Here’s a great piece from the east coast about how how some locals are using the healing power of humor.
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By Kathy Uek
Originaly found at MetroWestDailyNews.com
A guy walks into a bar…
Just those few words can make you laugh.
It’s no joke that laughter helps reduce blood pressure and lower the heart rate, which proves, says Memie Watson, that laughter is the best medicine.
“Because you are laughing so hard, it also removes toxins from the body,” said Watson, a stress management consultant who teaches people how to chill out.
Watson knows all about stress. She is a full-time paramedic with a Danvers ambulance service.
“Humor is important for reducing stress,” she said. “There’s nothing like a good laugh.”
Local residents talked about how humor helps them de-stress and get through life lightly.
Ed Sanderson said he lives by the motto: “life should be fun.”
He practices that philosophy at Natick’s Joan & Ed’s Deli, which he and his wife Joan own, by putting jokes and funny stories all over the deli walls.
An example: “By the time your children are fit to live with you, they are living with someone else.”
“Humor is a central part of life,” said 66-year-old Sanderson. “Fun is important when working. If it’s not fun, it not worth doing.”
Sanderson passed the humor gene on to his daughter, Mindy, who said, “Laughter is just a way of life.”
John Vernon, a chair aerobics instructor at Natick Senior Center, uses humor to get class members to forget about pain.
“Even though it’s a chair exercise, you have to put effort into it and when you are 80 or 90, it’s not easy,” said Vernon of Holliston. “Sometimes humor can act as anesthetic to take your mind off the pain.”
To help his students lose that sense of pain, Vernon pokes fun at the Red Sox, Tom Brady, and the aging process itself.
There’s no pain in the day for the owners of an 8-year-old beagle named Eugene.
The pooch makes Eddie Denty, 8, of Natick laugh when he looks at him with his sad eyes while pushing on his crate.
“He’s just so cute,” he said.
“And when he runs, he gallops,” added 7-year-old brother, Phillip.
Fourteen-month-old Charlie Lansdale of Natick is just learning to run, but at a recent family wedding he brought chuckles to his parents, guests and hopefully to the bride and groom when he said at a rather quiet moment, “Uh oh.”
Local residents find laughs everywhere – even in the pool. During a water aerobics class at Focus on Fitness in Framingham, instructor Alison Olson tells a joke or two on the last Friday of each month on “Joke Day.” Sometimes when reading moments of mirth, submitted by class members, the pages get soggy, but everyone laughs on.
“We put it into the class because we take life pretty seriously and we need to have opportunities where people have fun and laugh a bit,” said Olson. “That class lends itself well to telling jokes.”
Certified laughter yoga instructor, Laura Malloy, makes people giggle and roar in the classes she teaches throughout the community as part of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The gist, or jest, of the concept, created by Dr. Madan Kataria in India in 1995, is based on the research that the body can’t tell the difference between genuine laughter and laughter exercises, said Malloy.
So when she starts one of her exercises imitating a mad scientist, with an evil laugh, rubbing his hands together, at first the giggles may be contrived, but soon the laughter becomes genuine and contagious.
“It’s so much fun,” said Malloy. “My mood is always higher after a laughter yoga session.”
Laughter, she said, decreases stress hormones, boosts endorphins and provides a good cardiovascular workout.
At her sessions, the exercises are paired with breathing techniques, so they increase oxygen to the body and the brain and also boost the immune system, she said.
Laughter breeds success. Thirteen years after the first class began in India, 6,000 Laughter Clubs smile in 60 different countries.
At Dean College in Franklin, faculty member Jim Beauregard teaches “Commedia del Arte” in which his students learn gestures and motions necessary to portray comedy.
That, said college spokeswoman Pat Samson, is so “their comedic acting brings laughter to others.”
Samson tries to see the funny side of life.
“If you can’t laugh at something during the day, your life is way too serious and life is too short for that,” she said
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