Produced by HuffPost's Eyes & Ears Citizen Journalism Unit
I am not a yoga person, which is why I need yoga. Too bad my best efforts to exercise my willpower long enough to attend a yoga class have culminated in trips to the bodega (formerly trips to the bar) to reward myself on my way home, undoing my efforts and then some. Yoga does not come naturally to me. I am not flexible, I cannot relax regardless of how many deep breaths I enlist to sooth me, nor do I feel at one with the concept of spandex yoga attire at the moment.
I have always aspired to be a yoga person, but since my new year's resolution was to stop doing things that I hate to do because I believe they will pay off one day, I had finally crossed yoga off of my to-do list.
And just like the boy who finally told me he loved me the second I let go of him -- yoga showed up for me the second I let go of it, in the form of Laughter Yoga.
Any kind of yoga where you are encouraged to laugh your head off in other people's faces while "practicing" (sort of like I always wanted to) is my kind of yoga.
Wednesday night, I attended a Laughing Yoga event, held in the sufficiently accommodating reception area of Vishwa Prakash's midtown textile office. It is there he shares the teachings of his guru, and Laughing Yoga's founder, Bombay based Dr. Madon Katana. Prakash conducts the weekly two-hour yoga events from his midtown office, at no cost to the participants because of his own dedication to laughter yoga and for the "contribution it makes to humanity."
Prakash thinks New Yorkers especially could fare well by laughing a lot more, because, "laughter can reconnect them and make them a better human being."
Better how? Well, for starters, laughter makes you more productive. Prakash said there has been scientific research which concluded that the chemical reaction activated by laughter elevates one's brain function to such an extent that it makes one more productive, creative and possibly smarter. Johns Hopkins psychologist Ron Berk, Ph.D. conducted a study where he administered the same test to two groups of students in the same graduate level biostatics course. The students who were given funny instructions on their test -- as opposed to simply didactic ones -- averaged "significantly" higher test scores.
The Laughter Yoga website lists other health benefits you can look forward to, including stress relief, lowered blood pressure, and the alleviation of muscle pain among others.
My laughter yogi, Vishwa, was very adamant about making sure that we all felt plugged into the group, which was a pretty easy task considering that the entire event was orchestrated in a way that promotes connection to the other people. We hugged and laughed with each other, sat in a circle on the floor and meditated together. We also sat in chairs and talked about our experiences while passing around snack bowls. It felt like a club and reinforced a sense of community with the others in the group.
The ability to draw upon laughter with the same reliability and consistency as, say, a brisk walk, was what motivated Dr. Madon Katana to employ something as concrete and systematic as breathing exercises to induce the laughter -- as opposed to having to rely on an outside stimulus, such as jokes or anecdotes. It is the use of these yogic breathing exercises, or pranayama, that makes Laughter Yoga part of the yogic tradition.
Laughter Yoga eliminated the need for my list of considerations that ran in other yoga classes: Am I misinterpreting this? Am I being open minded? Am I doing this correctly? Is my arm spine in effective alignment? Is this working? What is wrong with me that I do not like this? Do my arms looks fat?
There really wasn't much room for that. It was too simple and too playful. All you had to do was laugh. It freed up a lot of potential within me to relax and therefore be more open to connect to myself and to the others. If just a little bit.