Laughter Yoga: Daily Practices for Health and Happiness by Madan Kataria
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I enjoyed reading and applying this little book about how laughter is healing and promotes happiness.
The author is an Indian physician who stumbled across laughter therapy when going through some adjustments to the pressures and disconnected quality of life in a large Indian city while attending medical school. He read Norman Cousin's book about his experiences with laughter and comedy in healing his painful disease and immediately set about doing personal "research" into how effective laughter would be in healing his depression.
He also looked at laughter as a way to bring people together in a warm and friendly way, to reconnect humans. Using Yoga philosophy and breathing exercises, in 1995 he went about formally setting up Laughter "Clubs", first in India and then around the world.
In this book he describes the way laughter yoga is practiced, the principles, and talks about the various studies that show how useful laughter is in alleviating various conditions, and in fact, in healing some. He looks also at various populations of people and the effect of laughter yoga in these groups.
This book is very inspiring. I have been doing some of the exercises. There are several videos about Laughter Yoga online and courses as well, through Udemy, etc. This seems to be a simple technique that can be expanded and used in many different situations (eg., dental anxiety) to turn things around so that fear is replaced by confidence, angry exasperation by calm, foggy thinking by acuity, etc. It's a quick read with lots of uplifting testimonials.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I enjoyed reading and applying this little book about how laughter is healing and promotes happiness.
The author is an Indian physician who stumbled across laughter therapy when going through some adjustments to the pressures and disconnected quality of life in a large Indian city while attending medical school. He read Norman Cousin's book about his experiences with laughter and comedy in healing his painful disease and immediately set about doing personal "research" into how effective laughter would be in healing his depression.
He also looked at laughter as a way to bring people together in a warm and friendly way, to reconnect humans. Using Yoga philosophy and breathing exercises, in 1995 he went about formally setting up Laughter "Clubs", first in India and then around the world.
In this book he describes the way laughter yoga is practiced, the principles, and talks about the various studies that show how useful laughter is in alleviating various conditions, and in fact, in healing some. He looks also at various populations of people and the effect of laughter yoga in these groups.
This book is very inspiring. I have been doing some of the exercises. There are several videos about Laughter Yoga online and courses as well, through Udemy, etc. This seems to be a simple technique that can be expanded and used in many different situations (eg., dental anxiety) to turn things around so that fear is replaced by confidence, angry exasperation by calm, foggy thinking by acuity, etc. It's a quick read with lots of uplifting testimonials.
Here is a podcast interviewing Dr. Madan Kataria who invented and wrote Laughter Yoga.
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