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If you’re feeling stressed out and are looking for laughter, a self-described swami’s teachings may be a diverting but ultimately fruitless use of your time.
Students who are feeling pressure due to midterms and major papers may feel like they have few options to deal with their anxiety. But many dorms offer various stress relief activities that are supposed to expose students to novel ways to cope with life’s frustrations. One such activity this week was the reprisal of a Welcome Week program that attempts to teach students how to use laughter as a tool to lift their spirits and relax.
Titled “Laughter: The Best Medicine,” the event promising music, meditation, and laughter was held in the Hayden Library Tuesday at 8 p.m. Laraaji Nadananda led the hour-long session of 12 people, surrounded by the quiet atmosphere of tables, chairs, and books in the large room.
Nadananda, who is also a musician, tried to find the best words to describe himself. Some call him teacher, others a “laugh master.” Still others call him a “workshop facilitator.” But, he said, perhaps “swami” could best “sum it up and explain why I do what I do.”
The night began with plenty of mirth, both in the exercises taught as well as the leader’s unique sense of humor. Nadananda showed everyone various ways to practice laughter on their own and how to best enhance their sensation of delight. The pituitary gland in our brain was said to be a tool they could use to laugh, and the swami made fun of his speech when he turned it into a mock slogan you could use: “Touch your pituitary today!”
While they were doing exercises, he was dispensing advice. “You can’t take a laugh pill like you can take a headache pill,” he said. He told them, “Laughter is energy work.”
Tamara Whitehouse, a CAS freshman who attended the program, said that her current greatest source of stress is school. She said she was skeptical of the methods at first, but that it was really cool. Though she enjoyed the program and said it was helpful at the moment, she doesn’t think she’ll use the techniques shown in the future. “I’m not going to laugh by myself,” she explained.
While everyone was practicing exercises, Nadananda joked, “Don’t you think of yourselves as yummy? You could walk around after this saying, ‘I’m in a yummy body!’”
Other advice he gave people included grounding themselves. “Have you ever heard the saying ‘get grounded’?” he asked them. “It’s like when someone is in a bad neighborhood and then pulls out his wallet full of money,” he explained. “Someone will come up to him and say ‘GET GROUNDED!’ You need to become aware of the situation."
He also told them a “therapeutic smile” can lift their spirits. They rated theirs on a scale of 1-10 and practiced varying degrees of smiling and they then unwound with some relaxation activities where they laid down and closed their eyes, to the sound of an accompanying gong and gentle sounds.
The event was organized by Lindsay Tadych, a Hayden RA and nursing student graduating in spring 2008. She is currently most stressed about graduating in May, and everything that comes with that, including getting a job and apartment. Even with this stress, Tadych said she doesn’t use the techniques shown at the program that often.
Normally the laughter event is just during Welcome Week, Tadych said. But she brought it back.
All of this started when, in 1985, Nadananda read a meditation book, The Orange Book: The Meditation Techniques of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho), that suggested laughter meditation. He tried it on himself and liked it. Then he shared it with his concert audience (he described his music as “ambient inspirational non-traditional sound music”) for about five minutes at a time, and then it “mushroomed into its own workshop.”
He explained, “I developed techniques [with] people sharing observations.” Osho was a “spiritual teacher” for him.
The laugh master is not without stress. His greatest stress now is musically “performing with someone whose technique is not fluid or spontaneous.”
“I have to cover them,” he elaborated. “I have to stay present in a certain way.” Another big stress for him is going through the airport check-in.
As for using his own techniques on himself, he said, “I do it myself, inwardly,” in places like car rides before a performance.
“I touch into it briefly during the day,” he said. “I find I can get the results by just dipping back into it.” He also participates in “laughing fits” with a group, making laughter more therapeutic, incorporating his own practice into it.
He’s currently trying to develop laughter as a performance art, and have it be an “infectious energy moving experience.”
The stress event itself could be classified as that. The RAs always try to have some kind of stress-relief activity during exam weeks, Tadych said. There was a similar stress relief event last week, a Peer Educator organized workshop on the eighth floor of Hayden. It included meditation and smoothies for “stress-free midterms.”
Gallatin freshman Brianna Sahagian attended that program and said she learned deep breathing techniques she now practices for stress relief.
“[T]his past week I’ve had a lot of papers and tests and stuff, so I’ve been really stressed,” she explained. “I haven’t been doing as well coping with stress this semester.”
The meditation and breath control are now part of her newfound coping process, along with muscle relaxation techniques, listening to music, and dancing in her room when no one’s around.
While the meditation workshop techniques are put to use, the laughter ones are not. Both attendee Whitehouse and organizer Tadych said they won't use them much in the future. If there's any point to the event, it’s to have a secluded time to let loose instead of any genuine, constructive methods to “de-stress,” as was advertised.
At the laughter event’s end, the participants repeated the phrase “play is the spontaneous exploration of sensation,” and ended the session with a rousing trip around the room skipping and declaring their various body parts “happy.”
Nadananda then proclaimed everyone “radiant yum yum[s].”
And really, if that isn’t helpful, what is?
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