We are slowly getting official recognition throughout the world by leading medical professionals, and it cannot be otherwise.
Laughter Yoga changes lives. Consistently. Everywhere.
Some things you can’t ignore forever.

Do you want to see over 10,000 people laughing, all together, at the same time, for no particular reason?
Mark the date. That will be in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday May 2nd 2010 as part of the 2010 World Laughter Day Celebration as well as the 2010 Sydney Comedy Festival.

I was recently made aware of a new drug “Neurodex” created by Avanir Pharmaceutical to address a newly created disorder called “Involuntary Emotional Expression Disorder” (this is when patients find themselves laughing uncontrollably at something that is only moderately humorous, being unable to stop themselves for several minutes.), and asked what my thoughts about it were.

Involuntary Emotional Expression Disorder is most commonly observed after brain injury, people with dementia expressing a psychosis of some sort, or degeneration in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig disease), a form of motor neuron disease. It affects up to 50% of patients or up to 17,000 people, particularly those with pseudobulbar palsy.[2] It also occurs in approximately 10% of multiple sclerosis patients[3], signalling a degree of cognitive impairment. It is also currently being considered for inclusion in the DSM as one of the two symptoms (of five possible) which must be present for a diagnosis of ADHD in adults. “

Critics may say that this proposed new disorder is one more illustration of how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is primarily driven by the psychopharmacological industry and pathologizes normal behavior, such as grief, sadness, shyness, healthy rebelliousness, and now…laughter.

See what theonion.com made of that news:

To be fair it’s also only part of the story as pathological laughter is not “normal”.

From a medical and therapeutic point of view there are 5 main kinds of laughter:

Genuine or spontaneous laughter is unrelated to one’s own free will and triggered by different (external) stimuli and positive emotions. It has been reported that spontaneous laughter causes typical contractions of the muscles around the eye socket (Duchenne laughter/smile).
Self-induced simulated laughter is triggered by oneself at will, with no specific reason (purposeful, unconditional), and therefore not elicited by humor, fun, other stimuli or positive emotions. (i.e. Laughter Yoga techniques, others).
Stimulated laughter happens as a result of the physical action (reflex) of certain external factors (i.e. to be ticklish, specific facial or bodily motions, by pressing laughter bones).
Induced laughter is a result of the effects of specific drugs or substances (i.e. alcohol, caffeine, amphetamines, cannabis, lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD, nitrous oxide or “laughing gas”, and more).
Finally, Pathological laughter is secondary to injuries to the central nervous system caused by various temporary or permanent neurological diseases and may also occur with certain psychiatric disorders. Pathological laughter is developed with no specific stimulus, is not connected with emotional changes, has no voluntary control of its duration, intensity or facial expression, and sometimes comes with “pathological crying”.

What to do if you know people displaying symptoms of pathological laughter? The answer is “I don’t know, ask your doctor.”

I will not take side for 2 main reasons.
(1) I know nothing of and have zero experience in the field of mental health.
(2) It is impossible to give collective answers to personal, specific situations. The only answer there is “it depends.”

While the risk of massive abuse exists with such a drug (e.g., in a mental hospital “Tommy gets on my nerve when he laughs, let’s give him some neurodex to have some peace”), you can reasonably conceive that in some specific cases, say someone with M.S. who wants to socialize yet can’t control their laughter/crying, such a drug can be justified as a short term solution.

I can only pray that the trained medical professionals who will be prescribing Neurodex will do so very wisely.

Read more at
http://www.stroke.org/site/PageServer?pagename=IEED
http://www.zurinstitute.com/blogs/index.php?blogid=4
http://irnewsservice.com

…this is a trace of where it all began:

“No joke is needed to get members of one of Mumbai’s 37 laughing clubs to erupt with glee. Instead, they breathe deeply, yoga-like, reach for the sky to reduce inhibitions, then force a ‘ho, ho, ha, ha’ until the laughter becomes contagious. It reduces stress, claims Dr. Madan Kataria, the clubs’ founder. ‘Laughing is my mission,’ he says, ‘I want to spread it all over the world.’”

