Laughter is a powerful tool in your box. You can whip out your laughter at any time, unexpectedly causing people previously caught in drama, self-righteousness and seriousness to just drop their shit and collapse beside you, bent over in unstoppable fits of laughter. Now that’s a gift. Learn to laugh with things and with life. Laugh at it and it will laugh back. Simply put, it’s good to laugh.
Warrior practice
Next time you find yourself in a busy public place surrounded by a lot of serious people, such as on a train, bus or subway – START LAUGHING. You could be at the supermarket checkout line, or picking up the kids from school – wherever you are, just think of something hilarious and start laughing. And see what happens.
There are a few scenarios:
1. You may get asked to leave or thrown off or out of wherever you are.
2. The people around you start laughing with you. You cause an UPROAR. People start laughing who haven’t laughed in years! You make everyone’s day, and make the local news!
3. Everyone thinks you’re crazy, or maybe they laugh with you and the same scenario is repeated across the globe.
This is a great practice to work on to lighten your mood and that of the people around you. Life is too short to be taken too seriously. Don’t be a frowner. Be a LAUGHER.
9. LEARN TO BREATHE – REALLY BREATHE
Take a deep breath in… feel your lungs filling to their full capacity with good healthy air. See if you can breathe into your whole being. With this in-breath feel your nervous system calming down. And with your out-breath imagine breathing out any tension or bad energy inside you.
Let your breaths become longer. Deeper. Calmer. Your breath has the capacity to calm you down. Did you know that? How you breathe is how you live.
If you breathe shallow, quick and rushed breaths – this is how you will tend to live your life: rushed. Quite literally out of breath. If, however, you take your breaths with slow deep appreciation of the sheer gift of air – savouring each one – then this is how you will live. More present and appreciative of the moment.
I used to be a shallow breather. I was always in a rush, perpetually late for everything, and stressed and anxious most of the time. Life was a continual non-stop RUSH. My breaths were quick, hurried, and using about a mere quarter of my lung capacity. And then I met a great teacher who taught me how to breathe properly. I learned that it was entirely possible to breathe calmly, deeply, slowly and powerfully, filling my lungs up to their full capacity with every breath a conscious one. How we breathe affects how we think, act and do.
How are you breathing right now? Could you slow it down a bit? Try taking a longer, deeper in-breath. Breathe it right the way in. Feel it filling up your whole body with life force. Savour it, don’t take it for granted. Deep, calm breaths help create a deep, calm state of being. And a calm state of being means you can handle pretty much anything that comes your way in life.
Warrior practice
Sit with yourself for a moment and check out how you are breathing. Observe your breath. Observe how you are doing the act itself.
Now, slow it down. Breathe in that air a bit deeper, and use your full lung capacity like it’s meant to be used.
Become aware of the correlation between your breath and your mind. Notice how when your breaths are slow and deep, your mind starts to feel the same. It calms down.
Try to change your breathing habits. Every time you notice that your breathing is erratic, fast or shallow, pause for a moment and deliberately begin to take longer and slower breaths.
Take a few minutes to practise this each day until you can make these new breathing habits the norm. Over time your breathing will change and so will the way you do things. If you would like to live life slower and more focused, with a simplicity and a calmness, watch your breathing and change old habits. Slow things down.
10. DANCE, DANCE, DANCE
One of the dangers of the modern curse of too much ‘screen time’ is that we can forget to exercise. To use our body, rather than our head. We need to learn to get out of our heads and into our bodies!
Exercise is an awesome way to occupy ourselves. It gets us into our bodies and grounds us. Combining daily exercise with getting out in nature is one of the most therapeutic things we can do – and doesn’t need to cost a penny! It’s also great for our mental health.
Too much time online can get us very stuck in our heads. Equal time spent in the head and in the body is what makes us human. So don’t forget to exercise. Dance. Run. Climb. Make love. Play ping-pong.
In my humble opinion, dancing is one of the very best forms of exercise you can do – it’s an amazing tool for liberating your soul! For shaking out your demons and for getting yourself out of your head and into your body. I LOVE to dance.
I discovered a practice called ‘5Rhythms Dance’ about 10 years ago – and it changed my life. Utterly. At the time I was pretty new to the healing path – and I still had a lot of personal demons. I was very in my head and not very happy. My best mate dragged me along to a 5Rhythms dance class, which initially looked like a bunch of weird people doing very strange things to loud music. Once I learned to drop my judgemental mind, however, and join the class I discovered the process of ‘dancing your demons out’ to really great music, and pretty soon I was completely letting go, dancing myself into a state where I could release of all my ‘baggage’ through the music.
These classes are a movement meditation practice that helps you to still your mind by moving your body through five different rhythms of dance. They include a particularly powerful stage called ‘Chaos’, where you are fully encouraged to go completely nuts and literally dance out your deepest traumas, childhood demons and current worries – usually to drum’n’bass. It’s absolutely WILD and I love it!
In my first three months of attending a regular 5Rhythms class, I effectively released 30 years of pent-up frustrations, deeply held emotions and past traumas. Anger, tears, laughter, screams, joy – they all came out, witnessed by other fellow dancers. I made some damn fine chums in those classes, because of our shared experience. Amazing. And the end result? Freedom from my past. I quite literally danced it out.
I highly recommend you check out conscious dance in its many forms. There are many variations, but they all essentially do a similar thing. They encourage you to move around and dance completely spontaneously – like no one is watching. They liberate you. As well as 5Rhythms, there is ecstatic dance, shamanic dance, Biodanza, movement medicine and more. I encourage you to check any of these out. The conscious dance movement is spreading like wildfire across the globe right now – so get involved.
Warrior practice
Go try out a 5Rhythms dance in your local town. Just google ‘conscious dance’ or ‘5Rhythms’ in your local area and go check out a class. It is a tremendously liberating experience.
11. TRY A DIGITAL DETOX
It’s becoming increasingly accepted that we all need to adopt and maintain some healthy boundaries with technology. It really is everywhere around us and can totally consume and overwhelm us if we’re not careful. The remedy is pretty simple: back off the technology a bit and create some boundaries. This is easier said than done, however, so I would heartily recommend that you start by introducing regular digital detoxes into your life. This will not only remind you that you are not, in fact, a slave to technology, but will also help you simplify your life by not having to keep up with an ever-increasing load of digital messages and communications, many of which you don’t actually need and which are definitely not serving you.