Tickle in the sheets before going to work. Watch a Monty Python movie. Rescue some characters from Corrado Guzzanti. Whichever way you want to get it, try to make room for a laugh throughout the day. Laughing is good for the heart and, if you can do it in fits and starts, the eyes are lubricated, the abdominals are strengthened and the diaphragm is kept elastic.

But what if a very old tradition merges a new practice based on the beneficial power of laughter? Here is the yoga of laughter. At first it was little more than an experiment, the one conducted eleven years ago by the Indian doctor Madan Kataria in a park in Mumbay to see if it was possible to revive a type of yoga based on laughter.

The first evidence of this practice dates back more than five thousand years ago. The yogi-poet-philosopher Sri Aurobindo himself defined laughter as a powerful weapon, more divine than human, and believed that humor was the indispensable keystone of the internal balance of the cosmos and the individual. Kataria, after the positive feedback of the first experiments, decided to (re) give life to Hasya Yoga, or laughter yoga .

Laughter yoga teaches you to combine the deep breathing of classical yoga with a stimulated laugh that becomes more and more natural with practice. There are also many exercises based on sound reproduction and repetition of verses. A good student will be able to recreate many kinds of laughter; that wetsuit, the one that simulates a phone call, that of the lion, the one that comes from the stomach, and even the welcome laugh, typical of the Indian tradition.

The practice has excellent feedback in everyday life: laughter yoga, if exercised over time, beneficially affects our worldview, revolutionizes it, lightens it (certain things you can understand / only laugh would say Diaphragm).

Today there are around five thousand associations dedicated to laughter yoga around the world. The same Kataria presides over the Laughter Yoga International [Website of the association Laughter Yoga International, a circuit to which most of the laugh clubs in Italy adhere. There is even a World Laughter Day, a May day dedicated to laughter for the promotion of peace and brotherhood among peoples.

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