—From “India: Fifty Years of Independence,” May 1997, National Geographic magazine

Read more: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/enlarge/laughing-club_pod_image.html

Expect to read a lot more news like this in the not so distant future: Staff and students from XYZ University take part to a ‘laughter yoga’ session because it makes them feel more optimistic, confident, assertive, adaptable, accepting and aware of themselves and others.

At the beginning of this week they were from Portsmouth University, England.

Today they are from the prestigious University of California, Los Angeles.

Tomorrow they may be from your local University.

Laughter Yoga has a lot to offer. That’s for sure…

Nearly 400 clowns and doctors skilled at clowning took part in an international conference in Buenos Aires (Argentina) last week to present scientific evidence, backed by their own experience, to show why laughter was healthy. It was the third International Congress of Hospital Clowns.

This is not a new scientific research that shows that laughter is a valid and powerful healing modality, and it’s not far off: what defines scientific is a specific protocol (in this case just laugh) that anybody can try anytime anywhere, and get the exact same outcome (which is the case here: laughter heals people the same in the North, South, East and West).

The future of medicine is upon us, coming faster than we think.

(if you read this article and have more info about what was presented at this conference please email it to us at laugh@laughangeles.com. We’ll help spread that far and wide. Thanks!)

Read more

As more and more people demand a holistic, comprehensive cancer care that cares for the person while treating the cancer, more and more cancer centers in North America are adding Laughter Yoga to their list of services.

The last hop on the train is Mercy Medical Center from Ohio (550 physicians, 2500 staff).

Laughter Yoga helps cancer patients, one center at a time. This is not a joke.

Statistics have shown that 5/5 people will eventually die , and it will always be more fun with laughter than without. Besides – who knows? – it may even make you much healthier!

Read more at http://www.the-press-news.com/news/article/4713403

PUNE (INDIA): It was a day for sex workers of Budhwar Peth to laugh, and laugh their hearts out for no reason but just for the sake being happy; a break from a stressful routine which they indulge in just to earn their bread and butter.

With the initiative of Saheli HIV/AIDS Karyakarta Sangh, an NGO, Kishore H Kuvavala, the founder of a popular laughter club, taught about 200 sex workers to laugh. His witty remarks and an interactive session had the audience in splits as he stressed on the importance of laughter therapy.

“Aap kaise ho? (how are you?) asked Kuvavala. “Hum bohot achey hey” (I am very happy), was the reply. Kuvavala says, “though I made them repeat these words, it’s difficult for them to say that they are very happy. But during the session they were happy, though for a short period of time.” The participants raised their hands and laughed together. It was also a sort of get-together for them.

One of the participants said she thoroughly enjoyed the competition. “It is good to laugh. I am tension free now (sab tension chala gaya). ” Another participant said, “I do not think I have laughed so hard in a long time.”

“Laughter gives a positive energy and this can help them fight disease and misery. When they are happy they can deal with business, people they meet and their children in a better way. They do not have a family as such. So the positive vibe can help them unite in a group,” said Kuvavala.

Tejaswi Sevekari, director of the NGO, said the idea was to use laughter as a therapy for sex workers. “We plan to introduce laughter therapy in all our meetings and also in HIV support group. We plan to start a laughter club in Budhwar Peth with help from other NGOs working on HIV/AIDS,” she said.

Read more: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Laughter-club-brings-smile-to-sex-workers/articleshow/5245009.cms

Amid simmering political tensions, a fierce post-election crackdown and a depressed economy, reasons to be cheerful are hardly in abundant supply in Iran.

Now Tehran city council has found an antidote to gee up down-in-the-mouth inhabitants : the good old belly laugh.

