Honoring Our Teachers

There is a woman in our Senior Center Laughter Club who taught high school history at the same public school for 35 years. She has retired now. During laughter club meetings, playing laughter games, she has the most serious silliness of any participant yet (although there are many close seconds). Her blood pressure, since retiring and laughing with us, has dropped 35 points. I wonder, if more of her staff and students had simply said, “Thank you”, if her blood pressure would have been so high?

I learned about the miracle of laughter from Bharata Wingham, a Laughter Yoga Teacher at Yogaville, VA. He has opened an entire part of life that I didn’t know could exist, or would exist, in today’s stressed out world. My day-to-day experience of life is different than it was a year ago, after laughing by myself and with a huge diversity of others. My eyes are brighter. I laugh at little things throughout the day that I wouldn’t have before. I find humor in what would be stressful situations. I strike up conversations with complete strangers with ease. I feel much more “grounded” and “clear”. How do you put a price on that? How do you put a price on the ripple effect of my leading hundreds of people in laughter yoga? You can’t. But, you can honor the one who introduced you to the path.

So when I received an offer to publish a book about Laughter Yoga, I instantly knew I needed to somehow include Bharata. Soon after, I had a tremendous spiritual experience one night on my way to call him that basically ended up being the very strong message, “It’s not your book to write.” That didn’t mean, as I eventually understood it, that I wouldn’t be writing the book. It meant I wouldn’t be writing it alone. Two are always better, when pioneering a really new concept. The goose-bump creating point: God also wanted to honor my teacher.

While putting the proposal together with Bharata, there have been moments of huh?, hilarity, writer’s weirdness… several bumps along the path, a major pothole… but I haven’t been able to let go of the message, “It’s not your book to write.” It’s as if that has been made part of my soul. Can’t get it out.

I wish we had a National Holiday — “Honor Your Teachers Day”. Any teacher. Even if you no longer follow the same path or use the same wisdom or advice. At one point in your journey, that teacher made all of the difference. When we honor our teachers, we also honor how we’ve used what they’ve given us. They’ve helped direct our journeys and given us a precious part of their souls. As for our souls, we can’t get them out.

Peace,
Leigh

Leading Laughter Yoga at a Non-Laughter Yoga Event

Saturday I had the privilege of leading Laughter Yoga with two volunteers as laughing Hershey’s Kisses. We were volunteers at The Chocolate Festival, a big Charlottesville event. But we needed to somehow relate laughter yoga to chocolate. So, we all wore giant Hershey’s Kisses foil hats (I made them . We stood out in the crowd.

To make matters more bizarre, we got on stage and attempted to lead the suspicious crowd in some laughter yoga games. I did a little introduction and then the games began. Some people participated, some just gave us strange looks.

We only had 15-20 minutes to do all of this. The crowd was the hardest I’ve ever had to try to participate in laughter games. Including women inmates at the jail. If I could do this again, I would spend much more time explaining laughter yoga and much less time trying to get everyone laughing. Although, the crowd did like “very good, very good, yay!”.

The better news, we handed out over 100 brochures about laughter yoga and many of my business cards.

Just a tidbit from as we leaders carry the laughter torch. Blaze on!

Hello & welcome

I thought it would be good for me to write a few things about Laughter Yoga each day as a way to gather and give support. This path leads to addiction, so sharing about my daily doses of all-natural laughter highs seems to follow. Hope to hear from you.