Laughter Yoga - Interview with Sharon Miller from Joyworks

Hello and a warm, warm welcome to Irise with myself, Ashok Gupta. And today we have a very, very special guest. We have with us Sharon Miller. So I just bring on Sharon from Joy.

Hello there. Hello, Ashok. I'm brilliant. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the opportunity and wonderful to be able to talk about Joy.

I actually thought you'd rename your. You've renamed yourself Sharon joyworks and just thought, right, I'm going to change my name Sharon joyworks from now on.

It's a great reminder for me, right? It's a great reminder for myself and for everybody, especially the exclamation at the back at the end because sometimes you forget, I wonder if you have an.

Exclamation in your, in your name if you were to change it by Depol. Anyway, we digress. So here on Irise, we're here to uplift humanity, empower humanity and give you the best tools and techniques to make you smile. So for those who don't know anything about Irise, Irise is a your home of personal transformation. So it's an app and a website which has got over 600 courses and classes across three and a half thousand videos. It's the only personal development app you'll ever need and it's got a huge amount of great material that you can enjoy. We've just launched, so please do check it out iriseapp.com or you can go to the App Store and Play Store, type in Irise app and you'll be able to find it there as well. And there's lots of great free materials that you can consume every day. And as part of our journey to empower and uplift humanity, we have many live events. So this is over the next week or so we'll also be having lots of free live events under the area of Valentine's Self Love Awareness Week, where we're going to be talking about how self love is so critical and so important to our relationships. And of course, today to uplift you, we have our Laughter Workshop which will be starting just in 20 minutes or so. So at 5.30pm UK time, we're going to be having our Laughter Workshop with Sharon and that will be live on the Irise platform and it's free to everybody. And all you have to do is visit iriseapp.com click on the live Events tab and you will see the zoom link for our event starting very shortly. So we're incredibly excited to be having our first Laughter Workshop live on Irise. But first we have this interview with Sharon. So, Sharon, you know, every time I meet you, you've always got this incredible smile on your face.

Yes.

And when we've interviewed people on the platform, we've always found that generally people have come to personal development because of their own story, their own challenges, that they've kind of. If you don't mind sharing, what were the kind of things that really made you come to this line of work? Was there one moment when you thought, ah, this is what I want to do in life, or were there some challenges you went through that made you seek this kind of journey?

Yeah, I was really lucky in that I was involved in the arts and theatre and I was engaging with lots of people with mental health issues, with emotional issues, with segregated prisoners in hospitals, designing projects, creative projects. And it was at that time, this is like in my early 30s. And at that time, like all of us involved in the arts. You can get away with your craziness, can you? You can get away with your craziness when you're involved in the arts. And I really didn't realize, I don't think just how low or maybe depressed I was at that time. And I was given so much to all of the different projects. And I was asked to deliver a workshop just for fun. And that was just a blessing because I was doing very, you know, very challenging work, putting on with the segregated prisoners 12 days to put on a performance for the friends and their families. So very stressful work. Or west side Story, you know, stressful but joyful and creative. But it was. It was challenging for me. And I was asked to deliver a workshop just for fun. And I went with my box of tricks into this wee guides hall with lots of senior citizens. And there was a lady whose everybody was round about, this lady, her husband had just passed and I really just wanted to walk back out of the room. I thought, what can I do? But the workshop happened. I was high as a kite, and they were high as a kite. And this feeling of expansiveness and joy, it was just wonderful. So I got in the car, I was driving home, and I heard someone talk about laughter therapy on the radio. And I thought, that's just what I've done. And I absolutely loved it. And so I started researching it. And the interesting thing that happened was when I was supposed to deliver the event, I actually had a house fire. The neighbor downstairs had a house fire, and I actually got her out. And I was staying with my sister in her flat, not even in my own home. And this laughter, joy, work session was supposed to happen. And the last thing I wanted to do was laugh. The last thing I felt like doing was laugh. And I went off. My sister got everybody, all of her friends to come, and she said, you've got to do it. You know, been doing all the marketing and everything. And again, I was reminded everybody paid ten pounds. And I remember going through to my friends afterwards and throwing out the ten pounds and going, oh, my goodness, I just want to give the money back. It gave me so much joy and it just felt so good. And so that's how Joy Works came about. But actually delivering joy Works, I feel that I have become much more. More joyful. I can laugh until the tears are rolling down my face. Feel much more connected to nature, to have a good, good, strong community. When I was very ill there. I was ill for a couple of years there with COVID And the Gupta program really helped me. And that's why I'm here, really. But the Gupta program really, really helped me. The visualizations just re engaging with joy. When you're ill, then that's a difficult thing to do. Even when you teach joy works, you know, it's a difficult thing to do.

