Jayne Clendening spends a lot of time laughing these days.
She’s had melanoma and breast cancer, and nearly lost her son in a car accident.
But she discovered that laughter is a great healer and she is now helping others learn that, too.
Clendening is an international laughter yoga coach and therapeutic clown. She was trained by Madan Kataria, founder of the international laughter yoga movement, and started the first laughter club in Regina in January 2006.
There are now four clubs in the city and several rural areas are in the process of establishing one.
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“My vision is a place to go laugh seven days a week,” she told a crowd at the Western Canada Farm Progress Show in Regina last month.
The idea is to use laughter to control breathing while doing gentle stretches.
Clendening told the enthusiastic participants in her seminar that people breathe about 22,000 times each day but pay attention to few of those breaths.
Children breathe deeply from their abdomens but as people get older they breathe from the chest and lose the value of deep breathing. They also seem to forget how to laugh.
Laughing can stimulate a return to abdominal breathing and restore a sense of humour.
It also gives internal organs a workout. Clendening said 10 minutes of laughter is the same workout as 30 minutes of rowing. It’s a good cardiovascular workout for people with limited mobility, she said.
The list of the benefits of laughter is lengthy. It includes lowering blood pressure, reducing stress, increasing digestion and relaxing muscles.
If nothing else, it’s fun.
The seminar participants start out by greeting their neighbours with their tongues stuck between their teeth and lower lip, causing funny faces and funnier speech. Fake laughter quickly evolves into the real thing.
Giggling like children, they progress through different exercises and various types of laughter, from deep belly laughs to short ha-has and from soft chuckles to loud guffaws. One even involves laughing while pretending to chug a drink.
Clendening said laughter can trigger other emotions.
“There is a fine line between laugh-ter and tears,” she said, as anyone who has laughed until he has cried knows.
Laughter is the best medicine as far as Clendening is concerned. Because of her health problems, she became depressed and spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward. When nothing else helped, laughter did.
For more information, contact her at clendening@accesscomm.ca.
