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Parallels between yoga and laughter

Yoga teacher Katchie Ananda likes to keep spirits up (and dogs down) in class.

Photograph: Hilary Nichols

"Laughing is an exhale," says Leslie Howard, a yoga teacher in Berkeley, California. When students tense up with effort, she cracks a joke. The ensuing laughter relaxes shoulders, jaws and minds. "Your yoga mat is a mirror of your life," Howard says. "When things are difficult, we tend to hold our breath. It’s helpful to remember how to breathe."

Yoga is a means of uniting body, mind and spirit. If laughter makes us relax and breathe, can its use in yoga stretch our minds as well? Katchie Ananda, a San Francisco yoga instructor, thinks so. "The true meaning of yoga is to hold the paradox" of uniting opposing energies, says Ananda, whose classes are routinely punctured by laughter epidemics as students wrap their arms and legs into various sweaty configurations. "What happens when you try to hold a paradox is that your mind has no other option but to expand." And there is nothing more expansive than a big, hearty laugh.