It is starting laughing clubs in an effort to reach out to people “who have lost the power of laughter”, according to the Tehran-e Emrooz newspaper, which is linked to the city’s mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

Participants will be urged to guffaw away the blues in group sessions designed to tackle the stress of urban living in a city of 12 million people. The classes may also lighten the morbid atmosphere left over from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election, which triggered a clampdown that opponents claim left at least 72 people dead and resulted in many others being tortured or raped in detention.

Clubs have been established in two cultural centres normally used for more high-minded pursuits such as concerts, further education classes and poetry readings. Eventually, the council hopes to expand the events to pensioners’ groups, health centres and even prisons.

The classes are based on methods devised by Iranian laughter therapist Majid Pezeshki, who developed his technique from a discipline practised in India based on the principle that laughing has physical and psychological health benefits.

However, applying it in Iran may be no joke. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, public laughter has been officially frowned upon by the religious authorities, perhaps mindful of the maxim attributed to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution’s spiritual leader: “There is no fun in Islam.”

The difficulties were illustrated last year when an earlier attempt to start the classes was aborted because of the two-month religious mourning periods of Moharram and Safar, despite 6,000 people having enrolled.

The new sessions also challenge another longstanding taboo: they are open to women. Traditionally, it was considered uncouth and unfeminine for Iranian women to laugh uproariously.

Until recent times, brides would pose for their wedding photos with a deliberately glum expression.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/19/tehran-laughing-classes

The press release read “Japanese Railway ‘Smile Scan’ Test Forces Employees To Give Customers More Sincere Smiles“. I never take anything on the internet for granted so I went digging for more information as I first thought this was a hoax.

It’s not.

A Japanese company named Omron has indeed created a device that scans a person’s face, renders a 3D model of it and checks a few critical spots (mouth, eyes etc.) to evaluate if someone is smiling hard enough. Every smile gets a percentage from 0% to 100%, with 100% obviously being the perfect smile (see the picture below). The device, which consists of a small analogue video camera, a sensor unit and a piece of software, is only available in Japan at this point.

See it in action:

To me this machine simply shows people the difference between a true smile and a fake smile. The fake smile only engages the muscles of the mouth and sends close to 0 nerve impulses to your neo-cortex. As such it does not create any kind of “happy” chemistry (some even say that the fake smile may cause depression). The true smile however (also known as Duchenne Smile) engages both the muscles of the eyes and mouth and does change your chemistry.

I dare not ask of course how much this device costs but regardless and if you are a interested in this for your staff because their morale is so low that they are grumpy and depressed all the time please do consider bringing a Laughter Yoga professional in instead. What they will do for you all is far more profound, powerful and long-lasting! Smiling is good. Laughing is better. Understanding that you can do both easily as and when you just because you want to is even better still.

Confirmed!

The 2010 All America Laughter Yoga Conference will take place on 08/25-31 at the Sandia Courtyard Hotel & Convention Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

• Before: Become a Certified L.Y. Leader (08/25-26)
• Before: Thursday One Day L.Y. Intensive (08/26)
• Main Event: Thu. Eve. 08/26 – Sun. 08/29 (noon)
• After: Advanced L.Y. Training (08/30-31)

This is very exciting because Albuquerque is an international airport (easy access) and a big stop for Southwest airlines (cheap plane tickets) + this hotel provides a complimentary airport shuttle service (no need to have a car or pay for a taxi) and has 2 restaurants on-site (we can all eat and stay together).

How much will this hotel cost? $69 for a standard Double Queen and $79 for the deluxe version (divide that by 2 if you are willing to share a room).

Our suggestion? Reserve your room now! You won’t have to pay for it until you get there and that way you’ll be sure that there WILL be a room available for you when you do get there.

Our 2010 call for presenters is open!

We are looking for ten 1h (45 minutes + 15 minutes Q&A) well prepared and content-rich professional presentations on any Laughter Yoga related topic that will either inspire and empower Laughter Yoga professionals to become better at what they do, or fire them up with enthusiasm to try something new that they had not thought about.

