Special thanks Dr. Please upgrade your browser. Site Navigation Site Mobile Navigation The Healing Powers of Laughter Yoga Two decades ago, in a land of sensory overload and spiritual abundance, a doctor mixed together meditation and hilarity. Photographs By Alec Soth. Madan Kataria created Laughter Yoga, a nonprofit meditative practice that involves breathing and laughing exercises, in Mumbai.
There are now thousands of laughter clubs in roughly countries. Costumed man from a parade in Bangalore. This unique approach to wellness is now available for all Brisbane, Gold Coast and Queensland residents who want a little more laughter, and a lot more enjoyment from life. Click here for our class schedule! Jan 31, I am regular visitor, how are you everybody? This article posted at this web page is genuinely nice. Shaina Conant Nova. Feb 1, I love what you guys are usually up too.
This type of clever work and reporting! Ursula Nathaniel Berte. Skip to content Where did laughing yoga come from? A brief history of laughter. Jul 24, Where did laughing yoga come from? A brief history of laughter by Lisa Laughing Yoga. By Lisa. Do you have any hints for aspiring writers? Alethea Mace Ilene. Kataria is an exceptional fake laugher. His face flushed, his shoulders heaved, he squinted, and as his laughter trailed off he wiped a tear from the outer corner of his eye.
An atmosphere of levity was quickly established. Kataria spoke again. No barriers. No language. But, instead of speaking, he began to laugh again, this time very differently. The laughter emerged from him in pulses, spaced about five seconds apart, and each pulse began with a heavily aspirated sound that trailed off into a cascade of ha-ha-has. As he laughed, Kataria looked around the room, raising his eyebrows and making eye contact with the trainees, or bringing his hand to his forehead, or opening his mouth wide and leaning forward.
Something—perhaps the giggling of a neighbor, or the inherent ridiculousness of the situation—appeared uncontrollably funny to them. After two or three minutes, the natural waves began to overlap, amplifying one another as they intersected across the group, and many of the trainees descended into hysterical fits of laughter. Faces reddened, and people gasped and swayed and turned away from one another or covered their faces, in futile attempts to stem their laughter; others seemed to be immobilized.
Fitfully, the laughter began to die down. Kataria calmed his body, and the trainees, following his cue, gradually relaxed, and grew silent. They had all been laughing, more or less continuously, for fifteen minutes.
Just laugh. I am not a comedian, and still we laughed like we never laughed before. The exercise that the group had just done was called Gradient Laughter, for the way it developed out of silence and slowly gathered momentum as the laughter became more natural and contagious. There is No Money Laughter, a pose in which initiates pretend that their pockets are empty, and then laugh; and Visa Bill Laughter, in which they point to an imaginary Visa bill in their palm, and laugh; and Milk Shake Laughter, in which they pretend to pour milk back and forth between two cups, and laugh.
Kataria also advises his disciples to laugh silently, and to laugh alone, and he has invented a number of simple mantras and games intended to create a nonjudgmental atmosphere within a laughter club, and to stimulate childlike playfulness.
Very good! Clowning around composes the bulk of the discipline—if it can be called a discipline, since laughter yoga is, by design, a free-form enterprise, and easy. A typical session includes almost no stretching or physical exertion. Also, when people laugh, they exhale more than they inhale—a ratio that yogis tend to consider beneficial.
Laughter is a funny thing. Even in the eyes of modern science, it remains mystifying, in part because it is so difficult to study. In the nineteenth century, scientists used a device called a magneto-electric machine to probe happy faces. More recently, they have taken blood and urine samples of people watching videos of the comedian Gallagher smashing watermelons or of other standup routines.
They have tickled students and great apes, and even rats. They have learned, by manipulating digital recordings of giggles and guffaws, that the range of what we comprehend as laughter is remarkably wide. There is no such scientific fact, but the idea may contain elements of truth. Kataria likes to cite William James, who, in , made the case that emotions were not manifested in the body but, rather, created by it. Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have explored this insight.
It seems that people lean forward while thinking about the future, and are more ready to judge a personality to be warm if they are holding a hot cup of coffee instead of a cold drink.
In , Charles Schaefer, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, studied how forced laughter affected the state of mind of students. Many studies like his are not designed to be definitive, and their conclusions are negligible.
The parts of the brain that light up when we force ourselves to laugh are different from those involved in the real thing. Brain scans of people laughing suggest that Duchenne laughter, as it is now called, originates within the limbic system, where fight-or-flight decisions are made, and within portions of the brain stem. Voluntary, or non-Duchenne, laughter appears to originate elsewhere—in the frontal opercular areas and the motor cortex, among other regions. This kind of laughter can bring about feelings of pleasure, and is often spontaneous, but that may be because we have conditioned ourselves to use it automatically.
Kataria believes that true mirthful laughter can have a liberating, transformative effect—one that momentarily erases all practical concerns, fears, needs, and even notions of time, and provides a glimpse into spiritual enlightenment. Kataria recognizes that people return to laughter-yoga sessions because of the emotional reward the experience provides, and one of the first things he did with the trainees was to share his own tale of struggle and awakening.
The village, populated by no more than a few hundred people, is situated in Punjab, near the border with Pakistan, and is about five miles from the nearest town, Firozpur. Kataria describes him as a stern and egotistical person, who, when money was scarce, would descend into fits of rage.
His mother, Raj Karni, was pious and attentive. Madan was her fourteenth child, and her last, and, though both parents were illiterate, it soon became apparent that he was bright and should be educated. With the help of his sister, he eventually gained admittance to the Government Medical College, in the city of Amritsar.
Kataria earned a reputation as a hardworking medical student, but also as an impresario and as a dandy. Kataria was popular and charismatic. Kataria was well-liked, but his quest for fame made him an oddity. Early in the morning, he would sit on a balcony and make a humming noise—to train his voice for acting, he told another doctor.
He thought he was good-looking, and he was, but he was very cocky. I thought he was a diamond in the rough. He had come from Punjab to the big city, and in certain Bombay circles you have to be really sophisticated. He would come and tell us he was trying to be a movie star.
All of us thought he was a little delusional. After his residency ended, Kataria married Madhuri Sajnani, the daughter of a police official from Rajasthan, and opened a practice in Bombay, in an upper-middle-class apartment block called the Lokhandwala Complex. Kataria says that corruption hampered his practice; doctors demanded kickbacks for referrals, which he refused to pay.
He made plans to open a chain of private hospitals, then a pharmaceutical company. He purchased land, where he housed street beggars, hoping to employ them. The beggars refused to work, and he sold the land.
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