"Laugh because that is the purest sound.”
~Hafiz
Favorite laughter links
Favorite laughter quotesLaughter Yoga videos
Websites & Blogs
Laughter & Spirituality
Literary Laughter
Laughter & Difficulty
Laughter as the best medicine...
Other laughter quotes
Find out about current Laughter Yoga offerings.
Learn more about Laughter Yoga and its benefits.
Request a copy of Rebecca's "Top Eleven Ways to Incorporate More Laughter into 2011"!
Discover the power of intentional laughter one-on-one through Center of Joy Coaching!
Laughter Yoga related videos...
Bodhisattva in Metro
My all time favorite youtube video...
"I Love to Laugh" from Mary Poppins
One of my most beloved movie scenes...
Benefits of Laughter Yoga with John Cleese
My very first taste of Laughter Yoga. Cleese: "Laughter is a force for democracy."
"Laughing for No Reason in Prison"
I gave this 'Pecha Kucha' talk (20 slides, 20 seconds a slide) in 2010 about offering Laughter Yoga behind bars.
"Laughter Flash" in Chicago
My friend Katie led a "Laughter Flash" in Chicago-- by the end no one knew who was part of the project and who wasn't...
"Laughter Yoga with Salimah" in Toronto
My friend Salimah offering an Intro to Laughter Yoga class at a Lululemon store in Toronto. Lovely!
Laughter Yoga and MS
A news clip of my friend Heather in Colorado working with folks with MS and traumatic brain injury.
"Gita's Story (Laughter Yoga Teacher with Parkinson's)"
Woman with Parkinson's Disease explains how she uses Laughter Yoga to manage pain and stay positive by accessing her own "inner pharmacy."
Laughter Yoga as Complementary Care for Cancer
Inspiring story about a Peruvian woman who used Laughter Yoga to stay positive and joyful during her battle with ovarian cancer. (In Spanish with English subtitles.)
Laughter Yoga with Cancer Patients
A news clip on Laughter Yoga at a cancer treatment center in Chicago.
Laughter Yoga Solo Practice
My friend (and former Laughter Yoga trainee!) Robert Rivest offering a 10 minute solo laughter yoga practice. Yea!!
Laughter Yoga in the Workplace
A video of various news clips and footage of Laughter Yoga in the workplace.
Yoga de la Risa en México y el Mundo Entero
A multilingual youtube video (prominently featuring my friend Jorge!) about laughter yoga in Mexico and around the world.
Yoga de la Risa en "Activate con las Evelyns"
My friend Luis on a Mexican talk show discussing and demonstrating Laughter Yoga. Jo Jo Ja Ja Ja!
Gibberish 101
A delightful video with clear & precise instructions on how to speak "gibberish" (zen-speak)!
"Laugh You Sun of a Gun"
Shirley Temple offers this reminder to "look on the sunny side" (with Spanish subtitles).
Laughter Yoga related websites and blogs
Laughter Yoga International
LY founder Dr. Kataria's site for laughter yoga around the world...
Laughter Yoga America
Useful site with lots of information and links...
The Levity Project
My friend Katie's blog dedicated to bringing more levity into the world.
Favorite Laughter Quotes
Laughter & Spirituality
"What is this precious love and laughter budding in our hearts? It is the glorious sound of a soul waking up!"
-- Hafiz
"Be inwardly ever newly joyous, like the ever-fresh laughing waters of a gurgling brook."
-- Paramahaa Yogananda
“What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul."
-- Yiddish Proverb
"When you laugh, aside from the endorphin rush, there's also a spiritual opening. You're not so tight inside yourself. That opening I've found to be a real gift, in people being able to absorb spirituality."
--Rabbi Sydney Mintz
"Man thinks and god laughs."
--Yiddish Proverb
“Blessed is he who makes his companions laugh.”
--The Koran
"It is cheerful to God when you rejoice or laugh from the bottom of your heart." --Martin Luther King Jr.
“Except ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
--Jesus
"If you're not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there."
--Martin Luther (1483-1546)
"It's one thing to say, 'I don't fear death', but to laugh out loud somehow drives the idea home. It embodies our theology."
--Rev. Laura Gentry
"But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate."
--Thomas Merton, Trappist monk
"Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods."
--Japanese proverb
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky."
-- Buddha
"If you become silent after your laughter, one day you will hear God also laughing, you will hear the whole existence laughing -- trees and stones and stars with you."
-- Osho
“The point is seeing that THIS -- the immediate, everyday and present experience -- is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter..."
