By: Duane St. Clair
Upper Arlington resident Susan Stewart, a registered nurse and laugh educator, trains people to teach others to laugh. No, she’s not just teaching people how to tell jokes. Rather, her lessons are about mild exercise, which laughter is (or can be), and improving attitudes and personal health as a consequence.
The laugh exercise operates under the auspices of World Laughter Tour, Inc. (www.worldlaughtertour.com), started in 1995 by Steve Wilson of Gahanna, a
psychologist. He learned about laughter yoga, a teaching method developed by Dr. Madan Kataria in India, and devised his own methods to help people create positive attitudes.
In 2000, Susan was seeking ideas for a lighter approach to a medical issue class she was teaching, so she took his training seminar and eventually became one of five trainers in the program nationally.
She readily espouses the varied and numerous benefits of laughter to mind, spirit and body. Laughter helps overcome what she calls “hardening of the attitude” and can be beneficial for rehabilitation or treatment in a hospital or hospice, long-term care facilities, the workplace, schools, senior centers, and the list goes on.
Cindy Gudel, another UA resident, took one of Susan’s two-day training classes to lead “laugh club” sessions. Leaders spend an hour instructing and coaxing class members about being light hearted. The retired elementary school teacher helped seniors to laugh with meetings at the Upper Arlington Senior Center until June – they are expected to start again in the fall.
For five years Cindy was caregiver for her mother, who suffered dementia. “I felt that humor really helped. Whenever we had a problem, we (turned to) humor. Then, we stood back and relaxed,” she says.
Three years ago, after her mother died, she took the laugh leader training course and learned about why it isn’t just about jokes. She was a backup leader for laugh club sessions that were held the former Wild Oats store before they were moved to the Upper Arlington Senior Center.
Mary Ann Lewandowski, an administrative assistant at the Northwest Counseling Center in UA, was also bitten by the laughter bug after seeing Susan in action. She saw Susan at a laugh class for 300 women last March and was hooked. Through the summer, practiced and developed her routines to lead laugh clubs, first with friends, then with staff members, neighbors and the Center’s support groups.
So what exactly does a laughter club meeting look like? A one-hour session involves about ten minutes of discussion about ways to improve life, followed by a half-hour of light exercise that involves various movements and simulated laughing. The class ends with a cool-down period. “Laughter is a sort of internal massage,” Cindy says. “We’re doing exercises that are really breathing exercises.” Those may involve walking and raising and lowering the arms while laughing, or at least simulating hearty laughter, inhaling and exhaling deeply. “Sometimes we end up laughing for real,” she says.
Cindy explains that the discussions may be about assigning a behavioral attitude for each day. Mondays are for compliments, Tuesdays, gratitude, Wednesdays, flexibility, Thursdays, kindness, and Fridays, forgiveness – not unlike some steps in a 12-step program. Weekends are for chocolate. “Don’t forget to do nice things for yourself,” she says. Susan says laugh club sessions are done without jokes because, “Everybody has a different sense of humor. Not everybody laughs at Abbott and Costello.”
Although there’s no follow-up with laugh club attendees or leader trainees to measure success, Susan has seen cases of attitude improvement. One woman, recently widowed, took the training class and “said she had a better outlook after the session.” A breast cancer patient said “she hadn’t laughed much lately” but was better able to cope with the disease and treatment after being exposed to the program.
The program has trained 6,000 people nationwide to be laugh leaders, and Susan often finds herself traveling the country to teach. In Bellingham, Washington, an 83-year-old partially blind woman took the course and now holds 15-minute laugh sessions in a third-grade class. The oldest student the laugh program has trained was 90. Laugh leader training costs $349 for a two-day session. Laugh leaders set the price for their sessions, Susan says, and it’s usually $5 to 10.
Mary Ann is in her 50s now and was enamored with the response she saw at the March session at the counseling center. She went to the Senior Center’s June laugh club and found it successful. Larger attendance numbers make sessions better, the leaders say. Susan guesses average club attendances averages 10-12 members.
After discussions with the Center’s administrators, Mary Ann arranged financial help through the laugh organization’s foundation and took the laugh leader training session. “I think it’s important in the kind of environment we’re in now. It’s another avenue to kind of chill out a little bit,” she feels. “You’re offsetting negative things that happen all day long.” As she starts using it in the fall, “We’ll see how it goes with the support groups,” sounding every bit the light-hearted, laughing optimist the program promotes.
Duane St. Clair is a contributing editor for Tri-Village Magazine.
Susan Stewart’s Tips
~Start each morning with … a BIG smile.
~Make time for laughter. Schedule it. Put it on your calendar and “to do” list.
~Develop a laughter library. Collect favorite cartoons or make a photo album; keep books with humorous and inspiring short stories handy, collect comedy videos, DVDs or CDs (or borrow materials from the public library).
~Read, listen to or watch something you find humorous every day.
~Look for the humorous elements in everyday activities and situations.
~Practice laughing in a mirror. You don't have to feel like laughing: just make the person in the mirror laugh.
~Find a laughter buddy. Be around people who laugh or have a designated person you can call to share a laugh.
~Join a laughter club.