Healing With Laughter
As cliché as it sounds, healing with laughter is one of the best forms of medicine for the soul. Do you notice that after you have a good ‘ol belly laugh that you feel lighter, regardless of what you still may be facing in the moment?
Laughing allows you to shake up the energy in your body. It will move out negative energy to replace it with positive. Healing with laughter can let us bring such joy into our lives. So often, we numbly move through all of our day-to-day life stuff. We don’t even notice our day has passed and laughter has been completely absent.
Finding My Own Path of Healing with Laughter
Over the years, I learned to create things that make me laugh. Healing with laughter allows me to connect to my silly inner child. At my home, I hide behind things to jump out and scare my husband. Unfortunately for me, he knows all of my hiding places and to expect my jumping out of them.
Regardless of whether I scare him or not, I still laugh and it feels good for me. I make up goofy songs and sing them to my baby because it makes him laugh, which makes me laugh. Hiding my husband’s drink when he sets it down to do something cracks me up! Those are some of the daily things I do to create healing with laughter.
Years ago, I can still remember all too well the days when I was stuck in a deep depression and forcing myself to maintain my job at the time. Healing with laughter was something I wanted but it had never worked for me. I was sitting in a hotel feeling incredibly numb. Reading things that were supposed to make me laugh wasn’t even working. So, I sat and thought about what in the hell could really make me laugh. Somehow, I knew healing with laughter was what my soul needed.
Healing with Laughter and Silliness
All of a sudden, I found it! Farts, a word I was raised not to say and that, in itself, makes me laugh. So, I downloaded a fart app on my phone. As I hit all of the buttons to hear the different fart sounds, tears started streaming down my face as I was laughing so hard. Whoever was in the hotel room next to me probably didn’t appreciate my incredibly loud bout of the non-stop, losing my breath episode of laughter I was having. That was one of my best memories of my own healing with laughter.
Not everybody has the same sense of humor and that is perfectly fine. That’s why it’s important to figure out what will allow you to do some healing with laughter. Many would greatly disapprove of my so-called “childish” humor. Many attempts were made to teach me to be “a lady” throughout my childhood, especially since I was raised in the DEEP South.
However, that is not going to change me! This “childish” humor made its way into my previous pharmaceutical sales career. Boredom set in because that career did not feed my soul.
Breath-Taking Healing with Laughing
My boss at the time had the exact opposite personality and humor from me. I was not paying attention to whatever he was talking about because I was planning a good ‘ol belly laugh for myself and my co-workers. He made us sit in assigned seats in meetings, probably because of me. Ha! My seat was ALWAYS next to him. He knew I couldn’t pay attention and I was a bit of a troublemaker.
I slid my phone away from me, as I had set a timer on the fart app to go off while he was talking. The fart noises were quite realistic. The first fart went off and he ignored it. My co-workers were all looking at each other in shock.
So, I set the timer for another fart to go off. After the second fart sounded, my boss announced that he thought we needed a bathroom break. Everybody thought my boss was farting and my boss thought it was one of us. We all scuddled off to get food or whatever during the break. We were all chatting and laughing about my boss farting during the meeting.
However, I couldn’t stop laughing. You know that kind of laughter where it’s hard to breathe like I mentioned when I first discovered the fart app. I actually had to walk away from the group because I was laughing so hard at what I had created. Now, this was some serous healing with laughter that I needed. When I walked off, a co-worker approached me and said he knew it was me and my fart app because his son had the same app.
He was cracking up, but I also know he was the one who “told on me” to my boss. I got reprimanded and my boss got angrier and angrier because the angrier he got at me, the more I laughed, probably because it embarrassed him. This is a behavior I carried from childhood where I would laugh when I got in trouble because for some reason it was almost always funny to me. Well, in this situation it was even funnier than the times I got in trouble as a child.
As I sit here writing this, I am laughing just remembering the meeting where everybody thought my boss farted. Again, I am fully aware that many people will not find this humorous in the least, but that’s not my point at all. So, what is my point? It’s that everybody should find something that makes them have a good ‘ol belly laugh. Healing with laughter is so good and cleansing for the soul.
Good ‘Ol Belly Laugh and Healing with Laughter
I can remember another time when I had a good ‘ol belly laugh with a friend. She and I were driving around hanging our heads out the window and screaming “It’s a beautiful day” to everybody we passed.
Now, why this was so funny to us is still a mystery but it still makes me laugh thinking about it. We ended our car ride of shouting and being silly with doing cartwheels in my front yard. You may be wondering how old we were when we did this.
I was in my mid-twenties and she was near thirty, I believe. I know people were driving by thinking we had lost our minds. The only thing I had lost, though, was my ability to do a proper cartwheel because I face-planted hard, but that sure as hell didn’t stop the laughter. It only increased it. My friend and I both did some needed healing with laughter that day.
What Makes You Laugh?
Do you have memories like these where you did something silly or just simply had a good ‘ol belly laugh? What were some of those times? Now that you’re thinking about them, is there a smile on your face? What are some things in your life now that could result in a good ‘ol belly laugh? Chances are that they are not related to potty humor, like many of mine are.
It doesn’t matter what makes you laugh, of course, unless it is harmful to somebody else. If that’s the case, then don’t be an asshole just to get a good laugh. I’m sure that my former boss would’ve lumped me into that category at the time, though. Potty humor isn’t the only thing that makes me laugh. I have had plenty of laughs at my clumsiness, which occurs quite often, as anybody in my family can attest.
Please share! No matter who you are and what you are going through, a good ‘ol belly laugh can heal your soul even if it’s just for a moment. Everybody deserves those moments and our goal should be to increase those moments as much as possible. Healing with laughter is a quick pick-me-up for anybody!
If you want to learn more about Not Good Enough Stuff, check out this blog post. Check out the link below for some ideas of things that might bring you some healing with laughter! Click here for a great video of babies laughing.
Healing with Laughter Quote: “As soap is to the body, so laughter is to the soul.” -Jewish Proverb
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DISCLAIMER:
This site is only intended for people who are truly willing to look at themselves with an open mind and have the ability to truly be vulnerable with themselves and others. Please understand that this site is in NO WAY THERAPEUTIC ADVICE. However, this site can be very beneficial in learning the causes of your Not Good Enough Stuff. This site is not intended to provide or replace medical or psychiatric treatment. Mary Beth HIGHLY RECOMMENDS finding a licensed therapist to help you process the information from this site and all that you learn about yourself. Visit Psychology Today to find a licensed therapist in your area.
