Laughter is like internal jogging

The greatest of all miracles is health. Every day our bodies are attacked by millions of microbes, viruses and bacteria.  The body is able to repulse these invaders and protect itself.  This mechanism is called the immune response.  The body’s immune response is enhanced by laughter.

Laughter is like internal jogging.  It fills your mindspace with positive emotions.  Emotionally it is relaxing, reducing harmful muscle tension.  Endorphins and serotonin flow into the blood, resulting in a peaceful happy state of mind.  A good bout of laughter also reduces the levels of stress hormones epinephrine and cortisol.

Love and Kindness to all living beings

When you give compassionately, you receive the gift of happiness.  The Buddhists believe in metta bhavana, a feeling of immeasurable loving-kindness towards all living beings. Like colour dropped into a glass of clear water, metta bhavana colours and permeates your whole life with the joy of all beings. In systems like pranic healing or reiki or even in organised religions, one prays for the peace and happiness of all beings in the universe. This can be an unending source of joy.

Sharing, helping each other and cultivating strong social relationships keep us healthy and contribute to a peaceful life. The rasa of compassion is a great source of creating a positive mental state and fortifying the body’s immune system as it taps into the feel-good chemicals in the body.

Studies have shown that those with eight to six close relationships were healthier than those with less than four. It is this feeling that promotes altruism and the many service clubs in the world. We need social relationships to truly thrive. Social networks can help us change our health activities. We need social relationships to be methodically developed to promote compassion and mutual empathy.

Positive Emotions for Health Heart

Emotions, and the way you deal with them can affect your health. This guide will help you understand the impact of nine primary emotions in maintaining health. The positive emotions create a positive field which fills your blood with the chemicals of happiness and wellbeing. They are conducive to the building or rebuilding of the healthy heart.  The negative emotions create a negative field which fills your blood with the chemicals of unrest and unhappiness.

Navarasas are a two-thousand-year-old Indian concept of emotions which see the mind as a space filled with positive and negative emotions. These emotions are: love, laughter, compassion, chivalry, anger, fear, abhorrence and wonder. Shantha or peace is the result of handling all these emotions correctly.

Obviously, the positive emotions or states like love, humour, compassion, chivalry and wonder put the mind in a happy and enthusiastic state, thereby fostering health. On the other hand, the negative rasas like anger, fear and abhorrence produce a state of mind which creates, as described in Daniel Goleman’s book, an ‘emotional hijack’.

The Big Five negative emotions are Lust, Anger, Arrogance, Greed and Jealousy. They are listed both in Hinduism and Buddhism as generating an atmosphere of unrest in the mind.  In this state, the fog of negative emotions slows and confuses the mind. During meditative practices, the chemicals of peace and tranquillity flow into the blood.  Breathing, heart rate and pulse rate stabilise.  The mind is able to function calmly and freely. An alert and relaxed attitude is required for the teamwork involved in building ideas and analysing them.  Self-awareness of your state of mind can help you get the most out of life and lead to a healthy heart.

Be in Supportive Nurturing Group

Belonging to a supportive nurturing group, is the best protection you can have against disease and unhappiness. Being loved can prevent you from the flood of negative emotions that have the capacity to destroy you.

With the breakdown of the joint family in India, the shock absorber of family ties is threatened. Nuclear families are creating explosive situations, which are lethal.

Invest in your family. Keep in touch with your extended family. Join supportive groups.

Being ‘included’ in a group is very healing. Study the group to which you belong and see whether you share:

common goals

a common language

shared jokes

your pet-name

personal successes and failures

time together

a common shorthand of thinking and speaking

compliments

comfort and support

affirmations and help

Build A Happy Workplace

·         Create meaningful personal relationship with co-workers.

·         Take short relaxation breaks, at least thrice a day.

·         Eat fresh, energy giving foods.

·         Take a walk outdoors during lunch break.

·         Stay away from politics and back-biting.

·         Bring your family to the office during lunch break or on a Saturday.

·         Cultivate a hobby.

·         If you have a toxic workplace, look for another job.

·         Celebrate achievements, even small ones.

·         Make your workspace clean and comfortable. Surround it with happy pictures.

·         Listen to music with headphones.

Interpersonal Intelligence

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people.  It is to be able to see what motivates them, how they work and how to work cooperatively with them.  Interpersonal intelligence is the inward sense of being able to understand oneself, to form an accurate model of oneself and to operate that model effectively to live life.  Professor Howard Gardner of the Harvard School of Psychology tells that the two aspects of personal intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal, form the most important foundation for a happy, fulfilling life.  To those who define success as happiness, these two elements can be the bedrock of a happy life.

Sensitive people can empathize with others.  They can understand the feelings of others as though they were feeling it themselves.  This skill involves being able to pick up subtle verbal, tonal and non–verbal signals from others.  Charismatic leaders are able to reach others by breaking the barrier that exists between people.  A charismatic speaker can make thousands of people react like one mind.

The Upanishads say that the divine spark or life force exists in all—the leader, the leper, the judge and the criminal. 

