Sharing a few paragraphs from a chapter Laughter Wellness, written by Ros Ben-Moshe is one of Australia’s leading laughter wellness experts and founding Director of LaughLife Well-being Programs.
Laughter wellness is a new mind-body modality that incorporates a range of strategies and techniques to help create and sustain positive energies to benefit the body, mind and spirit, promoting multiple aspects of well-being. Laughter is naturally one aspect of this, but there are many ways this can be nurtured and developed including smiling mindfulness practice, re-framing and individualized endorphin-boosting activities. A laughter wellness mindset offers a whole new way of unleashing positivity, happiness and optimising well-being.
One of the most popular expressions of laughter wellness is through the practice of laughter yoga, which evolved decades ago in India. More recently laughter yoga has taken the world by storm through laughter clubs, with Indian Doctor Madan Kataria and his wife Madhuri at the helm. It’s a winning formula, combining laughter exercises, deep breathing and clapping whilst chanting ‘ho, ho, ha, ha, ha’. It doesn’t rely on something being funny to generate laughter, which is one of the reasons it is well suited as a complementary healing tool in health settings.
During times of acute stress or dis-ease, laughter and feelings of joy are generally the first things to go. Why would you want to laugh when you hit a real low? So there’s something very exciting and powerful about being able to generate the health benefits of laughter, through facilitated or simulated laughter exercises. And if you’ve been in a room where people erupt into laughter, you’ll know how contagious it is, which is what happens even if the initial trigger is non-humour based yet intentional.
Laughter being used as medicine or therapy is not a new phenomenon. It dates back to biblical times as written in Proverbs 17:22, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” Then skipping ahead to the 1500’s, one particular Court jester is believed to have kept Queen Elizabeth 1 in better health than her physicians. In more modern times clown doctors in over-sized shoes and bulbous red noses traipse down hospital corridors around the world bringing play, humour and laughter to patients, family and staff. Even in more contemporary times, in Hollywood land, the movie “Patch Adams” starring Robin Williams recounts a true story of a doctor who will do anything to make his patients laugh. There’s an array of humour based laughter therapy and non-humour based laughter therapy: the common denominator being laughter for health’s sake.
A common language we share with all other members of the globe, laughter occurs naturally from the earliest stages of our development – an innate super-power. Yet sometimes we need to remind ourselves it is there for the taking and the sharing.
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