Of course, you know, people find that if I'm ill or I'm unwell or I've got some challenge in my life, I'm not allowed to be happy, right? So we think, okay, I'm going to be joyful and I'm going to be happy once that thing is sorted out in my life.

That's right. That's right.

Once I've got a relationship, once I get over this, then I'm allowed to be happy. And then I'll laugh more than anyone's ever seen. It's about being happy first and laughing first and then seeing what the world.

Definitely, definitely. And it's tricky, isn't it, because we were so unkind to ourselves when we're poorly. It's very difficult to love ourselves when we're poorly. You know, it's great when we're feeling happy and, and expansive, then it's easy to love ourselves. So it's tricky to get that. William James says, you know, we laugh. We don't laugh because we're happy. We're happy because we laugh, you know, And I love Louise Hay when she says, laugh at yourself and life and nothing can touch you, you know, but it's tricky. It is tricky. And I'm forever reminded of it. You know, we teach what we have to learn. And I'm forever reminded of that, that joy work. It's the excavation marks.

Yes. And I think it is, as you say, it's. It's putting the cart before the horse, isn't it? Sometimes. Right.

Let me.

Let the outside world give me something to make me happy and then I'll laugh, then I'll smile. But actually, joy comes from within. Yeah. You're teaching here and actually the love, as you say, is something that. It's a facility, it's a way of bringing up that feeling from within and accepting that joy. Is that how you describe it?

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a bubble in. And when you realize, you know, so many people, when they come to the trainings or the events, say, now I've got the power. Now I know I have the power to change things for myself. It's a very empowering thing to do. It's a bubbling waterfall that happens, you know, and you get to a stage where you can laugh with your tears rolling to your cheeks at nothing and. And that's a beautiful place to be. So beautiful place to be. But, yeah, yeah.

I mean, something that made a lot of my team laugh here at Irise was at Christmas. I was doing lots of test filming for our launch of Irise, and I was sitting in front of a fire and a big Christmas tree next to me, and I was in the middle of presenting and suddenly this entire Christmas tree fell on top of me. And if you're lucky, one day I will release that, probably on TikTok or something.

That's good.

And it was such a shock, you know, people haven't seen me suddenly exclaim, whoa, what on earth was that? And it's just really, really funny. So maybe one day we'll share that. I remember just sharing that with a team and it just brought tears of laughter to people's eyes.

Laugh at ourselves before somebody else does. Right? It's good. And then when we do laughter as a practice, you know, joy is a practice, you know, and we do laughter as a practice, we. We can laugh at our mistakes much, much more easily. We can get out of our head and into our heart. It's just a wonderful tool. A tool that, you know, is becoming so well known now. You know, when people used to call me, they would ask for a Joy work session. And now people call me and say, can we have laughter yoga? And I'm like, oh, you know, it's just spread like wildfire because it's so simple but so profound. Many people say it's life changing. Even half an hour obsession. I get emails from people saying, that's Changed my life. You know, I'm constantly getting, you know, feedback. We've gone 14 years in March to see, you know, how it's 14 years, it's transformed. Yeah. And the interesting thing is, Ashok, when I used to get these emails saying, you know, it's life change, it's changed my life. And people really have made drastic changes in their life because it's such a catalyst for healing. Once you've been laughing for a long time, you know, you think, well, wait a minute, some people cry, it's just to release their emotions. It's all good. But it was never life changing for me. But what has been life changing for me is the way that the joyworks community, when I was ill, came together for me and, you know, with healing meditations. That's been life changing for me. And I think it's really interesting that.

