Prov. 3:12: I know that there is nothing better for them
than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live."
Prov: 17:22: A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a
downcast spirit dries up the bones.
God, that's true! Laughter heals for real. Are you depressed?
Start laughing. Go into a room all by yourself and put on the
funniest movie you can find to get you started. Engage in some
laughter therapy. Heal yourself.
Don't believe the scriptures are true? Then check out this
article below:
The guests at a Manhattan hotel must have thought they had
checked into a madhouse. It was 1964, and day and night they
could hear a man laughing uproariously. Weirder still, he seemed
to be on some kind of schedule. What could be so funny? Nothing
perhaps. Fifty-year-old Norman Cousins was laughing to save his
life.
Cousins, the respected editor of the Saturday Review, had
been given six months to live. He'd been diagnosed suddenly with
life-threatening ankylosing spondylitis, a painful, degenerative
disease of the spine. Cousins, who was in constant agony and
quickly succumbing to paralysis, checked himself out of the
hospital, which in his view "was no place for sick
people" and into a hotel where under the supervision of a
doctor, he began taking extremely high doses of Vitamin C
punctuated by a regimen of intense belly laughter.
Why laughter? It was the only thing that seemed to kill the
pain. Cousins would start laughing by watching Marx Brothers
movies and Candid Camera episodes on a rented projector. After
several months, and day after day of laughter, Cousins walked
out of the hotel. In the years since then, Vitamin C would be
discredited, but laughter, it turns out, is another story.
Cousins's "laughing cure" was greeted by the
medical establishment with derision. How stupid. A man curing a
life-threatening disease with laughter. Cousins even wrote a
book about his experience, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by
the Patient. Although the book helped launch the holistic health
movement, decades would pass before medical researchers reopened
the curious case of the Laughing Man.
In 1995, in Bombay, now Mumbai, a young gastroenterologist
would come across Cousins's story in a medical journal. Dr.
Madan Kataria - a dour and, in his own words, humourless
professional - was used to fishing around in people's guts for a
living. But when he read about Cousins he decided to do
something crazy.
At 7 the next morning, he went to a local park and was able
to gather a few people for what he called a "laughter
club." The small group grew quickly. Each day they would
tell each other jokes to try and produce laughter as a health
routine. But a few days in, a sad thing happened. People were
running out of jokes, and instead were offending each other with
off-colour and sexist humour. Kataria's experiment was, in his
words, a bit of a "flop."
That night Kataria had an epiphany. The people at the
laughter club were fixated on a reason to laugh, a joke, a
story, a comical event. What if he removed the reason?
The next day, Kataria gathered the now miserable group, and
told them they didn't need a reason to laugh. According to
Kataria, some of them burst out laughing. Kataria learned that
you could gather a group of people together, tell them to laugh
and they could just start laughing. If someone hesitated, he
would say: "Fake it."
While the laughing was initially forced or "acted,"
it would almost seem to build magically into the real thing.
Laughter is naturally contagious and by simply laughing, people
were "fooling" their own bodies into laughing along.
And soon the whole group would be laughing madly. Kataria's
discovery of managed, contagious laughter - a new form of
laughter - marked the creation of Laughter Yoga, an
awkward-sounding health craze that has now spread to 40
countries and counting.
