capturing it. Maybe, from out there, I would see that rock, that pebble, is beautiful. And, if that's the case, we're all part of it - each of us, one tiny paint stroke that, together, makes up a wonderful canvas.

Thank you, bitter animator, for sharing your astral views with us, your fellow passengers hurtling through space on the great beautiful bus of Planet Doom.