A lot of people notice. Scientists notice that actually when we're young, like when we're a baby or a child might laugh, you know, 100 to 200 times a day, whereas an adult, we laugh like maybe 10 to 15 times a day.

15 times a day.

Why is it that suddenly when we're young and we're natural, we're laughing so much and as an adult, we get weighed down by the challenges of life, the problems of life, and we forget that actually the joy comes from within. And I think maybe reminding ourselves to laugh, it's a bit like breathing. You know, when we get stressed, our breathing rhythm changes right into something more stressful up from the chest. And so what we do with breathing techniques is to change the breathing technique to change the state.

Yes.

And I think it's a similar thing that we're doing here, that rather than waiting for the mind to feel happy and then we laugh and smile, let's laugh and smile. And that makes the mind feel good. It's kind of reversing that loop, as it were. And what are the benefits, Sharon, that people can expect from going through a kind of laughter yoga workshop?

Brilliant. Well, you will feel a wee bit nervous to begin with. I'm always a wee bit nervous to begin with, you know, so that's natural and that's all right. And you might feel a bit silly, but that's okay, too. That's actually the point. You know, we get back to being a kid and get back to being playful. You know, my grandpa used to always say to me, hen you're off a serious, you want to lighten up. And I was, you know, so we start a wee bit nervous and we Start, you know, not knowing what's going to happen, but before we know it, laughter is contagious. And we see everybody else laughing and we join in with them and we feel a wee bit lighter and we come out of our head and we come into our hearts and we. Even if we are pretend, even if we are pretending to laugh, the amazing thing is that even if we're pretending to laugh, we. Our brain doesn't know the difference between real and imagined. So even if we are going, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, and we're just not feeling it at all, then the brilliant thing is that we are still getting all of these benefits. But at the end of the session, just as I say, people can often say that it's life changing. People can see how quickly they have the power to change their mood. So it is pretty fantastic.

Yeah, it's incredibly empowering. I mean, I recently did a workshop on the healing power of laughter. Singing and music and dancing as well. And what was really interesting that was with laughter, actually, your immune system gets an instant boost the moment you laugh. So you've got that kind of physiological benefit. Your whole cortisol levels go down, your muscles relax, physical kind of changes. And then emotionally, it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to shift your, your mood. When you're singing or listening to a beautiful piece of music, we know how that can shift it. But what I love about laughter is that it's, it's getting you to the state you want to get to. So you might use music or singing to kind of make you feel good or make you smile. But let's go direct to the source. Just laugh and smile and you're going to get it hit straight away. That's what I really love about laughter.

Yeah. Everything that we do in life is to be happy. You ask anybody what they want and they say, I just want to be happy. So why don't we, as you say, shortcut, just get happy, you know, don't look for all of these other things. Just do it and do it in the now. And the laughter really does bring us into the now. And that's where all the power is. Right?

And exactly. Sharon, what happens if someone says, look, I'm going for a really tough time right now, A real challenge. And I, and I, you know, I love, you know, I love this, the sound of this, but I just don't feel like I can laugh right now in my life. And if, if I do, I'm bypassing my pain. What would you say to someone who Might have that kind of experience.

Yeah. Well, that's okay. We are where we are and that's okay. Give yourself a wee hug because, you know, we have to accept ourselves where we are. That's only. We can only change things when we can accept where we are. But if you come into the session, then you can just enjoy the sound of laughter. You can close your eyes and enjoy the sound of laughter. It just. You just feel. It feels really lovely to look at lots of happy places smiling. You know, Albert Einstein says, you know, to the best thing that we can do for ourselves is to view the world as a friendly place. And you come into, you know, a laughter session and you're seeing all of these friendly, loving, beautiful faces. Nobody looks, you know, everybody looks beautiful when they smile. You know, we all look gorgeous. Our eyes sparkle. It's just silly, lovely thing to be in a room like that. So come and be part of it anyway. And whatever, you know, as Rumi says, all emotions are welcome. And whatever emotions come up, then that's okay. Whatever emotions. Some people cry buckets. I remember delivering a session and the CEO of the company was in absolute tears. Absolute tears. The CEO of the company. And I said to my workshop, just leave her, leave her, just let her be. Because that, that's what needs to come up. And all the emotions, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's laughter, but it's good if it's laughter. But sometimes we need to cry before we can get the laughter as well, right?

