By African American Books Author Denise Turney @ (www.chistell.com)

Put healthy laughter on your list of life goals. Commit to laughing at least once a day. Looking for reasons to laugh is a great way to exercise creativity. For starters, you could laugh at how you look when you yawn in the morning. Or you could laugh if your hair pops up like Alfalfa’s hair did on Our Gang Comedy.

Time To Be Silly Laughing!

Catch yourself being silly? Greet the experience with a hearty laugh. Nieces, nephews, grandkids and, of course, your kids, offer countless opportunities to laugh each day. Kids are so free! They haven’t learned to put weight on how someone perceives them. So, they say the first thing that pops into their minds. And they do what they want, without regard to how what they do will be received.

A lot of what kids say and do is downright funny. Facial expressions kids make can be hilarious. Can’t count the times I outright laughed at something my son said or did when he was a kid. There are also times when I covered my mouth and turned my back so my son wouldn’t see me about to burst out laughing at something he’d said or did that I didn’t want him to say or do.

So, be careful when laughing at kids and adults. Ensure you’re encouraging good behavior. Also, avoid using laughter to avoid facing tough life situations. All shared, if you’re like me, you probably toss aside way too many chances to enjoy a good laugh.

So Many Reasons To Laugh

Looking for more reasons to laugh? Recall funny things you did when you were a kid. More paths to laughter include:

• Watching a comedy, a movie that cracks you up!
• Reading a funny book
• Dancing to a lighthearted song
• Getting creative and drawing a funny picture
• Attending a comedy show
• Listening to good-hearted jokes

Did you ever crack yourself up, sending yourself into bouts of laughter, the kind of laughing that shakes her whole body? When’s the last time you had a good laugh like that?

Pets and neighborhood animals, including birds, squirrels, and ducks, do funny things too. I’ve laughed watching two small birds try to pester a larger bird until the larger bird flew off a tree limb, electrical wire or housetop. Instant by instant, a myriad of activities, sights and sounds occur that give reason to laugh.

Great Opportunities For Fun

Start taking advantage of those opportunities! Why?

Check out these benefits associated with laughter. How many of these benefits did you already know about? Which ones are new for you?

• Laughing gives the immune system a boost, making it stronger.
• Shifts your focus upwards. After a hearty laugh, did your thoughts shift from paying bills, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, cooking a large meal, completing a work project, etc. – something that you didn’t want to deal with — to a lighter topic? It might seem odd, but laughing has a way of shifting focus upwards, into better places.
• A good laugh boosts your mood. Ever felt like “blah” then started laughing? Even if you didn’t go from feeling deep in the dumps to soaring emotionally, bet you felt better after a good laugh.
• Laughter lowers anxiety. This links to how laughter helps shift focus and works as a mood booster. It may take consistent effort (but light effort). Try it! Next time you catch yourself worrying, start laughing. While laughing, read a funny or positive saying. Do this throughout the day when you catch yourself worrying. See if you can turn “making lightness of life” into a habit.
• Stress reduction comes through laughing. If you’re already in a stressful state, search for lighthearted thoughts, the types of thoughts that cause you to smile and laugh.
• Oxygen in your body loves being treated to laughter. According to Cleveland Clinic, laughing can “bring in heaps of extra oxygen, which decreases your heart rate and stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system.”¹

How Your Body Loves Laughter

More oxygen in the body, especially while you’re laughing, is good for your heart. In addition to increasing blood flow, “laughter can decrease stress hormones, reduce artery inflammation and increase HDL, the “good” cholesterol.”¹

Social connections might expand and strengthen as you laugh more as well. Similar to yawning, laughing is contagious. Once you start laughing, don’t be surprised if other people don’t at least start smiling. Keep laughing and it would be a shock if a few people didn’t start chuckling or laughing too.

When you laugh hard, it attracts attention. Deep down, maybe we want to laugh more. That could explain why we turn and search for who’s laughing and the cause of their laughter. It’s no secret that we love being around people who make us laugh.

Just as you have trained your mind to search for things to criticize, compete over, feel jealous about and worry about, consider training your mind to find healthy, love-based experiences, sights, and sounds, to laugh about. You did it when you were a kid. Certainly, you can do it again and benefit from laughter just as much!

Here’s to a day filled with laughter, appreciation, joy, and peace!

Resources:

4 Health Benefits of Laughing (clevelandclinic.org)

By African American Books Author Denise Turney

Yesterday has a tricky way of filling up the only time that truly matters – this instant. Without realizing it, you will be convinced that what’s happening in front of you is fresh and new. Yet, if you consider the experiences you’re having, you may see that, as nuanced as these experiences seem, they have happened before.

