Excerpt from a YouTube video (by James Laughlin, uploaded March 14, 2025) describing laughing meditation as a workshop practice. The speaker explains running group laughter exercises, notes initial awkwardness that becomes genuine laughter via mirror-neuron contagion, and characterizes laughing (and yawning) as powerful breathing exercises that activate the belly and oxygenate the blood.
Those I consider the two highest meditations, laughing and yawning. I used to do these workshops and I would sit around with people and I would. I would trigger the la. I would just start. I would tell everybody, we're going to laugh together. We're just going to laugh. We're going to laugh as hysterically as we can possible. This is weak as possible. We're just going to experiment with this. And it was. It's, it's awkward and uncomfortable for the first few seconds. And then all of a sudden, everyone's really genuinely laughing because your mirror neurons get activated, your belly neurons get activated, and you are genuinely engaging in this really powerful breathing exercise that oxygenates all of your blood cells and everything else.
