Laughter, The Dalai Lama and Yoga Memes

Memes are an enriching addition to our social media culture that give us a much needed touch of humor to everyday life. I get especially happy when I see yoga memes that offer insight and laughter to my practice, and I feel humor offers something valuable to any activity we silly humans take part of. 

The Dalai Lama wrote an article for the Daily Beast regarding how he manages to approach life with a sense of humor despite the challenges his country faces. I thought the passage is a good reminder to all of us, whether we are facing challenge on or off the mat, to not approach the world with too much pessimism, judgement and sadness.

"I have been confronted with many difficulties throughout the course of my life, and my country is going through a critical period. But I laugh often, and my laughter is contagious. When people ask me how I find the strength to laugh now, I reply that I am a professional laugher. Laughing is a characteristic of the Tibetans, who are different in this from the Japanese or the Indians. They are very cheerful, like the Italians, rather than a little reserved, like the Germans or the English.

My cheerfulness also comes from my family. I come from a small village, not a big city, and our way of life is more jovial. We are always amusing ourselves, teasing each other, joking. It’s our habit.

To that is added, as I often say, the responsibility of being realistic. Of course problems are there. But thinking only of the negative aspect doesn’t help to find solutions and it destroys peace of mind. Everything, though, is relative. You can see the positive side of even the worst tragedies if you adopt a holistic perspective. If you take the negative as absolute and definitive, however, you increase your worries and anxiety, whereas by broadening the way you look at a problem you understand what is bad about it, but you accept it. This attitude comes to me, from my practice and from Buddhist philosophy, which help me enormously."

The Dalai Lama mentions here that laughter is actually a tool for dealing with our challenges, not a chore to do despite of our challenges. Yoga is also a tool we can use to find peace despite the extremely difficult world we live in. Yoga is not just an exercise for our body, but to help train our minds put aside our troubles to pause and really enjoy the simple things- like laughter. 

Anyways, here are some of the yoga memes I came across that I especially liked. Feel free to comment with any yoga memes you come across that you would like me to add. Enjoy!