Yeah, absolutely. This is, you know, I'm just loving everything that I'm hearing. I'm just so excited.

And sometimes we can get angry as well. Sometimes we can feel anger within ourselves that, oh, why am I happy? And why is it difficult for me to laugh? And why. And that's okay too. Just let. Just make peace that these, these emotions are natural. It's all right, you know.

Absolutely. And I think this is also related to the idea of emotions being stuck in the body. From a neurological perspective, we might think that emotional hangs out in here because this is our subjective experience of the world that our mind is up here. But in fact, we know that emotions are experienced throughout the body. So when we get fear, you know, we feel the fear in our stomach and our heart area. When we get angry, we often feel, you know, the anger around the head. We get a tightness in the head. If you're feeling sad, you know, we get. We feel it feeling kind of here.

Yeah.

And so those emotions get trapped in our energy centers and actually when we laugh, what I notice is that suddenly there's a kind of emotional release where you letting go. And this also happens when I, when I sing. Everyone probably knows I love singing karaoke. Something just shifts and changes and I can imagine what's happening. With laughter, you're unblocking the path to your emotions because we often suppress it. So we, we push our emotions down and we live up here and vibrate up here. But to laugh you need to come back in your body and really feel the laughter and you start reconnecting with your emotions. And we can only release our emotions once we're connected to them. And I think that laughter and joy can be an amazing way of expression.

Release and getting back to the heart's true purpose, which is pumping joy. Right? Getting the heart back to its true purpose. Pumping joy, absolutely. Yeah.

Well, everybody, if you're on the live streams now, we're in conversation with Sharon Joy Works. We're not going to rename you Sharon Joy Works and we're talking about the upcoming Laughter Yoga session just in 10 minutes time. It's free to all sorts of. Please do share this on your social media, your Facebook, your Instagram, share information that this is something that IRISE is doing to give back to society, give back to the community. A free laughter workshop with Sharon and it's going to be on the irise platform. So all you have to do is go to iriseapp I r I s eriseapp.com click on live events, the Live Events tab in the navigation bar and you'll see the zoom link for us to go into a private workshop together, experience this laughter Yoga session. And I can't recommend it enough. Right. Even if you right now, really, really, really, please do come.

Yeah, that's the thing and that's a wonderful thing, isn't it? Because it's come especially if you don't feel like laughing, come especially if you don't feel like laughing because it can change things very, very quickly.

Yes, that's the really good point actually, isn't it? That when we're feeling low, we have low levels of those feel good brain chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, endorphins. And so that actually demotivates us and that often happens in chronic physical illnesses, that happens in chronic emotional illnesses. We have low levels of dopamine so we don't feel like actually going to do things that can improve our health situation. And here it's about the saying, well, let me just make that decision to go anyway and not rely on Myself to feel good. Because when I get there, then I will feel good. It's once again reversing the horse and the cart, saying, once I feel better, then I will go to that particular event. No, let me feel like I make a commitment, go there, and then I'll feel good. And then the feel good chemicals.

There's such a host of health benefits that you've already mentioned, but it's a natural, natural pain reliever as well. So, you know, if you feel any, if you've got any pain at the moment, then laughter really is proven to be. It creates a feel good chemistry and it's a natural pain reliever. And if anybody is interested, they can read the book Anatomy of an Illness with who was it? Anatomy of an Illness.

Now you're testing me.

