Stress, Suggestions and Using Laughter

What does the word stress bring up for you? Very likely it will be negative because the media influences us that stress is ‘bad’ and we are directed to find relief from it with buying, eating, drinking, holidaying etc. Many people are so accustomed to living in a stressful manner and may not realise that there are ways to combat it. It can be that when we our time is restricted, it is beneficial to feel under pressure and we can achieve that without sending our bodies into a stressed mode. In fact it can be uplifting and energising, rather like self-testing or facing a challenge. And the word challenge is bandied about these days, as one to use instead of one that conjures up negative tones such as difficult or hard. A challenge helps us to get out of our own way and get things done, especially if we are procrastinators. I can relate to that. Our attitude is our choice and it can be small things that help us to feel in balance when our life is full of demands. We may feel stuck and often have little choice of changing things for the time being.

From my experience and many others, laughter, exercise, gratitude, good diet and meditation are imperative to live a fit and well life. Incorporating laughter into your daily life is highly beneficial. Laughing helps you to improve your sense of humour and bring lightness, upliftment and joy. When life throws you a lemon and you feel lost, being able to laugh can save the day and give you enough strength and hope to keep on going.

Meditation helps deal with thinking too much as alternatively things blow out of proportion and our mind will be in a constant whirl. We do not need to think and things frequently seem worse than they really are when there will be light at the end of the tunnel. I believe that whatever comes our way we can deal with and will ultimately makes us stronger and wiser.

Speaking of laughter, I have found it to be a fantastic addition to my life. It has helped me with the physical exercise aspect and in other ways, including bringing a lightness and energy into my being. I love being involved with Laughter Yoga and grateful to the Laughter Yoga movement Founder, Dr Madan Kataria who developed Laughter Yoga into a simple exercise routine, which he calls ‘laughing for no reason’. It is scientifically proven that the body cannot differentiate between real and fake laughter. What begins as pretend laughter still releases positive endorphins into our blood stream and what began as an exercise quickly turns into real spontaneous tummy wobbling laughter.

How we can learn to laugh easier is to be in a group situation, such as a Community Laughter Yoga Club which assists us to learn to laugh more freely. Before we go I will leave you with an example of how to do this laughing for no reason thing. Once you learn the art to laugh, you will discover there is no limit to your laughter creativity. You will find yourself laughing more and longer. You will re-invent yourself. The more you learn to ‘laugh for no reason’ the simpler and more spontaneous laughter becomes.

An important hint first up is to recognise the benefit and have the desire to laugh more for the many health benefits that it brings. The next step to help you lighten up and heighten your sense of humour, find everyday things, in fact anything at all, to practice laughter and laugh lightly at them.

Try the following. Begin with a quiet little chuckle, chortling away, make it bigger and louder, if it is appropriate, depending on where you are physically. Say to yourself, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, incorporating breathing which goes as follows. Breathe in and as you breathe out, say either silently or out loud, ha ha ha ha ha ha and you can add some he he he’s too. It is very good to incorporate laughing and breathing, which is why it is called Laughter Yoga. There are many other Laughter Yoga breathing exercises, which I am happy to forward to you upon request. Also you will find more about them on my website or you might be able to come along to the free community Ferntree Gully Laughter Club, which meets on the 2nd, 4th and 5th Sunday morning at 10.30am.

Love and laughter blessings to you,

Lynette Mitchell.

Please email me to receive my newsletter, or sign up on Laughter For Living.

Disclaimer: This post is written from my personal understanding and experience and is not to be misconstrued. The advice given is general and I am not a medical doctor, taking responsibility for how it is received, my intention is that posts will be supportive and assist in living a more holistic life.

The Seniors Festival, Flexible Time, Goals and Renewing One's Self

Feeling respect and honour is important and coming up in October we may be prompted to feel gratitude, respect and honour for the seniors in our community because of The Seniors Festival, officially in Victoria the 4^th to 11^th October. In the Knox district there will be activities throughout the whole month of October. It culminates in a closing ceremony on 31st by the Royal Australian Air Force Big Band. Also it can serve as a timely reminder about our local laughter club which has been laughing away for 10 years. I invite you to experience what we do at the Ferntree Gully Club, which meets on the 2^nd, 4^th and 5^th Sunday at 10.30am. You will enjoy yourself, whilst probably enjoying a new experience. Laughter Clubs gather together in great community spirit and practice laughter yoga. This is a form of physical exercise which is loads of fun and is fun, energising and uplifting. More information is here.

Seniors Festival I am looking forward to the Seniors Festival this year, which has an enormous variety of community activities throughout Victoria, many free ones, like our Laughter Club. We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the Knox Council for featuring us in the Knox Council Seniors Festival Information Booklet again this year. We are featured on page 19 and if you do not have the booklet, you may pick it up at the Council or contact me. I have several and am happy to post it, hand deliver or email to you or else here is the downloadable PDF (21 page) link.

