Have you laughed yet today?

"A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically. It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods." ~Author unknown

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." ~e.e. cummings

I remember getting into trouble as a kid for laughing at the dinner table. My sister and I would get into uncontrollable fits of laughter where we were on the verge of having food fly out of our mouths or milk come out of our noses. Usually, there wasn't one thing in particular that inspired the laugh. The joy must have been so bountiful that we just couldn't contain ourselves. So...we got in trouble. That made us laugh even harder! As much as we tried to squeeze our lips shut, the sounds would squeek out and lead into another belly-aching outburst that might have ended in a race to the bathroom to pee.

I've been caught laughing in church at my cousin's baptism and at a family reunion gathering where one of my relatives was delivering a sermon. In this instance, my aunt and I were laughing so hard we had no choice but to disguise our laughter by pretending to cry - we thought tears would be more socially acceptable as it might appear that we were emotionally moved by the sermon. (As you can probably guess, this was not in fact the case). I'm reflecting on this because of all the times in my life where I've felt so joyous to laugh, I've felt pressure to contain this fantastic expression and conform to some social rules about adult laughter. Those that know me may say otherwise particularly if they've watched a movie with me. I've been known to laugh at things that the audience doesn't find nearly as funny or laugh a little after the punch line. Regardless of whether or not a laugh is timed right, why are we sometimes compelled to quell such a powerful expression?

I think this laughter suppression is why we see the rise of laughter yoga, laughter meditation, laughter therapy, humour therapy and laughter clubs. Don't you find it odd that we have to structure laughter back into our day? It's kind of parallel to the fact that we've engineered movement out of our daily routine and now we have to re-integrate exercise back into our day in order to keep ourselves healthy.

I'm reminded of all this because of my yoga class today. We closed with a laughter yoga session - the instructor suggested that we 'fake' laugh as fake laughter generates the same beneficial physiological response as genuine laughter. Blood flow increases, good hormones flood the body, and our immune response is enhanced. From my yoga mat, there was no need to fake it - after the instructor let out the most hilarious gut-busting laugh, I joined right in with pure genuine laughter. We really should not let a day pass without one of those abdominal aching laughs! I read somewhere (can't remember where now) that 100 laughs is equivalent to 10-15 minutes of aerobic exercise. Can't you just picture it ..."4 more now... ha..ha..ha..ha...okay only 96 more to go......