Could Comfort Be Holding You Back?

Depending on your age, the experiences might have occurred so many times that you feel bored. And you might have ceased to notice the marvel of life, expecting the familiar to show up again. On the one hand, it brings you comfort to live with the certainty that you know what’s coming next.

Then, on the other hand, a part of you is begging for change. If you would only trust enough to say good-bye to yesterday!

Even if it takes years and several more experiences to realize it, holding onto the past is keeping you bound. Holding onto the past causes you to relive old experiences. To move forward, you must let go. But first, you need a reason to release familiarity. Noticing the costs (or symptoms) of living in the past is a key reason.

What Holding in Yesterday is Costing You

See which of these “living in the past” symptoms you’re dealing with:

• You haven’t heard birds singing in months.
• Ten years have passed since you made a friend.
• While traveling, you always take the same route.
• If you were hurt in your last relationship, you’ve committed to never date or enter a relationship again – and you’ve kept that commitment for two or more years.
• Regardless of what do, you expect life to stay the same.
• Eating and/or drinking an unhealthy diet seems impossible to shake, in part, because you think that your health will be the way it always has been, regardless of what you put into your body.
• Whenever someone close to you tells you about a significant change (i.e., moving to a different country or state, taking on a new job, buying or selling property) they are going to make, you do your best to talk them out of accepting the change.

How Do  You Know You’re Not Stuck?

Whichever way you turn, you face proof that you believe that this present instant will be no different than the past. Your perceptions are stuck and, whether you see it now or not, this familiarity is causing you pain.

There’s only one way to get unstuck, setting yourself free of internal bondage. That’s right! You have to say good-bye to yesterday, releasing the past. This means that you let go of experiences that made you feel excited, hopeful, and happy as well as experiences that made you feel sad, hopeless, and angry.

After all, it’s letting go that opens you up to more joy, more peace – more goodness!

Open Up to the Sweetest Change

Sounds simple, but you know it’s not. Habits can hold a tight grip, making it challenging to free yourself. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t shift your thoughts and break free. In fact, here are actions you could take to enter freedom:

• Try one new activity today – Yes! Today!
• Brush your teeth in the kitchen sink.
• Exercise at a different time of day.
• Call a friend you haven’t spoken with in a year or longer.
• Learn how to play an instrument you haven’t played before.
• Strike up a conversation with a trustworthy colleague or neighbor you don’t normally chat with.
• Take a bath instead of a shower for a week or vice versa.
• Cook food from a different culture for a week.
• Take an online course and learn to speak another language.

Letting go of the past doesn’t happen at once. It’s a good-bye that occurs step-by-step. Similar to how it took you months, more likely years, to develop your current life patterns and routines, it might take weeks or months to completely relinquish the past and enter new, exciting and more rewarding ways of living.

Simple Actions Make a Huge Difference

Commit to completing three or more of the above actions within 24 hours. Add to the list of activities, taking on a new activity a day. This helps you to prove to yourself that change won’t hurt. To reinforce your trust in change, particularly that you are safe as you undergo life shifts, consider:

• Writing in a journal, focusing on repetitive thoughts and emotions that you’re feeling
• Drawing pictures that depict how you feel each time you engage in a new, rewarding activity
• Singing about the specific changes you engage in
• Reading stories about people whose life changed significantly (for the better) after they made a number of life changes

Trusting yourself is key to releasing the past. The more you open up and honestly record thoughts and emotions that surface as you move further away from familiarity, the more you may trust the process. Fortunately, you hold the keys during this “change” process.

Practice Awareness

Should you feel overwhelmed, reduce the number of changes from two or three a day to one a day. If you still feel overwhelmed, reduce the number of changes to two a month. Avoid aiming to feel the way you’ve always felt. The goal is to avoid being overwhelmed, not to always feel comfortable.

Continue the process. Soon change may generate fewer sharp emotions. In other words, you might go through change while hardly noticing that you’re evolving.

Also, if you practice awareness, you’ll start to feel when change starts to occur early in the process. It’s this awareness that can help you avoid shock. Practicing awareness allows you to start accepting shifts you undergo before the shifts manifest in big ways.

Let this happen three to four times and not only will you start to trust that you will be safe going through change, entering newness, and living in the present, you will start to trust that your true Self knows what is coming. Soon you may see early change as the way that your true Self prepares you to say good-bye to yesterday so that you can enter increasing fullness, instant-by-instant.