Empathy

Empathy is the capacity to feel my pain in your heart.’ Develop the capacity to pick up subtle verbal, tonal and non-verbal signals from others. Learn also the ability to send out soothing, nurturing signals to others, thus creating a positive interpersonal field.

‘Practice working with people and listening to them with the same attitude as you would to a beloved child, or respected parent. Your word, tone, your very glance should be completely focused on the person. When you are with someone, pay complete attention. Anything less will only elicit a lukewarm response. Those who can create positive fields around themselves attract and build lifetime relationships.’  

Healing Space

The family is the magic circle where all wounds are healed and all dissonance melts into harmony. Make every day an occasion to show how important your family is to you. Children however need the security of a simple, dependable schedule. Ambiguity or lack of dependability in family life is known to affect the individual’s capacity to live in a secure long-term relationship in the future.

A healthy home would be a healing space, a nurturing positive mind field. It can be a place where all wounds are healed. Alvin Toffler wrote ‘The family is the giant shock absorber of the family to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world!’ If your home is not a sanctuary but a battle-field, do something about it. Get help, maybe professional help. Reserve time for laughter and happiness—schedule time for it, like you do for your work.

Have a rule to avoid difficult topics during meal times or bed time. Music, if is soothing, can be a powerful force for peace. The very walls absorb the vibrations of the music. Mantras can do the same for your home. I sometimes feel that if music can be infused into the mindspace so that it plays quietly in your mind, as the background to your day, it can have a really soothing affect. Avoid violent, depressing programmes. Just as you would not allow a terrorist into your home, do not allow such movies into the sacred space of your home. You surely are the protector of the field that exists in your home. Make your home fragrant with incense. Clean, sparkling and beautiful. Respectful of the sacred forces that can animate your home.

Family a Safe Sanctuary

The family provides the love and nurturing required for the survival of children. As we grow older, we crave nurturing, but are not adept at asking for it. We long for affirmation from the ‘significant other’ in our lives.

Affirmation is when important people in our lives say, ‘What I really like about you is ...’ They say it verbally, tonally, non­verbally. The opposite of an affirmation is a discount. You need at least ten affirmations for every discount for the maintenance of a healthy relationship. A home filled with discounts becomes a torture chamber instead of a sanctuary. Dr Dean Ornish says that men who feel that their wives love them are much more likely to reverse heart disease, than those who feel the opposite. The home can be the cause for disease. It can also be the safe sanctuary for healing and reversal of disease. Fill your home with affirmations, with positive strokes, with a peaceful atmosphere, a nurturing space that enhances prana, the life force. Laughter and smiles, compliments and hugs can create a powerful positive field in the home.

‘Family is the shock absorber of society, to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world,’ wrote Alvin Toffler in his landmark work ‘Future Shock’. The family provides unconditional love for the crippled, the old and the helpless. It heals the pain of failure and provides rest from the assaults of a cruel competitive world. Family dynamics can cause disease or reverse it

Powerhouse of Potential

Within each of us lies a hidden masterpiece waiting to be liberated by the magic touch of attention.  Be your own ‘expert’. Do not build negative ideas about yourself through the comments of others. Your self-talk should be calm, happy and elevating. Choose to see and hear what is beautiful and encouraging. When you are wounded, learn to soothe yourself by using these affirmations.

·         By nature I am kind, gentle and loving.

·         Any mistake committed is unintentional and I forgive myself and others for it.

·         God’s grace has created a magic circle of love, a safe heaven for me and my loved ones.

·         I am capable of achieving my goals with hard work and dedication.

·         I look around me for help and knowledge to reach my goals.

·         I seek companions who encourage and help me.

Tips to be Happy

The world is in your drawing room, it is clamouring to change your life with more and more sophisticated toys. As a popular jingle goes, 'What separates the men from the boys is just the price of their toys.’ Simplify and go home to what you really need.

The world is like a buffet counter at a five-star hotel. Let's not grab everything on our plates. Let us be choosy, so that we may avoid spiritual indigestion and physical exhaustion.

‘I felt like a waterfall,’ said Diane Roffe–Stainrotter, gold medallist skier in the 1994 winter Olympics. The joy of a job perfectly executed, fills the body with the chemicals of bliss.

Professor Mihalyi Csikzent speaks about a state called the flow, which athletes, musicians, surgeons—in fact everyone experiences when they are at their best. It is the experience of doing your job with total immersion in it. So absorbed are you, that there is no place for anxiety or niggling worries.

Finding a job you love is one of the ways you can immunise yourself against health problems. A good marriage is a protective shield against heart attacks.

The capacity to enjoy the free gifts of Nature—sunlight, rain or flowers starts the flow of the chemicals of bliss. It is in this gentle chemical bath that the body is able to replace dying and dead tissues. Merely avoiding negative emotions is not enough; one should consistently cultivate the positive emotions: love, compassion, courage and peace.

