Bring more joy and laughter to your life with Laughter Yoga - an aerobic exercise with playful exercises combined with deep yogic breathing.

This is NOT a yoga session as such. There are not the usual ‘poses’ and ‘stretches’ associated with Hatha Yoga, etc. Instead Pranayama Yoga (deep yogic breathing) is combined between the Laughter exercises. The aim is to bring more joy and laughter into your life through Laughter Yoga - an aerobic exercise with playful exercises and hand claps combined with deep yogic breathing

Think about how spontaneous laughter is to children. They don’t need a reason to laugh - they just do it. Giggles, chortles, snortles, belly laughs, uncontrollable laughter that goes on and on. As adults there is no reason why we cannot do this too. This is what we do in Laughter Yoga as it is unconditional laughter that comes from the heart and doesn’t need humour, jokes and comedy. I have run Laughter Yoga sessions where the shear mention that we are going to laugh has set people off. How good is that!

It does have a structure with warm up exercises as it is an aerobic and cardiovascular exercise. Participants need to be aware if they suffer certain medical conditions it might not be suitable for them. These include uncontrolled conditions such as:

· Advanced (bleeding) piles

· Any kind of hernia

· Any persistent cough

· Anything with acute symptoms

· Epilepsy

· Heart disease

· High blood pressure

· Incontinence of urine

· Major psychiatric disorders

· Severe backache

· 1st and 3rd trimester of pregnancy

· Having undergone surgery within the last 3 months

The structure of a sessions starts with a few gentle exercises - hand clapping and deep breathing and then bringing in the laughter exercises. There is hand-clapping between laughter exercises and the ‘yoga’ element of the session is the sequences of deep breathing in between exercises. Then the process is repeated with a different laughter exercise for as long as the session lasts, finishing with a grounding relaxation.

So many times I have heard people say they can’t remember the last time they laughed so much and so freely. It’s totally liberating. Not only does it have many health benefits but it provides people with tools to help them when facing difficulties and anxieties. By regularly doing Laughter Yoga exercises it helps to build resilience.

Please sign up to each monthly session individually via Eventbrite.

About Maggie

I trained as a Laughter Yoga Leader in 2010 after being introduced to it at a workshop I facilitated at my place of work - a continuing professional development session for Gentle Exercise tutors. I was blown away by its joyful simplicity and how natural it felt to me. After leading several Laughter Club sessions, I felt the time was right to plunge deeper into the philosophy, research and benefits and trained as a teacher in 2013. To date, I have trained 34 people to qualify as Laughter Yoga Leaders.

Register