Norman Cousins. Norman Cousins, exactly. Norman Cousins, Yeah. He was diagnosed with an incurable disease of the spine. And he checked himself out of hospital and decided that, well, you know, I'll just. He booked himself into a hotel room and he realized it when he was watching Candid Camera. Some of you will not know that you've been framed as the more kind of recent one, but he checked himself at a hospital and he started watching Candid Camera and he realized that when he was watching the Candid Camera, he was getting 2 hours pain free sleep. 2 hours pain free sleep. And he recovered from this illness. And this was way before all of the laughter research. And at that time, he thought he was just distracting himself by laughing. But now we know that actually laughter rejuvenates and accelerates the healing processes in our body.

Yeah, that's very important to remember that the laughter. We're not distracting ourselves away from our emotions or the challenges or pain that we feel. We're giving the opportunity for the brain and the body to heal itself. Yes, whatever. Whether it's stress or you're experiencing anxiety, depression right now, or you're experiencing physical illness, if you're on the Gupta program and you've got long Covid or you've got any kind of fatigue, whatever you're experiencing, whatever's going on in your life, this is an opportunity to reset and rebalance your nervous system. And even if you're not, let's say you're pretty happy. Go lucky. Everything's pretty good in your life. Well, let's.

That's even better.

Experiences. And you'll be a source of joy. You'll be a glowing source of joy for those others in your life as well. So whatever your background, whatever you're experiencing, this laughter yoga Workshop is going to be just for you.

Yes. And we go gently as well. We'll not fire right in, you know, we'll go gently. It's a whole hour and that's just so lovely. Such a gift. A whole hour to just be ourselves and be a kid and be joyful.

Yeah, absolutely. So people can pace themselves. So if you're actual health, that's great. You can go through the whole workshop. If you've got health challenges, you can just pace yourself and take your time and do what is right for you.

Yeah, I'll do the workshop seated and at the end we'll have an opportunity to stand and to go through a whole session. But you can even do it lying down, you know, lying down with your blanket and your cuddly toy. Just come along and shut your eyes and enjoy hearing the laughter. I love that. This is a beautiful quote from Jean Houston. At the height of laughter, the unit universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities. And quite often people say to me after, I don't know how many people have gotten camera saying this, I felt on top of the world. I feel as if I could do anything, you know, so.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, Sharon, it's been an absolute joy to have you on the show, on the Irise show and so incredibly excited for our workshop coming up in just a few minutes. So once again everybody please now go to iriseapp.com you can use the website or you can use the Irise app, but if you want to just use the website, you want to have a bigger camera so you can see everyone on the screen, go to iriseapp.com click on Live Events and on the live events tab you will see a zoom link and you just click on the zoom link you're able to join the Zoom event. Invite your friends and family to. This is free to everybody and we'll go into our laughter yoga session. Great. And I will also let you know about some events coming up. So on Sunday we've got an interview with Anna Celestino, a very well respected author who's going to be talking about self love and relationships. And then on Tuesday, the day after Valentine's day. So Tuesday the 15th of Feb, I'll be running a workshop on self love and on Thursday next week we'll be speaking to Anadea Judith. So all of these events are on the Irise app and the Irise website and you can see all of them there. So all it's left for me to do is say thank you to all of you for watching, please share this on your social media, your YouTube, your Facebook, and let's get as many people knowing about the joy of life. Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. It would be such a blessing if you came. You'll never regret it.

Great. And Sarah, actually just asking a question. Is it just for adults or can children join as well?

Oh, no, bring kids. And I think this is such the lovely thing when I do corporate events that the children join in, you know, and children just think it's wonderful to see parents or family members laugh their heads off like that. You know, it's just lovely for kids to see adults being playful and being silly. And you'll have lots of laughter exercises to go away and play with with your family. Yeah, definitely. Definitely come along. Yeah, definitely. Because they're very, very welcome. They can teach us a lot.

Yeah, they can run the sessions, can't they? They have to laugh on cue. Great. So thank you, Sharon, and we'll see you minutes on the Irise platform. And thank you everybody for watching. And we'll see you next time on the Irise show. Thank you and goodbye.

Thanks so much. Bye. Bye.