A Good Laugh is Good for You
I was talking to my friend the other day and she said something that made me burst out laughing. My laughter surprised her, and we both wound up in stitches. We laughed until my sides hurt. Even as I was still giggling, I realized how long it had been since I laughed like that. “Man, I needed that!,” I gasped to her. She started laughing again as she said, “And I’m not even that funny.”
I am also a member of the “not that funny” club (just ask anyone in my family and they will roll their eyes to confirm), but, my lord, do I love laughing. I love laughing at home- many family dinners have dissolved into hysterics as my older daughter and I laugh until we are in tears. I love laughing in audiences – at comedy shows, movies, plays, and even in church when listening to a sermon. I especially love laughing at work while I’m teaching, not just because laughing is fun, but because laughter opens us up and makes us willing to explore challenging topics more deeply.
Which, as I think about it, is exactly what happened when I was on the phone with my friend. We had been talking about our parents when her funny comment made us both erupt into laughter. After we settled down, we slid very easily into a conversation about how we worry about what lies in store for our aging parents that could have been hard to have or made us feel vulnerable but didn’t because our gales of laughter had already stripped away any boundaries between us.
Laughing Opens Our Minds
Some of my favorite teachers are the ones who bring a sense of humor to their teaching. I’m thinking of the way Dan Harris teaches about the very meaningful topics of mindfulness and meditation with irreverence and humor on his podcast 10% Happier. Or the profane and hilarious way that Anne Lammott writes about her attempts to live her very messy life with faith as her center. Or the way Julia Louis Dreyfus, on her podcast Wiser Than Me, leads with humor as she draws her guests into the deep water of what it means for an older woman to live a full, robust life.
Humor, it turns out, isn’t just charming. It is disarming. Especially when you don’t expect to laugh, humor disarms both our defenses and our certainty, making us more open to the wisdom that is being shared. I remember cringing while listening to a live, stand-up comic venture into the wildly uncomfortable territory of social hierarchy. Yet his punch line was so unexpectedly hilarious – and so incredibly (and painfully) true – that I and the people sitting around me somehow stayed open to his simultaneously difficult and important message. Were it not for the burst of shocked laughter, we easily could have been too shut down to understand his point.
Laughing Helps Us to Grow – Even When It Hurts
In the yoga world, rather early on in their practices, students are confronted with inability (things they cannot do), disinclination (things they are afraid to try), and imperfection (things they cannot do well). They are asked to become keenly aware of the hurtful inner chatter that often accompanies their struggles. Most meaningfully, they are asked to question their deeply rooted beliefs that their value as a yogi (and even as a person) comes from their abilities and achievements.
Trust me when I say that this is deep stuff. Speaking personally, for me, it was challenging and decidedly un-fun territory. Grappling with all of this requires a look at your own psychology, an awareness of your own perspectives, and the challenge of identifying and then changing habits that are so well-established that they feel necessary. You can easily imagine that inner work like this could take years of journaling, meditation and therapy. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But, for me, laughter made venturing into this territory easy – or at least easier.
Let me set the stage. I had signed up for a three-day workshop with a very famous yoga teacher, David Swenson. I was beyond nervous. My nervousness cusped toward panic as I watched my fellow students “warm up” with postures I couldn’t even imagine being able to do. The class hadn’t even started, and already I was thinking that I was in over my head, that I had no business being there, that my yoga practice was dreck, that I was an imposter who shouldn’t be practicing let alone teaching. To say that I was not in a good headspace to receive instruction would be the understatement of the year.
Well, you know what happened, right? Within the first 15 minutes, I fell out of a posture (one that I could do all day long any day that I hadn’t already made myself crazy with anxiety). I didn’t fall subtly. It felt like every head in the room turned toward my mat at the sound of my crash. I cringed as David Swenson walked toward me. He placed a hand on my shoulder, smiled at me kindly, and said, “That’s OK. You’re still a good person.”
My laughter instantly blew away my anxiety and my doubts and my super mean inner chatter. His humor-infused wisdom opened me up – body, mind, and heart. A decade later, his kind one-liner is perhaps the most memorable yoga instruction I have ever received. Somehow, with a handful of words and a smile, he was able to convey the essence of a truth we all often forget and even more often need to hear:
No matter what you can or can’t do, or what you have or haven’t done, at your core you are a good person.
How I wish I was a funnier person so I could make you laugh before you re-read that. Because I know that it landed so deeply for me because David Swenson had me laughing as he said it.
Laughter helps establish us in the softness and ease that are necessary to balance out the hard work of our practice. Patanjali teaches that yoga postures (asana) must incorporate both ease (sukkah) and effort (shtira) and that we must be both stable and relaxed to practice mindful breathing (pranayama).