Use It Or Lose It There is an important and from my experience to be true, a well-known saying to ‘use it or lose it’ and surely this can apply to many things in our lives. It could be true too that when we become more aware of decreasing something in our life, such as flexibility or fitness, it is also true that when we apply ourselves, we are able to regain it or significantly improve over a period of time. This may take considerable effort and application and mean that we do need to rise up out of our comfy chair to exercise or whatever it is that we know is in our best interests and might have been putting it off. Effort applies to so many things that are worthwhile and another well-known saying is ‘practice makes perfect’.

Time Can Be An Issue For You  Another issue may be time. If you are like me, you will agree that we can fill our lives and become busy with a variety of interests which may take up a lot of our time and energy. Even everyday things such as looking after ourselves can take up a lot of our time. A different and more inviting way of looking at how much time we have can be to feel and know that we have enough time. Time can be experienced as stretchy, even standing still and even become quite flexible. For this to happen we may need to change our mindset, particularly when our self-talk is about there not being enough time. We could be more positive and each day say to ourselves, ‘I have enough time to do what I need to do’. There are counselling exercises which help evaluate where we place our time and one is a fun one, having a dozen cardboard cut-out egg shapes and distributing them into various baskets. It helps one to see where there is an imbalance whereby what we are doing will clearly not enable us to reach our goals.

Goals  Of course as a foundation, you want to know what your goals are in your life. This includes personal, professional, spiritual and community goals. Does this bring up for you a need to revisit your goals and figure out how you are in reality spending the hours in your day? I know I tend to go with the flow a lot and can certainly improve in this area and have been working on achieving a greater balance in what I do from day to day and improving putting more time into my spiritual, or self-mastery wishes.

Look At Your Life In A New Way And Take Action  The simple thing of changing the way we view our life can be energising in many ways and of great benefit on every level, whether to ourselves, our family, friends and members with whom we work, or groups to which we belong. When we apply ourselves to regaining or keeping ourselves as fit, healthy and involved as we would like to, we will be rewarded. (Not that we do things seeking rewards.) This may require a far greater amount of effort and attention if we have let things go too far. It is never too late to turn over a new leaf and life can be very forgiving as we adapt to what our current motivating force is. All is not lost and we will find more pleasure and meaning in our lives when we follow our heart. When we are surrounded by happy people we feel happy and in the same way, when we are in tune with our bodies and our life, including our hobbies, we frequently mysteriously connect with and are drawn to likeminded people.

Summing Up  Seniors Week is coming up Victoria wide 4-11 October and in Knox, right throughout the month, with many wonderful activities to participate in all over Victoria, many of them being free, including your local Ferntree Gully Laughter Club, which you are warmly welcomed to attend. We need to keep active in order to maintain our fitness and flexibility. Let your self-talk be that there is enough time. Revisit your goals and evaluate where you are investing your time. Review your life and view it through new eyes in order to feel more energised and involved and lastly – do things that bring you joy.

Lynette Mitchell runs the free community Ferntree Gully Laughter Club, phone her on 0425 799 258. Besides this she sees clients who need counselling, life coaching or laughter yoga sessions.

Contact details: Lynette Mitchell

Phone: 9763 5475

Mobile: 0425 799 258

Email: lynette@laughterforliving.com.au

Website: www.laughterforliving.com.au

Disclaimer: Information shared here is from my personal understanding and experience. Advice given is general and as I am not a medical doctor, take no responsibility for how it is received, my intention is that articles will be supportive and assist in living a fuller, holistic living life.

Death Sits On Our Shoulders

I am feeling to share some of my perspectives on death and dying and throw some light or a different view upon the matter. I have believed in reincarnation since I was 15 years old upon reading about Bridie Murphy in the Womens Weekly. Many people with whom I speak say they have a feeling that we do come back and would like to think that there is a purpose, or let’s say a higher purpose to living a life, rather than death being the end of it. It also throws a spanner in the works of then believing in a heaven or hell. I have heard it said that hell is living here on earth in an unconscious state and that darkness exists here in the unillumined times of our lives. Fortunately we may choose to ‘wake up’ to spirituality and see things from a different perspective.

The reason for this piece about death is about being real and a gentle reminder that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Is it not then best that we prepare ourselves for them both and in doing, create more harmony for family and friends in so doing, to get our affairs in order. How many of us have that sorted?

My ex-husband died on 5th August, the funeral was at Springvale Crematorium on the 13th, which was a wonderful celebration of his life. I had known Bill for 55 years, one of the longest relationships that I have had. Luckily he died peacefully in his sleep, rather than being bedridden for years as was his father before him. I was very proud of our five children who all spoke and shared stories about his life at the funeral, which flowed each into the other.