Note that there is no value in presenting about the benefits of laughter for any given applications. We already know it’s good. What has value is how you do it, not why. As such you must successfully practice yourself what you propose to share with us.

The presenter application deadline is Friday, January 22, 2010. You will be notified of the acceptance of your application (or not) before Friday, February 26, 2010.

Click here to apply

Exactly how widespread is Laughter Yoga?

It was a random check. I wanted to know how popular www.laughangeles.com has become on a global scale. We have been for several years now the most popular Laughter Yoga website in North America, ranking with industry watchdog www.alexa.com on 10/31/10 as the 78,145 most popular website in the USA (in comparison the official Laughter Yoga website www.laughteryoga.org ranked 156,372 on that smale scale, in that same great country of 300+ million people on the same day).

Here is the question I asked big brother: where did the people who visited www.laughangeles.com in the past 3 months come from?

The answer both surprised and inspired me greatly. Our fan club is spread over 141 countries and 16 territories on 6 continents! Here is the list:

Now: there are exactly precisely 195 countries on Earth as of 10/31/2010. That gives us a current world coverage of 72.3%! Not bad.

Dare consider that ideas precede action. To say that there are Laughter Clubs in each one of these locations is a little far fetched at this point in time, and I choose to think that this time is not that far away!

Here is a list of the countries that have not “visited” us in the past 3 months.

What this means: dare we say it: www.laughangeles.com is the most comprehensive educational website on Laughter Yoga and Laughter Clubs on the planet, and that’s just a beginning! (we are currently working on a major update with lots more updated and interactive content, all due out in a few weeks.)

Everything in due time is all I can say about that. Laughter Yoga is marching on and will prove hard to stop.

Laughter encourages and empowers people to actively participate in their health care

Dr. Gita Suraj Narayan, a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Work and Community Development, University of Kwazulu-Natal (and a Certified Laughter Yoga Teacher!) recently proved that Laughter is a powerful form of complementary Medicine through her research and a series of Community Outreach Projects.

Dr Suraj-Narayan was inspired by the founder of Laugher Yoga, Dr Madan Kataria, to carry out research exploring the Bio Psycho-Social Impact of Laughter Therapy on Stroke Patients and to empower rural communities using laughter yoga with cognitive restructuring as an alternate form of therapy.

The study, which commenced in September 2008 comprised 120 laughter therapy sessions using various laughter techniques, pranayama (deep yogic breathing exercises) and cognitive restructuring conducted on stroke patients between the ages of 40 to 90 in the Verulam Frail Care Community.

Initially, some of the stroke patients viewed laughter therapy with skepticism. However by their fourth session, they were more receptive to this form of therapy, said Dr Suraj-Narayan. Significant findings of the study included:

• a reduction in post-stroke depression resulting from direct damage to emotional centres in the brain, compounded by frustration and difficulty adapting to new limitations. These included anxiety, panic attacks, flat effect (failure to express emotions) and apathy, often characterized by lethargy, irritability, sleep disturbances, lowered self esteem and withdrawal, and a reduction in stroke-related pain.
• enhanced mobility and the ability to walk without walking aids.
• endorphins released as a result of laughter helped in reducing the intensity of pain.
• in some cases laughter therapy helped patients recover from cognitive deficits resulting from stroke including perceptual disorders, speech problems, and problems with attention and memory.
• improved communication and relations between the patient and significant others.

“Stroke patients viewed laughter therapy as a safe medium to overcome their problems. They developed a zeal and enthusiasm to do things for themselves. For older stroke patients it had given them inner joy and offered them a renewed sense of purpose to live,” said Dr Suraj-Narayan.

Observing the positive effects laughter therapy has on stroke patients, Dr Suraj-Narayan said she attained “super-sensuous joy” and a sense of fulfillment knowing that this therapy made a profound difference in the lives of people who were vulnerable.