Preventive Steps to Deal Stress

Meditation and pranayama, provide everyone with a way of reducing the automatic, violent reactions to stress. You can actually control autonomous systems like heart beat and pulse rate, which were thought to be outside the individual’s control. Knowing and practicing meditation can provide you with a silent space where you can retreat into peace: slow breathing, steady heartbeat, low pulse. This space is always available within a person who has learnt to meditate. While you cannot change your job, family or your life situation, you can certainly learn to breathe more peacefully, thus reversing the process of excitation and avoiding the emotional hijack. It is not possible to learn meditation by thinking about it, any more than it is possible to learn swimming by talking about it. If you have to swim, you have to get into the water. Learning mediation and understanding your breathing patterns through pranayama may be the best investment you ever made. In India, there is no excuse not to learn these things. Stress need not be a response to the pace of your life. You can learn a peaceful response that protects your body.

Innovation To Way Out Competition

In the modern corporation, there is only contributing members. Restructuring, re-engineering, shrinking profit margins have made the workplace increasingly intolerant of the unskilled and non-performing members. The only defence against the pink slip is personal excellence and constant growth. This can put a lot of pressure on the individuals. Flatter organisations celebrate individual performance. There is no place for anyone less capable to hide in the crowd. This can be a challenge. It could also be a test, which many will fail. Constant competition with peers can be very tiring. The only way out is innovation, through uniqueness, through entrepreneurship and intrepreneurship.

Alvin Toffler’s prediction of the electronic cottage (people networked and working from homes) and small office home office (SOHO) is becoming a more and more visible reality. The customer is no longer interested in mass produced products. He demands choices. No more Henry Ford promising, ‘You can have any colour car you want provided it is black.’ Paint companies allow you to even mix your own colours. This can be an opportunity and a treat depending on the entrepreneur’s attitude.

Maslow’s self-actualisation principle—the individual’s capacity to be transformed into the individual God created him to be—is a possible destination for all.

Einstein, Time magazine's ‘Man of the Twentieth Century,’ warns:

‘The concern for Man and his destiny must always be the chief interest of all technical effort. Never forget it among your diagrams and equations.’

The revolution of rising expectations, fuelled by the global perspective, provided by the media and internet creates unrelenting stress.

Women in Era of Stress

In today’s modern societies, many of them bear the dual burden of managing the home and a career. The infrastructure necessary to help them: crèches, dependable childcare, help from husbands, gadgets to make housework easier, is not yet in place. This generation of transitional women is at high risk from heart disease, particularly during the menopausal years. Statistics show that women have fifty per cent chance of dying of heart disease, ten times higher than their risk of dying of breast cancer.

The traditional shock absorber of the family, particularly in Indian families is the woman. Dual responsibilities have reduced her capacity to perform this role. Her ability to absorb and reduce tensions has been greatly compromised. The tensions building up in a nuclear family can have a negative impact on health. The two-income family brings an increased pay check, while insidiously increasing the risk factors for heart disease. Huge reserves of patience are required to cope with this new, changed family structure. Most do not have these reserves.

Globalization of Economy

The current development of the global economy means that the 173 countries of the

world will share a single market place. Demand and supply will respond to the compulsions of global competitiveness. Every country is eyeing the one billion strong Indian market and its fabled 250 million middle class. No company can escape the restructuring and blood-letting, the downsizing rampant today. The possibility of the pink slip stares every executive in the face.

It is being slowly realised that economic prosperity can lead to poverty in the quality of life and health. Is India gradually becoming a global back office with uninteresting, boring, repetitive jobs being dumped on us? The joy of craftsmanship is being replaced by the monotony of the assembly line.

This expanding global economy and the lethal workplace have created serious conflicts in the individual’s life. Many have to confront the question of how their values measure up against their need to own and have the world’s goodies.

Solutions to Tough Situations

Ambition and increasing peer pressure ensures the 'rat in a trap syndrome', where you are trapped into running faster and faster to stay in the same place. Work follows us everywhere. The blurring of work and leisure has intensified in this era of twenty-four-hour access, when the computer is just a fingertip away and the Blackberry and the cellphone are as intimate as a heartbeat. The delicate tissues of the body are constantly awash in the lethal chemical bath of chronic stress. Interactive electronic devices have made stress continuous. Home is no longer a refuge. The only way to break this pattern is to find a way to change the response to tough situations.

Meditation and pranayama, provide everyone with a way of reducing the automatic, violent reactions to stress. You can actually control autonomous systems like heart beat and pulse rate, which were thought to be outside the individual’s control.

Unconquered Frontier

The twenty-first century will be the century of the Mind. The Mind is man's last unconquered frontier. The Upanishads describe it as fast, fickle and uncontrollable, like a dozen swift horses travelling at breakneck speed. Mankind is paying a steep price for failing to learn more about the Mind before embarking on the race for success in the new millennium. Stress is the price we pay for success. Stress stalks the precarious climb up the corporate ladder.Any of the big five emotions—Kama, Kroda, Madha, Lobha, Matsarya (lust, anger, arrogance, greed, jealousy) respectively can flood the body with the chemicals of stress. Stress is destructive. Stress is ageing. Stress is a killer. Beware of it.