When Carla Riechman laughs, you hear it.
With her big laughter, the former District of Columbia school teacher has been compared to the laughing Buddha, and it’s a comparison she welcomes. She helps people laugh, which in turn helps them meditate.
“Laughter brings one to silence,” says Riechman, 63, who calls herself the professional “giggle lady.” She established the “laughter revolution,” a laughter meditation program based in the District of Columbia that provides people with hourlong sessions in which they laugh and then meditate. She hosts laughter sessions at people’s homes and local wellness centers, as well as online at the-laughterrevolution.com.
Riechman gives few instructions during those sessions: She starts with a short “smile meditation,” in which participants close their eyes, smile and get into a relaxed, positive state. Then she starts laughing, and everyone else follows. People laugh for five to 10 minutes at a time because laughing is actually considered a mild workout. Much like exercising, laughter stretches muscles, sends oxygen to tissues and releases hormones.
“They laugh at different levels,” Riechman says. “Some people are very self-conscious. They can only give what they can give. But if you are giving your 100 percent, you are allowing your mind to completely relax. Your mind stops thinking, and you begin to feel the depth within you.”
Even if the laughter starts out fake, it usually induces real laughter, says Katherine Puckett, the national director of the mind-body medicine program at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Zion, Illinois. And laughter, she adds, “is the best contagion.”
Riechman says that at some of her sessions — especially for the bigger crowds she conducts with groups such as the World Bank and technology companies — people’s laughter sounds like popcorn popping. Functionally, she adds, laughter also reduces stress and can help you see situations more positively.
Priti Mathur, 41, a government contractor, began laughing with Riechman when she established the program two decades ago. Mathur, then in her early 20s, says she was looking for mental health tools when she came across Riechman’s program. She was immediately hooked and has been practicing the meditation method ever since.
“I can definitely feel the stress leaving the body. You fill yourself with joy. The mind kind of quiets down,” says Mathur, who maintains a regular, twice-a-day meditation practice but sometimes spontaneously does laughter meditation.
“Sometimes you find yourself in the throes of laughter,” she says. “If I’m not at a party, and there’s a space where I feel I can sit and meditate for 20 minutes, I just kind of do it.”
The meditations following laughter, she says, “are a little fresher and deeper” at the same time.
[Read: The Happiness Racket: When the Pressure to Be Happy Makes You Miserable.]
Laughter in the Clinic
We all know laughter does us good, but can we hold it to therapeutic standards? Well, it’s not chemotherapy, so it probably won’t cure your cancer, but it can provide a welcome relief from the stress of cancer, Puckett says. A cancer patient approached her a decade ago and said, “You guys need some fun in here,” and gave Puckett information on therapeutic laughter. CTCA combines traditional and complementary therapies for cancer patients, so if any place was going to be open to such a practice, this was probably it. The CTCA website has a page on laughter therapy, citing laughter’s historical use in medical therapy. Surgeons in the 13 th century used it in pre-anesthetic days to distract patients from pain; fast-forwarding to the 1970s, Norman Cousins, in his book “Anatomy of an Illness,” wrote about his recovery from cancer using laughter and vitamins.
Still, Puckett had reservations about bringing laughter into someplace as serious as a cancer hospital. But she took a chance and started a humor group, with Mad Libs, jokes and comic videos. The group waned because patients’ tastes in humor were so variable, so she decided to adopt some of the techniques of Dr. Madan Kataria, also known as the “giggling guru” and the founder of laughter yoga in India.
Puckett has participants start off by making laughter sounds and touching the body part from which they came: “hee-hee” comes from the head; “haw-haw” from the heart; “ho-ho” from the belly. They do two or three rounds of the sounds, sometimes chanting in unison. Then they may move onto a laughter greeting, in which instead of shaking hands, people burst into laughter. “It’s a good icebreaker,” Puckett says. Or they engage in gibberish conversation with each other. “It’s good, clean, silly fun,” she says.
Most importantly, these various prompts invariably lead people to their own source of real laughter — the type shared with a good friend, for example. “It restores that in people who have lost touch with that, and so often people with cancer have,” Puckett says. Laughter can also lead to the release of other blocked emotions. One woman imitated people asking her how she was in that doting, saccharine way that’s well-intended but often annoying to sick people. Her laughter led to venting and tears — and was something everyone in the room could relate to, Puckett says.
She adds that there are other health benefits: Laughter releases endorphins, which energize and help elevate people’s moods. Studies have also shown that laughter improves heart health and may strengthen the immune system. But mostly, Puckett says, “It takes their mind off the hard stuff.”
[Read: When Cancer is in Your Genes.]
Laughter and Movement: a Winning Combination
Puckett sometimes borrows laughter games from laughter yoga, which synchronizes laughter to movements. At a recent conference of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in the District of Columbia, professional laughter leader Debbie Ellison demonstrated some of these. With “milkshake laughter” you pretend you’re drinking your own laughter milkshake; you laugh while you do the chicken dance; or you pretend you’re on your cellphone and laugh. An at-home exercise Ellison teaches is the “laugh-firmation” in which you get in front of a mirror and say nice things about yourself while pointing to yourself and laughing.
“You’ll feel good all day,” she says, adding, “One of the benefits of laughter is that it keeps you in the present moment, which is the only time of real joy.”
Ellison doesn’t get too hung up on whether the laughter is real or fake because “the body doesn’t know the difference.” Physically, laughter marries especially well to yoga because laughter causes the diaphragm to move up and down, and it shakes up the surrounding organs. “It’s a great internal massage,” and the physical activity has even helped people lose weight, she says.
And the mind, she adds, is also more flexible when you’re laughing. “If you don’t like something, laughter makes it so much easier,” she says. “Use laughter as a coping skill, so instead of crying or getting angry, just laugh. Even if it’s fake, it changes your whole perspective.”
[Read: 10 Tips to Lighten Up and Laugh.]
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Go On, Laugh Your Heart Out. It?s Good for You originally appeared on usnews.com
