Laughter Yoga

What it is

A facilitator guides the group through laughter exercises alternated with breathing exercises. There are no jokes and no comic turns: you laugh on cue, in a circle, looking at each other. It opens with a gentle warm-up, stretching, chanting, clapping and eye contact, which is what takes the inhibition down. After the first few minutes the forced laughter stops being forced, and that’s the point of the exercise. The whole thing takes under an hour, and it also runs online.

When it makes sense to choose it

It sits inside a longer day, as an opening or as a break between two activities. It works well when a group has gone stiff around its roles and you need something that steps over them quickly: laughing together puts everyone in the same position faster than any round of introductions.

It works less well with people who have only just met. Laughing on cue in front of strangers asks for a threshold that has to be lowered first, with something else.

How it actually works

The facilitator offers short exercises, one after another, each with a different pretext for starting the laughter. In between you breathe, because laughter is an exhalation and without pauses the air runs out.

The uncomfortable part is the first two minutes, when everyone knows they’re faking it and feels ridiculous. Then somebody laughs for real because the others are laughing falsely, and from there the group doesn’t stop. Laughter turns out to be contagious by sight, which is the observation the whole method was built on. The day after, the room remembers that it can drop its guard in ninety seconds.

Three questions

Do you have to be the type?

No, and you don’t even have to be in a good mood or have a sense of humour. Everyone starts the same way, which is by pretending. No special clothing, no equipment: a space where the group can stand together is the only requirement.

How long does it take?

A useful session is ten to fifteen minutes of continuous laughter. Written down that sounds like very little, but a spontaneous laugh lasts a few seconds: fifteen minutes in a row is another thing entirely.

Where does it come from?

From the Indian physician Madan Kataria, who started the method on 13 March 1995. He began in a local park with four people, and that was the first laughter yoga session in the world. Today it’s practised in thousands of clubs across sixty-five countries. The yoga in the name is there for the breathing exercises rather than for the postures.