-- Alan Watts
"I would not exchange the
laughter of my heart for the fortunes of the multitudes; nor would I be
content with converting my tears, invited by my agonized self, into
calm. It is my fervent hope that my whole life on this earth will ever
be tears and laughter. Tears that purify my heart and reveal to me the secret of life and its mystery, Laughter that brings me closer to my fellow men; Tears with which I
join the broken-hearted, Laugher that symbolizes joy over my very
existence."
-- Kahlil Gibran
"Laugh my
friend, for laughter ignites a fire within the pit of your belly and
awakens your being."
--Stella & Blake
"The whole play of existence is so beautiful that laughter can be the only response to it. Only laughter can be the real prayer, gratitude."
--Osho
“In some respects, if I had to choose just one (virtue on
the spiritual path), I’d feel safest with a sense of humor. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves
off, have a good laugh about human nature, and get on with our journeys.”
--Bo Lozoff (Prison-Ashram Project)
“Sometimes when I am alone in my room in the dark, I practice smiling to myself. I do this to be kind to myself, to take good care of myself, to love myself. I know that if I cannot take care of myself, I cannot take care of anyone else.”
--Thich Nhat Han
"In a few Zen monasteries, every monk has to start his morning with laughter, and has to end his night with laughter -- the first thing and the last thing! You try it. . . For no reason! Because there is no reason. Simply, you are again there, still alive -- it is a miracle!"
--Osho
Literary Laughter
"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."
--William Shakespeare
"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."
--Kurt Vonnegut
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."
--"Willy Wonka" (Roald Dahl)
"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."
--e.e. cummings
"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from a human face."
--Victor Hugo
"Earth laughs in flowers."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All you
need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love
in one hand and laughter in the other."
--August Wilson
"Laugh because that is the purest sound.”
--Hafiz
"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."
--Kurt Vonnegut
"Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing."
--Ken Kesey
"Laughter is the most direct route to God, filling our heads with light as we go…" --Henry Miller
"No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad."
--Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, chapter 4
"The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in the man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything."
--"Tom Sawyer" (Mark Twain)
Laughter and Difficulty
"With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die."
--Abraham Lincoln
"I have been confronted with many difficulties throughout the course of my life, and my country is going through a critical period. But I laugh often, and my laughter is contagious. When people ask me how I find the strength to laugh now, I reply that I am a professional laugher."
--The Dalai Lama
"We're in pain, of course, but to cheer ourselves up we get together and laugh from the bottom of our hearts. At any moment, we're scared. But at least this way, if there's another earthquake and I'm killed, I won't die alone."
--Kunimas Nakata, Earthquake survivors sitting around a campfire, Kobe, Japan.
"So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter."
--Gordon W. Allport
"It
is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and
laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either."
--Wayne Dyer
"Laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life. Either you laugh and suffer, or you got your beans or brains on the ceiling."
--Wavy Gravy
Laughter as the best medicine...
"Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects."
--Arnold Glasow
"Play and laughter are vital to feeling good. Recreation isn't merely a frivolous addition to life or a hard-earned reward for work, two beliefs stemming from early Puritanical times. I believe in a society driven by a strong work ethic, with so many individuals burdened with workaholism, people aren't getting enough enodorphinergic surges throughout their bodymind on a daily basis. For you not to be laughing and playing during some part of every day is unnatural and goes against your fundamental biochemistry."
--Dr. Candace Pert, an American neuroscientist & pharmacologist who discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain.
"A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything."
--Irish proverb
"Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations."
--Norman Cousins
"A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically. It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods."
--Author unknown, from an editorial in New York Tribune, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren
"Every blessed one of you feels better for that burst of laughter."
--Ivor Novello
"Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter."
--Sir Max Beerbohm
Other laughter quotes
"There is little success where there is little laughter."
--Andrew Carnegie
"The first half of life is learning to be an adult—the second half is learning to be a child."
--Pablo Picasso
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
--Victor Borge
"Laughter connects you with people. It's almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you're just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy."
--John Cleese
"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind (humankind) is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth"
--Aristotle
“Laughter is an instant vacation."
--Milton Berle
"I have always felt that laughter in the
face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the
day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time
to laugh is any time you can."
--Linda Ellerbee
"I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, 'Ain't that the truth'."
--Quincy Jones
"I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world."
--Peter Ustinov
"At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities."
"He who has
laughter on his side has no need of proof."
--Theodor Adorno
"I am
thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose."
--Woody Allen
"When we laugh together, there is instantaneous recognition of "sameness" even in the midst of vast differences."
--Rebecca Foster :-)
