A happy way of yoga : Laughter Yoga

Life! It's about new days, new challenges, and new stress coming our way. After a certain point, we feel that we need an escape from these chaotic situations. And everyone would agree laughter is a great escape. As one says “Laughter is the best medicine”, and I won’t deny it. It’s true! I can say that because the SYNC fam recently organized a ‘Laughter Yoga’ session with the Laughter Yoga Guru Archana Rao and it was a complete joyride.

HO HO HA HA HA! And here it all began. We all came together and performed some laughter exercises reflecting on the different situations in our life. Breathe in, breathe out, laughable blaming each other, silent laughing and many more fun exercises covered the session. To conclude the session, we performed a meditative exercise – it was not a basic form of meditation, it had something more to it. It helped us all to relax our minds and calm ourselves down. We are very glad that she had specially organized this sound therapy and meditation for us.

This whole session was not about cracking a joke and trying to laugh at it but instead laughing without making any efforts and laughter yoga is all about that. Laughter Yoga is not a comedy. It is an exercise program developed by Indian physician Dr. Madan Kataria where anyone can laugh without relying on humor, jokes, or comedies.

The concept of Laughter Yoga is based on scientific studies which have proved that the body cannot differentiate between intentional and real laughter. One gets the same physiological and psychological benefits. 

Some benefits of Laughter Yoga are as follows: 

1. Laughter Yoga helps us remain cheerful and in a good mood throughout the day by releasing endorphins from our brain cells.

2. Laughter Yoga is like an aerobic exercise that increases your heart rate, and blood circulation thereby relaxing your muscles.

3. Laughter Yoga reduces stress and strengthens the immune system.

4. Laughter is a great connector of people and brings quality caring and sharing among friends

5. Laughter helps to create a positive mental attitude to deal with negative situations and people.

Let the beautiful smile on your face never fade away.

Live. Laugh. Love. 

Toodles!

By Hrishita Shetty and Vaishnavi Dalvi (Team SYNC)