Death is such a personal thing to each of us I believe. We all have our own experiences and memories of the person, each is unique; no one can truly feel as another feels, nor walk in their shoes. Bill’s passing for me has caused way more grief than I had expected and I have given myself time to honestly feel as I feel and be quiet, appreciating the opportunity to go deeper within and get more in touch with other seemingly unrelated grief filled times and moments. It is said that there is a grief pool, where unresolved times of grief or loss in our lives settle. Another nice way of putting it is that it is like a string of pearls that we wear. It can be precious and each pearl an individual treasure, that holds a richness for us in our hearts.

My recent experience has been useful in helping me be in touch with my grief pool and has given me the opportunity to review my life and the effect that I have had upon others. This has been helped by looking through many old family photographs which easily got me in touch with long forgotten feelings and memories. Although it has been sad and painful, I have been provided with a wonderful opportunity to help me connect with deeper feelings. Then, through my spiritual practices this has enabled me to be able to clear, release and resolve those hidden feelings in a way that had not been possible before.

This has been quite easy with a Feeling Is Healing process which I am able to email to you if you feel that it would be useful. As we go about our everyday lives, we can live them superficially, filling our time and using our energy in ways that are not in our best interests, depending on what we wish to achieve in our lifetime. What goes around comes around and I love the idea of ‘paying it forward’ and living a life in full awareness and in touch with my feelings. For me it is important to be more in touch with feelings and to get that monkey off my back, the ever busy mind, filled with its mental chatter. And so I am daily working towards self-mastery.

My recent journey was unexpected.My initial feeling upon hearing of my ex-husband’s death was gratitude in that after our divorce, we had made peace with each other and treated one another with kindness, love and respect. However I realised that in wanting to create boundaries in my life and not really trusting him sufficiently, I could have done better and regret that the opportunity to do that has passed. My experience was that towards the end of his life, I was able to see Bill with new eyes, instead of still seeing him as a snapshot from a very long time ago. I had him in a box. We like to categorise our life and experience, placing everything like items into its own little box. This is what I did, have a snapshot image from the past and my mind held onto that. 

It is a very unconscious process, as our unconscious mind is constantly at work as it sees things, categorises, judges, tries hard to make sense of everything, hence the habit of putting every little thing into its own box. To stop this we have to become more mindful and conscious the way we live our life. We need to practice greeting anew.

Until recently I was not able to see how much Bill had changed, how he had mellowed, softened and become helpful, with many wonderful attributes. That was not greeting life anew, which I shall now explain more about. To greet anew is that in each moment, every hour of each day we are constantly greeting anew, whether it is with people, things, or anything else. Even oneself! And it takes vigilance.

It helps to prevent the following, that we may keep drawing similar experiences to us, in part due to habits and living an unconscious life, rather like Groundhog Day. We find ourselves repeating what we do as we go round and round in circles, going over the same lessons again and again. You know the feeling when something is familiar, we find ourselves in similar relationships or situations with work or people and feel quite stuck.

So that is one important intention to hold, to treat each other anew and also to practice the Holy Encounter. The Holy Encounter is to recognise God in everyone, including oneself, to understand and realise that our essence is made of Spirit, or God or whatever term you may choose to use which is meaningful to you, as we live by the impulses drawn from that very essence, which expresses itself through the vehicle of our physical, or human body.

Nowadays instead of feeling intermittently sad and regretful that I could have done better, I am grateful to my life with Bill and the opportunities that presented. Despite everything and how I had felt myself to be a victim in the marriage, finally I am blessed with gratitude for the life we shared and comprehend that his influence, even his control, was done out of love and with his best wishes for me and other people. I have learnt from Michael King that love is the motivation behind everything. We may not understand this and more often than not are likely to do the following. Argue the point, take things personally, judge, project onto others, are either aggressive or passive aggressive without knowing it (or a multitude of other less than helpful things). To live each day and moment with genuine gratitude is highly beneficial and altogether necessary if we are to live our lives rich in experience and abundance.

I would like to leave you with a quote by Mahatma Ghandi, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Love and Blessings to each of you. We are able to live a reality filled life, full of rewards, making considerable progress with which with we may as a result enter into the next life far richer and with greater opportunities.

Lynette Mitchell xo

Disclaimer: This post is written from my personal understanding and experience and is not to be misconstrued in any way. Advice given is general and as I am not a medical doctor, take no responsibility for how it is received, my intention is that articles will be supportive and assist in living a fuller, holistic living life.
I am available for either laughter yoga sessions and holistic living counselling and lead the Free Community Ferntree Gully Laughter Club which you are welcome to attend. Phone me on 0425 799 258 or email me to make contact, or to receive my monthly email newsletter, or sign up on Laughter For Living