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Yogi says: Laugh

| August 28, 2014 9:00 PM

Anyone need a laugh?

We all do. Laughter really is the best medicine. It relieves stress and improves mental outlook. Psychologists say it helps develop and strengthen relationships. Doctors say it improves blood pressure, increases oxygen to body tissues, helps the sick heal faster, and has some of the same benefits as exercise.

Speaking of exercise, most have heard of the similar benefits of yoga as health aide, stress reliever, and mood enhancer. Somebody thought to combine them and it's starting to take off: Laughter yoga.

Life hard? Laugh a little. Stressed out? Do some yoga.

It's not as counterintuitive as it first may appear, but that laughter yoga is taking hold in Tehran, Iran. Not exactly a place one pictures a light-hearted or yogic populace.

Life in today's Tehran can be somber, certainly more so than when I lived there. Air pollution and traffic jams I remember, but now Iranians also face political suppression, economic hardships, and culture wars. These make life more stressful than need be. Some are finding relief is just a chuckle away, in an hour-long, laughing yoga class led by one of Iran's 250 laugh instructors who've appeared in office buildings, clinics, and health clubs over the last few years.

One of them is Mahro Sameni, who was quoted in the June 4 issue of The Monitor Weekly:

"Today, unfortunately we forget the child within us; we need to find that and shut the rest of the brain down... (Laughing) changes our view of life, the pollution, the political problems; this will help us forget all that, all the outside issues, and be with people."

Laughing practice is old in Persian tradition, sadly suppressed though it may be by modern life. Ancient Persian mystics and poets wrote of it, and laughing clubs existed in medieval Persia. Somehow it fell from formal Asian traditions until the early 1990s, when an Indian doctor in Mumbai named Madan Kataria noticed laughter's rather extreme benefits while doing research for a journal article entitled, "Laughter, the Best Medicine."

In 1995 he field-tested his theories by forming a laughing club in a park. It grew from five people to 50 in a few days. A yoga practitioner, Dr. Kataria noticed the similarities between breathing in laughter and yoga. He and his wife developed laughter yoga.

Wherever it takes place, laughing yoga apparently feels awkward at first, with forced "ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-ho" chants. But as minutes go by, somehow body and brain join in and create irresistible, real laughter.

It's infectious. Rooms dissolve into belly laughs, at first at the absurdity of the experience, then with genuine happiness. It's somehow automatic. As Dr. Kataria discovered, our bodies can't distinguish between fake and real laughter. Start the former and eventually, you'll get the latter.

He called it, "happy chemistry."

I haven't yet found a laughter yoga class in North Idaho. But we don't need one to laugh. Read a joke. Call a friend and trade. Or just start the fake variety and go until you get the real deal - apparently 15 minutes works and two or more people infecting each other works more easily than one.

Now smile. Feel better?

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.