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What terrible, terrible times for the Japanese. My heart goes out to them.
I stumbled on Midoharu’s Youtube channel recently. Midoharu is a beautifully cute Japanese girl whose mother lovingly captures all her endearing antics. This week, after watching the shocking videos coming out of my beloved Japan, her videos seem all the more poignant.
Today mother posted this latest video. What do you do when the sky is falling and your heart is black? You could look at the children.
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 programsand blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
I came across this video at Juggling Dynamite. It has ‘gone viral’ reaching 2 million views in the last week. Pass it on to your friends, you can’t make this up.
This one will not be everyone’s cup of tea and I normally do not appreciate heavy punk music or whatever it is called. But I love these guys: they put such heart into it and their expressions have me in stitches.
I was very angry this week and I have been watching this video and laughing as a kind of therapy. This is exactly how I would like to react sometimes....
I have just discovered the following video that combines a little masterpiece of a song with a little masterpiece of an animation from Howard Blake’s little 1982 masterpiece ‘The Snowman’. I thought about saving it to post later this Christmas but it is just too good to deprive you of for any length of time.
So here it is. It captures so well those times of our childhood when Christmas was filled with magic and wonder; times when there was so much about this world we didn’t know or understand that the line between what was real and what was imagined, the possible and the impossible, was yet to be drawn.
For today’s children that line must be ever and ever more tenuous. A child today can watch this video and decide that he wants to experience walking in the air. He can base jump with the Snowman. Perhaps a video like this one inspired our own Halvor Angvik to become a base jumper. If you read this Halvor, how about putting this music to one of your next videos? Maybe it will inspire some young minds.
For a funky club mix twist to this music I doubt you’ll find better than this:
This is not a review of Philip Gröning’s work: to ‘review’ such a film would be as presumptuous as a book review of the Old Testament. But I will share with you here what I saw and felt in this film in order that you might wish to see and feel it also.
The Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse is considered to be one of the most ascetic monasteries in the world. In 1984, I asked them for permission to film on location. It was said that it was too early. Maybe in 10, 13 years. 16 years later I received a call from the Chartreuse. They were now ready. – Philip Gröning
‘Into Great Silence’ is a fly on the wall’s view of monastic life in the Grande Chartreuse. It is a film like nothing you have ever seen before because what it sets out to do is make visible and palpable the invisible and the impalpable. And in this it succeeds like no other film you will ever see. How do you tell the story of a life devoted to the invisible Spirit, spent largely in silent communion with God, in menial tasks performed gratefully with a pure heart?
The Lord passed by. Then a great wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord,
But He was not in the wind.
After that there was an earthquake,
But the Lord was not in the earthquake.
After that came a fire,
But the Lord was not in the fire.
After the fire came a gentle whisper. – Kings 19, 11-13
This is the first of several quotations from the Bible that occur like milestones or guiding stars along the journey of the film. And we are immediately seized by the power and poetry of those words. This feeling stays with us as their meaning is given form in the daily life of the monks.
One of the earliest scenes shows a monk preparing vegetables in the kitchen. 30 seconds of watching a monk cutting the leaves off celery. One might begin to think to oneself that the director is setting the scene, preparing us for the action to come. But, with great courage, Gröning continues to show us the monk cutting the celery. There is no action to come. This is the action. The smallest of tasks are given their due place in life. It is borne in on us that all our daily tasks are noble and a meditation if performed in the right spirit. We need to slow down and pay attention to our lives.
In my opinion there is absolutely no doubt Gröning was divinely inspired and guided throughout the making of this film. Can you imagine that all the monks’ prayers - the whole monastery’s most earnest prayers - for a happy outcome to their film project would go unanswered? Think about it. Even I feel the breath of an angel over my shoulder as I write about it.
Gröning slows us down in every successive scene and makes more and more obvious the complete disconnection between our frenzied superficial world and this timeless, peaceful world of the Spirit. At first we may feel uncomfortable. Those afraid to be alone, afraid of the void, afraid to think, or afraid to be away from their cell phones for more than 5 minutes, may feel very uncomfortable. But after a while we begin to think that this quiet life is the real life and that other frenzied life is uncomfortable.
Interspersed with the scenes of daily tasks and prayer and silent communion with God are scenes of nature, time lapses of the stars at night, camera angles of the play of shadows on the wooden floor boards, dust specks floating in the light. Scenes that ordinarily might go unnoticed are now presented to us in their own right to make us look at the visible beauty of the world and how it suggests the invisible beauty of the Spirit that created it.
Anyone who does not give up all he has cannot be my disciple.
We try to imagine what it must be to give up all we have and become a monk, a disciple. We fail. These words are old but for these monks they are new and imperative. We look on with a kind of awe. Gröning has no qualms presenting us with several series of 30-second full-face shots of the monks. Humility, kindness, simplicity, forgiveness: all manner of virtues are to be read on their faces as they look us benevolently right in the eye. One might even say God looks us right in the eye.
The ‘aha’ moments are many in this film, although they are no doubt somewhat different for each individual. I found the following quotation particularly poignant. It perhaps sums up the whole meaning of Christianity and the spiritual imperative in its two lines:
Behold I am become human. If you should not want to join me in becoming God, you would do me wrong.
‘Join me in becoming God’: that is what the monks wish to do with all their heart. And their journey, revealed to us by the inspired hand of Gröning, is very poignant and uplifting. Poignant because a life devoted to the Spirit is what we are born to and what we would desire above all things if we only knew it, but we don’t know it. Uplifting because these monks, although only men like us, have been able to choose this path and to follow where it leads.
You shall seek me and you shall find me. Because you seek me with all your heart, I will let myself be found.
I hope I have encouraged you to see this important film. I am sure it will change the way you look on your own life - perhaps at first in small, imperceptible ways - as it has changed the way I look on mine.
I will leave you with the following clip that shows many of the aspects I have discussed and has an excerpt of the beautiful Night Office at the end. (Unfortunately the presentation of the opening quotation has been modified but do not mind it: the rest is worth it).
You may remember last October I posted a spectacular video of some crazy guy base jumping with a wingsuit down the north face of the Eiger. I commented at the time that such a practice might be laudable in pursuit of some military objective that would save lives but was foolhardy gambling with one’s life in the pursuit of thrills. The next day, that crazy guy (Halvor Angvik) wrote me a very scientific and reasoned four page reply showing that preparation, knowledge and practice removed much of the risk and that risk-taking was anyway a necessary part of life, at least a necessary part of a life worth living. And I had to admit he was in the right of it.
So now, ladies and gentlemen, let me present for your viewing horror Halvor’s latest video entitled ‘Wingsuit proximity flying – working a line’ in which Halvor makes 5 jumps, each successive jump more hair-raisingly spectacular than the last. I need a coffee.
Well shipmates, you are in for a little treat. You know the music vid, now know the poem vid. A beautiful, refreshing little video called ‘How to be Alone’ by Tanya Davis. My blog has a contractual obligation to post anything called ‘How to be Alone’.
I will not spoil the surprise for you by making any other comments, but you can trust me, its great.
