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.

Change your destiny with Yoga - part 2

Are you able to do nothing, to just be with yourself? Or do you immediately reach for the TV remote, or a book, or a friend, or some other ‘busy’ task in order to escape being with yourself, so that you won’t actually have to think about yourself or your life? I know I do sometimes, so I am not speaking from some lofty perspective. We have so many ways to ‘entertain’ or ‘distract’ ourselves these days, that all too often we neglect thinking about how we feel, where we are going, what’s important to us. We go through life half-asleep, half-aware. But we are aware enough to know that we are not happy, that ‘this’ is not ‘it’. Or perhaps we carry on regardless until some great life-shattering event snaps us out of our slumber and forces to look inside, for once. And when we get to know ourselves, perhaps for the first time, then we can perhaps see what it is we really have to do.

Man simply does not know his own soul and the principles and forces at work deep within it. He does not know the source of his thoughts or the source of his wishes, and chained down by the ignorance of his own being, he cannot control either himself or his destiny. In the same blind way in which he follows his animal instincts and urges, fate buffets him to and fro like a rudderless ship in a storm. On the other hand, when one has learned to recognize the various levels at which life goes on within his self, and learned to control himself, he is also able to control his fate…
But let us not wait until we are struck by the blows of fate! On the contrary, let us set out consciously and on our own initiative along the trail of self-knowledge and self-control! We will soon find out that with every step along the way our destiny is more and more inclined to obey our will…
Just as people in the West have developed technology to a very high stage, their brothers in the Orient, after a long painstaking, patient search in the field of human psychology, have solved the greatest puzzle of all: Man!

From ‘Yoga and Destiny’, by Elisabeth Haich and Selvarajan Yesudian. See also the post ‘Karma does not crush’.

Photo by Gregor Buir

Change your destiny with Yoga - part 1

If we go back five hundred years in history, or a thousand, or two thousand and more, we see that there was not much difference in the way people lived. Geography and culture, not time, were much more deciding factors in the quality of life. We know that some ancient civilizations were much more advanced in many ways than say, Europe in the not-so-ancient Dark Ages. And many would say they led happier lives than we do today.
If we take the art of war for example, four thousand and more years ago a man fought with a sword and a shield, or with a bow. So did the Romans two thousand years later. And so did all of Europe until a mere 6 or so generations ago, another two thousand years after that. But now, all that has changed in a short period of time. In every field, the changes have been dramatic. The industrial, technological and information revolutions have transformed our lives. But has our happiness been transformed along with it? I don’t think so. For all our cleverness, for all the secrets we have unlocked in nature, in science and in technology we have not learned the most important thing: who we are. And until we do, we cannot hope to be happy.
In the end, happiness happens between the bottom of your feet and the top of your head. A friend of mine once said money was not important to him, rich or poor ‘I still eat one plate’. Happiness is not to be found in things, in money, in gadgets, in people, in anything ‘out there’. Happiness can only be found inside, ‘in here’.
The following passage comes from a 42 year-old treasure, ‘Yoga and Destiny’ by Elisabeth Haich and Selvarajan Yesudian. The message is even more needed today than it was then.

While his attention was directed to things outside himself, he neglected to look inside and ask the question, ‘Who am I?’ This omission had serious consequences: while technological developments became ever more perfect, man himself became ever more imperfect. At the very time that engineering and technology were enhancing man’s personal comfort, his soul was sinking deeper and deeper into dissatisfaction and misery.
A person who has lost himself is plagued by burning unrest, and the result of inner dissatisfaction, tragedy within the man, is always war, destruction, cosmic catastrophe. Humanity plunges into misery for the simple reason that people seek happiness outside themselves, instead of in the one and only place where it can be found, within! But the sufferings that often seem to grow and compound themselves finally force us to turn our attention away from things and toward the person who is suffering – ourself! Sooner or later we must learn that the true reason for our sufferings is our abysmal lack of self-understanding and self-control.

More in ‘part 2’.

Photo by Gregor Buir

The Yogi of Action

The following text from Mahatma Ghandi has been stuck to the back of a door in my bathroom for 5 or 6 years. This does not mean that I have integrated it into my everyday life. (Is it possible?) It does not even mean that I understand it fully. But it does mean that I have read it 100 or so times in that period, and that perhaps, when someone shows me disrespect for example, my reaction is different today from what it might have been. Perhaps I still get upset, for a second or two instead of an hour, or for an hour instead of a day. And that’s not bad, is it? I think it was a pretty good idea 'I had', to stick it on the back of a door in my bathroom...

The Yogi of Action

He is a devotee who is jealous of none,

who is a fount of mercy,

who is without egotism,

who is selfless,

who treats alike cold and heat, happiness and misery,

who is ever forgiving,
who is always contented,

whose resolutions are firm,

who has dedicated mind and soul to God,

who causes no dread,

who is not afraid of others,

who is free from exultation, sorrow, and fear,

who is pure,

who is versed in action yet remains unaffected by it,

who renounces all fruit, good or bad,

who treats friend and foe alike,

who is untouched by respect or disrespect,

who is not puffed up by praise,

who does not go under when people speak ill of him,

who loves silence and solitude,

who has a disciplined reason.

Such devotion is inconsistent with the existence at the same time of strong attachments.

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Photo by Barun Patro