Say what you like, you’re generally not going to be grouchy, irritated, depressed, stressed-out or sad when you’re laughing. It’s a surprisingly simple premise but one on which laughter yoga was founded 15 years ago.
“It’s a scientifically proven fact, the body can’t tell the difference between real laughter and fake laughter,” said local yoga teacher Eleni Papa. Dr Maidan Kataria, an Indian physician, discovered this fact while creating laughter yoga in 1995 with his wife Madhuri, a yoga teacher.
Here’s the other surprising fact: it won’t cost you a penny. And it’s not held in a field or someone’s front room, but a plush, dedicated yoga centre. What do you actually do? You turn up, and you laugh, basically. It does get a bit more involved than that as the class goes on because the aim is to start with simulated laughter and then have it turn into real laughter. Not that it matters too much whether it does or not because, you see, real and fake, they both work the same as far as the body is concerned. Not only that, but laughter does actually have a scientifically measurable and medically significant effect on the human body.
Laughter yoga was born while Dr Kataria was writing an article ‘Laughter – The Best Medicine’. During his research, he discovered many modern, scientific studies that described in depth the proven benefits of laughter on the human mind and body. This left the problem of how to produce laughter without relying on jokes or a sense of humour, the first of which run out and the latter many people don’t have.
He discovered that both pretend and genuine laughter produce the same ‘happy chemistry’. For those who want to look into that side of it in more depth, gelotology is the name for the study of laughter, and its effects on the human mind and body.
With this research, and to try out his theory, Kataria persuaded four people to join him in forming a laughter club at a Mumbai park in India at 7am on March 13, 1995. Then it kind of grew really fast from there. As of 2009 laughter yoga is taught in more than 6,000 dedicated centres in over 60 countries. In addition, it is also practiced in companies and corporations, cruise ships, fitness centres, colleges, prisons and self-help cancer groups.
Real laughter is easier to ‘go with’ than simulated laughter, and takes less effort to maintain. So laughter yoga was structured with warm-ups like clapping with aligned palms to stimulate acupressure points and simple chanting and exhalations to get the session going and help release tensions. There’s also some really simple stretching, but not much of it, and it is all very, very easy. This is not some high-powered hatha-yoga class which is impossibly difficult and takes years to actually attain enough flexibility to be any good at.
Most of the class though is just plain, simple laughter. There’s a variety of exercises and group scenarios to encourage laughter and get it going, and for variety. The aim is to get people laughing out loud and heartily, from the belly. The exercises are interspersed with deep breathing. It’s all actually quite fun. And very easy too, that can’t be mentioned enough really.
For example you have the Metre-Long Laugh: you measure out a metre with your hands, and burst out laughing when you get to the end of it. The centimetre laugh is similar, but gets to the result quicker! The Happy Pills – which you walk around the class sharing with people – are another favourite exercise, as is laughing at time (even if you’re not wearing a watch).
Eye contact is encouraged most of the time, as is a certain playfulness. These things help to get the real laughter moving and everyone relaxed and enjoying themselves. At the start, nothing is expected of anybody. Later on, deeper and more advanced laughter exercises are accessed.
In this achievement-driven society, laughter yoga flies against the trend! You can’t really compete in it. You just turn-up, get started, and laugh…
The final exercise is lying on the floor, in a circle, laughing. You keep going and eventually it does just become real, long, deep laughter. It ends up becoming infectious and just happens spontaneously. Then, winding down, the classic yoga nidra, or savasana, is used to close the session.
Laughter Yoga classes
Wednesday 6-7pm and Thursday 7-8pm. Glafkou Street, Nicosia. Tel: 99 312722, www.laughteryogacyprus.com. If you do decide to turn up for a class, please books a place in advance
