And lighten up, find the funny side. Don't forget to laugh at it all

 

"All that’s left to do then is to just be your natural self. Your authentic, conditioned and messed up self, and always find a way to laugh at yourself. As someone once said, if you can laugh at yourself you will never be short of material."

 

I came across this quote when I was doing some background research for this article. My response was a belly laugh. Thankfully, I’ve become more relaxed over the years but when I was in my twenties, I realised that I had a tendency to the more serious side. During the ten years or so before things turned around for me, laughter had become a stranger.

 

Now, I laugh, and laugh often. It’s not a forced, manic or hard laugh, it’s an easy free feeling that sees the cosmic joke of my life. Most of all, I laugh at myself a lot. A mental laugh, little chuckles, full on laugh out loud moments.

 

A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine that I’d feel this level of easy humour at things. And I’m not saying I don’t ever experience seriousness, I do, that old habit pops up occasionally, but it’s not often and it’s an ever decreasing phenomenon. It is why all these points are ‘practices’ and ‘trainings’. It is about evolution and consistent progress in a new and positive direction, not perfection. If we are noticing traits that have the hallmarks of more freedom, ease, peace and joy, that’s all we can ask for or expect as we tread this path.

 

This practice point is about challenging us to look at how tightly we are holding on, how caught up in the minutiae of our life and responsibilities we can be. Do we add a layer of the dramatic to our problems and struggles that really isn’t necessary? I don’t mean to minimise our problems, but perspective is always a useful thing and it can often be missing. In fact, I suggest that if we are serious, then it is missing. I think it’s a rare occasion when someone’s life is constantly filled with serious issues or problems.

 

Lightening up and taking a grounded and rational look at our situation will reveal there’s probably a lot we can let go of. I’ve seen in my own life how I can catastrophise my concerns, even when they are relatively minor. For some strange reason, my mind can envision the worst possible scenario instead of naturally having a more measured perspective. Why do I want to cause myself this emotional pain and stress?

 

Similarly, a long time ago I went through a period of intense and extremely painful worry because I was imagining a possible outcome of a difficult situation. After the dust settled with no tragedy in sight and my mind returned to its usual constant low level worries, I realised something.

 

No matter what is happening in my life, if everything is going well or there’s a major issue unfolding, I will worry, I’ll have some hand wringing concern on the burner. It’s just a mental habit that got conditioned into me somewhere along the way, or perhaps I was born with it.

 

Either way, it’s a complete waste of energy and it can be changed with greater mindfulness and practices that gradually and consistently direct my mind to more positive states of being. This tendency to rumination and apprehension reminds me of a well known Mark Twain quote which captured it beautifully. “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

 

Perhaps this tendency towards seriousness is about making our lives feel more important or significant in some way. Pop culture is full of drama, we like watching it, we enjoy the emotional rollercoaster ride, the theatre of it. Are we simply habituated to the highs and lows of this type of experience? Whatever the reason, allowing ourselves to get entangled in drama is just a mental habit that some part of us likes, even though it makes life seem more complicated than it has to be.

 

All habits and attitudes can be changed; it's just a matter of applying awareness and training one’s responses. When I shift a brooding concern into a laugh, it’s usually because I turn to fully face the situation, instead of letting it sit in the background and nag me with unacknowledged, unsettling feelings. I look directly at the thinking, feelings and emotions, and try to see what the fuss is all about. Is it really valid the amount of turmoil it’s creating?

 

At this point, a freer perspective arises and I’ll laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, my unconscious entanglement in matters minor. When this happens, I can feel invigorated by the release of tension and remind myself, I can practice this every time and apply it to my whole life.

 

Holding life lightly comes from not being so attached to things, people, possessions, ideas, beliefs and so on. For this reason, amongst others, humour and laughter is said to be a quality possessed by the spiritually mature or enlightened. Being less attached is what we call a wise strategy because one of fundamental qualities of existence is impermanence.

 

No matter what we think or believe and how stable our life appears to be, how reliable and trustworthy we assume it is, everything is in a constant state of change. People will leave us, our car will break down, we can lose our job, the stock market can crash, our skin will sag, people will die, and so will we. Desire and attachment are a constant part of our lives, if we don’t acknowledge the fact of impermanence and lighten that attachment, our suffering will be constant and considerable.

 

The worries, dramas and concerns in our lives are about what we’re invested in, so lightening up is about being less attached to those outcomes. Entitlement and materialism can just be a habit we’ve formed because that is what we’re conditioned to believe in. The antidote to this is gratitude, a transformative practice that I mention repeatedly here because it works!

 

Appreciating what we have and acknowledging our relative prosperity shifts our ‘never enough’ mentality to a sense of freedom and enjoyment of all that we already have, and all that life has to offer. We start to see abundance everywhere and savour even the most mundane moments.

 

Life is precious, too precious to be uptight about it. Real freedom comes by understanding this and when we do, we stop being so attached to our possessions, to outcomes, to our idea of ourselves, we can just sit back and watch it all unfold. It’s then that we can really embrace life, to embrace it with a free heart and joyfully watch to see what’s going to happen next.