Staying happy and positive has been known to improve your mental and physical health. Learn how laughter meditation keeps you mentally calm and improves your mood.
Let’s Explore this fun topic!
With much to be taken seriously in life, we desperately need to remind ourselves to laugh more. This doesn’t suggest making light of a difficult and sensitive situation, but it indicates the importance of maintaining a positive and grateful attitude. Laughter meditation is a fun and efficient method to help bring comfort into your life and heal your body from within.
Many people dismiss the positive and transformative benefits of laughter meditation, believing it to be a ruse. However, that is not the case. Even if you feel a bit skeptical at first, after trying laughter therapy just once, you will begin to understand how it impacts your mood and overall perspective.
Laughter therapy can awaken a person’s inner child and provide you with a host of benefits with regular practice. If you are curious about what laughter therapy exactly is and the kind of advantages it can offer, keep on reading this article.
What Is Laughter Meditation?
Laughter Meditation is a method to unlock a dormant part of you and help you escape the sombreness of the world. With laughter meditation, you can access pleasure, joy, and connection with your peers as you laugh together and heal your spirit, mind, and body.
Laughter meditation was initially developed by Dr. Madan Kataria, who believed that laughter without reason could improve a person’s life and perspective. This type of meditation constraints your wandering mind and helps you focus on the present rather than worry about what has passed or what is to come.
The practice of being present is what is called meditation. Laughter meditation brings your attention to how your stomach moves as you laugh, how your shoulders go up and down, and your facial expression changes with different kinds of laughs.
Most find it easier to practice laughter meditation alone as it allows them to focus on the present and surroundings without distractions. However, many beginners feel self-conscious in groups and are reluctant to participate in team activities.
Nevertheless, laughter meditation in groups is more enjoyable for some as it allows them to connect and be present in the moment with other people.
Since laughter is contagious, practicing laughter meditation with others can help you drop your seriousness, maintain your laughter for extended periods, and inspire deeper laughter that can help you go into a deeper meditative state.
What Are the Benefits of Laughter Meditation?
The transformative benefits of laughter meditation you can begin to feel with regular practice have been mentioned below:
Presence
Like other types of meditation, laughter meditation helps you bring your mental focus to the present and be aware of where you are. It pushes your body and mind into the same moment and allows your mind to let go of any worries. As you simply laugh, you become more aware of your surroundings and body and learn how to ground yourself.
Emotional Release
Keeping your emotions bottled up for too long can affect your overall mental and physical well-being. Laughter meditation helps you access your feelings creatively and provides an outlet for a primary emotion: joy. It can make way for more emotions bubbling under the surface, such as fear, anger, and sadness. This is why you should always practice some calmness and silence after laughter meditation and be open to any emotion that comes up. Laughter mediation is a strong tool that can help you realize your underlying emotions and feelings that might have gone unnoticed.
Connection
With social media and other technologies, it seems accessible to contact others but not “connect” with other people. Sometimes, with work and family responsibilities, you can lose track of meaningful relationships in your life which can cause you to feel alone.
When you practice laughter meditation with someone, you build a lasting connection as you celebrate the joy of being alive together. Even when you are afraid of feeling silly when practicing laughter meditation with someone, you should give it a try since they might be feeling apprehensive just like you.
Lightness
Being an adult, you may feel like the world is a dark and unfair place. There is so much cruelty, desperation, greed, pain, and hurt in the world that you can begin to feel powerless and hopeless.
This helpless feeling pushes you to always want to feel in control of your life and be serious. People who take themselves too seriously often have a negative point of view of the world around them.
Even though there are negative aspects of life, you should aim to create peace within yourself and understand that there is much that can be done to bring positivity and harmony to the world.
Although you should take time to figure out the serious problems of your life and fix them (taking care of your family, doing an excellent job at work), you shouldn’t focus on these issues alone. If you do, you will be left with a heaviness of the spirit that will pull you down.
Your mind and body suffer when you don’t open up yourself to joy, frivolity, and pleasure; therefore, you need laughter meditation in your life. It helps you remember the joy of being frivolous and invites an element of lightness into your life.
Stress Alleviation
With stress and anxiety in your life, you may feel bogged down by simple tasks. Anxiety can impact your emotional state and sabotage healthy efforts to live a happy and more peaceful life.
There are many ways to deal with stress and anxiety in your life, and people often consider mindfulness, exercise, and medication.
However, the most overlooked and simple method to fight anxiety and stress is laughter. Laughter boosts the level of serotonin and dopamine in your brain and offers you a pharmacological alternative for dealing with difficult emotions effectively.
Laughter Meditation – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What kind of exercise is laughing?
Laughter is a physical exercise that engages several muscle groups in your body (back, shoulders, and abdomen) and face.
What is the point of laughter yoga?
It is a movement and breathing exercise that helps you become more joyful and stress-free.
How long is a laughter meditation session?
A laughter meditation session is almost 30 to 60 minutes long.
Laughing Meditation | 30 DAYS OF INTENT
Natalie and Iman visit laughing meditation instructor Stephanie Nash to learn the art of laughter. The exercise takes them out of their comfort zones, but one burst of Stephanie’s infectious laugh is enough to get them giggling.
Summary
Many people find laughter meditation awkward and unnatural at first; however, it is a great tool to help bring your mind to the present. As your mind focuses on your laugh, how your body moves as you laugh, and what is so funny that is making you laugh, you begin to become aware of yourself and your environment.
Laughter mediation can be practiced alone or in groups. However, it is more fun to practice laughter meditation with more people. This allows you to connect with others in a more meaningful and joyful way.
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Image Credit
“A-maze-ing Laughter” by chris.huggins is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
