Ok, so maybe ultimate is stretching it a bit.
I mean there is fierce competition out there. In addition to the conventional visits to the doctor and your garden-variety pharmaceuticals, many of us have access to meditation instruction, yoga, massage therapy, aromatherapy, and other various practices. People talk or boast about how they are able to practice sitting mediation for hours without thinking or how they inhale various “medicinal” plants to help clear their minds.
In contrast, it is not often that you will hear someone say, “Peyote? Oh, no thank you. I prefer ingesting a couple hours of Cosby with some spontaneous tickling thrown in.”
As it turns out though, humor may be one of the most effective and inexpensive forms of holistic therapy.
The word “holistic” has become so popular that it’s lost some of its meaning. Everyone uses it from the local chiropractor to the neighborhood streetwalker: “$20, and I’ll make you feel good all over.” For our purposes, holistic refers to the perception that our ailments and illnesses are affected not just by our physical condition, but by our mental/emotional states as well as our spiritual states. By referring to humor as holistic, I’m suggesting that humor can be used to alter one’s mental, physical, and spiritual conditions.
MIND
How often are you angry or upset over the events of the previous day? Or, how many times do you find yourself driving in your car on the way to work worrying about your next meeting or a possible confrontation with a boss, coworker or client?
In our minds many of us prepare for battle, engage in warfare, and bury ourselves in our own graves before ever stepping out of the car. The stresses of our everyday modern lives hold many of us captives. We relive painful memories of past relationships, past failures, and past decisions only to find ourselves next worrying about future relationships, future failures and future decisions.
Here, the most obvious effect of humor is its use as a distractive mechanism, distracting us from our own harmful thoughts. In simple terms, it forces us to look at our present situation in such a way that we feel good. We are either able to see the world in a different context and are able to not take it so seriously, or we are able to laugh at ourselves. In either case a humorous outlook can help us relax when the stresses of the world seem overwhelming.
BODY:
The human body has evolved to include natural responses to the environment. When confronted with life threatening situations, such as confrontations with wild animals, our ancestors developed the ability to quickly change their heart rates and increase their adrenaline in preparation to either run away or gear up for battle.
This is of course known as the Fight-or-Flight response. However, while our minds have evolved to bring about a more complicated and technically advanced civilization, this fight-or-flight response still remains with us. It is very rare to be faced with a bear attack while placing an order at the McDonald’s drive through window. Yet, the stress we feel while driving there, or the stress of having our orders screwed up still initiate the same body chemistry reaction as if we were in the face of life threatening danger.
The fight-or-flight response is still active, but instead of being activated once in a blue moon, it’s activated when we wake up dreading going to work or school, or when we drive in rush hour traffic, or when we can’t find parking, or when we’re late for an appointment, or when we’re worried about our finances, etc… This constant stress on our body chemistry results in a weakening of our immune systems. It creates an internal toxic build up that we typically do not have a release mechanism for (unless of course you take the term “drive thru” literally and decide to use your vehicle as a battering ram).
Now imagine being told that you are sick or that you’ve been diagnosed with a horrible disease. Wouldn’t you be even more stressed out, thereby worsening your body’s internal defense systems?
That’s why humor can be such a helpful therapy. Not only can it be used as a distraction to ease your mind, but also studies now have shown that being exposed to humor can help boost your immune system. In addition, laughing out loud provides a release for your tension. It ain’t throwing a punch at a grizzly, but it’s close. So, at the very least humor dulls the pain you feel and at its best it may help aid in your recovery. More so, having a humorous outlook in general helps us defend against the many stress related illnesses that have become commonplace in our hectic modern lives.
SPIRIT:
The great wisdom traditions of the world, whether they be from Hinduism and Buddhism from the east, or the three Abrahamic traditions of the west have very similar notions of the human condition. They have described the typical human being as fumbling around the world “half asleep“, not being fully aware of his/her own life and surroundings; living as a bundle of preconditioned responses reacting unconsciously to worldly stimulus just as we’ve been brought up by our cultures to do.
The symptoms include valuing material goods as dictated by society, valuing our social status, and valuing other cultural norms. One day you’re in high school worried about getting a date for the prom and the next day you’re the proud owner of two malfunctioning cars, a mortgage, and a job you hate. Ten years pass by without you even blinking an eye and you’re left wondering how you got where you are. Many of us “live in the wilderness” all our lives without ever realizing the world is more than the forest we find ourselves in. Many of us “look” at the world without ever truly “seeing” it.
Humor is valuable here in a few ways. Some groups, as illustrated through the Sufi tales compiled by Idries Shah, use humor as a way of “waking” people up from their preconditioned trance. Through the use of a joke or humorous story your regular pattern of thought is jolted. That’s what makes something funny. The farther away the punch line is from what you were expecting the funnier the joke.
Another, and related, value of humor is it forces your mind to stop neurosing over the past and fretting the future. Instead, it forces you to live in the present moment. When we stop our minds from stressing us out over past events or future problems we are left with the world as it really is in the present moment, not how we imagine it to be. Take a deep breath. Smell the roses. In our context, relax, pause every once and a while and laugh. As Jesus said,
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, or what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet, your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
If you truly have faith in any expression or notion of transcendence in your life, what are you worried about? It seems to me that living a life lightheartedly demonstrates a greater faith than living with a heavy, worrisome heart. By laughing we acknowledge there’s more to this world than what we normally immediately perceive. By continually trying to change the context in which we view our everyday predicaments and focus on a “bigger picture” we can acknowledge the absurdity of the everyday world of school problems, job issues, and never ending bills.
It does not mean we ignore reality. In fact, those who live lightheartedly are able to be more successful since living becomes more fun. They are more productive and happier since they spend less time passively worrying and more time actively engaging the world head on. As Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Indian teacher Don Juan would say, one’s life becomes their “controlled folly”. Or using a basketball analogy, they shoot their free throws as if it were practice rather than if the game were ever on the line.
Conclusion
We here at My Hyena hope to provide you with as much inspiration for laughter as we can. We really do believe that humor can be used to benefit your life and the lives of the people you come in contact with everyday. We also encourage you to investigate the links we have provided on this page to learn more about the humor-healing connection and to read about the real life stories illustrating the positive effects of humor.
So, if you ever find yourself distressed or overcome by a massive headache at dinner time, even if dinner happens to be a #1 combo meal, just remember to say grace:
“Rub-a-dub-dub. Thanks for the grub. Yeaaaaaa God!”
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