In another study last year, Dr Suraj-Narayan also conducted laughter yoga combined with cognitive restructuring with patients suffering from stress, sugar diabetics, asthma, depression and high blood pressure.

“After exposure to laughter therapy over a four-month period I found a reduction in stress levels, depression, sugar diabetes and blood pressure among some of the participants. Because laughter improves the lung capacity and oxygen levels in the blood some of the participants reported a reduced frequency of asthmatic attacks and in the use of nebulisers,” said Dr Suraj-Narayan.

The laughter exercises conducted by Dr Suraj-Narayan stimulated heart and blood circulation equivalent to any other standard aerobic exercise. According to Dr Suraj-Narayan a belly laugh is equivalent to “internal jogging.” Laughter provides a good cardiac conditioning especially for those who are unable to perform physical exercises.

“Laughter therapy may be used as a supplementary treatment to patients who are already on medication for their ailments. It should not be used as a substitute for medication,” said Dr Suraj-Narayan. She plans to develop an integrated model of laughter therapy incorporating individual, group and community development which can be used within the School of Social Work and Community Development and other related disciplines.

Dr Suraj-Narayan discovered laughter is an excellent medium to minimize the negative impacts of contemporary issues facing rural and urban communities. She has conducted several community outreach projects using laughter therapy aimed at breaking down the barriers of social isolation, discrimination, oppression and concomitant depression, as well as to expose people to a light-hearted but effective way of enhancing their sense of well-being and reducing stress and burnout.

She says laughter also encourages and empowers people to actively participate in their health care.

Read more at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/UKZNonline/V3/17/s16.html

Sports student Ulrich Rehm (26) is doing a very interesting research on Laughter Yoga and back pain in the context of his Ph.D. thesis (very appropriately titled “Laughter Yoga For Back Pain?”) He is backed up by his mentor Professor Dr. Heiko Wagner from Münster University (Germany).

In a recent experiment he hooked 2 healthy young men to an elekromyographie (EMG) machine and measured their strength, endurance, and increase in muscle activity as they performed a series of regular exercises on a mat for 30 minutes. Next they were asked to stand up and go through another 30 minutes of – this time – Laughter Yoga exercises while still hooked up to the machine.

Conclusion: simulated laughter exercises engage as many abdominal muscles as conventional physiotherapy exercises – sometimes even more.”

Impressive.

We look forward to hearing more on this!

You can read the full article (in German) at http://www.szon.de/news/gesundheit/200811250642.html. A tip if your German is either rusty or non-existent: let the machine work for you Use http://translate.google.com/ to translate.

P.S.:

This is unrelated, and for those of you who understand German (even if you don’t it’s still interesting to watch) there is a great 15 minutes documentary on the health benefits of laughter at http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/content/844140?inPopup=true

The 2009 All America Laughter Yoga conference was very inspiring and empowering!

The Laughter Yoga flame is burning strong in North America. We can vouch for that. My personal experience was witnessing the purity of passion of many. One participants summarized that with the words “layers of awesomeness”. I totally agree with it. It was very touching.

One of the big thing that impressed people this year is the realization that as a community we have long gone past the stage where they talked about the potential of Laughter Yoga, or the simple stage of trying it out in various settings to gain experience.

We now have seasoned professionals who use and have been using for a while the method on a daily/weekly basis in their field, from working with dying kids and adults in hospice settings all the way through high level business applications at senior management level, with much of everything and anything in between.

Jeffrey Briar, Linda Leclerc, Tanaz Bamboat, Michael Coleman and Khevin and Gaga Barnes received the 2009 Laughter Yoga Ambassador Award as a mark of appreciation from the entire North American Laughter Yoga community for their uncompromising dedication and patience in spreading Laughter Yoga.

Photos

Click here to see photos from this event.
Click here to purchase the 2009 All America Laughter Yoga conference 8 DVD-set (almost 10h of video!)

Videos

Here is a summary video of this event and what took place: