News Alert

MY HERO.COM 1/1/06 [Excerpts]: Dr. Madan Kataria...[an] Allopathic Physician...at the Jaslok Hospital (Bombay) in Internal Medicine and Cardiology has thousands of people laughing their way to better health, more happiness and deeper friendships.

This jovial medicine man from India, has developed a new technique of Laughter Therapy based on Yoga called Laughter Yoga. Dr. Kataria explains that: "in a nutshell, laughter yoga is a combination of self-induced laughter, yoga exercises, yoga breathing and stretching exercises. With a little bit of playfulness it turns into real laughter. Our body produces a similar response to what we get from spontaneous laughter."

He said the "idea of a laughter club came to me like a divine light. In 1995, I was writing an article for my health magazine and remembered that "Laughter, The Best Medicine," from Reader's Digest had always fascinated me." During his research for the article, Dr. Kataria discovered a large amount of scientific literature on the benefits of laughter on the human mind and body.

"I was very impressed by the American journalist Norman Cousins, whose book Anatomy of an Illness, describes how he laughed his way out of an incurable disease of the spine-Ankylosing Spondylitis.Cousins said: ‘What was significant about the laughter...was not just the fact that it provides internal exercise for a person...a form of jogging for the innards, but that it creates a mood in which the other positive emotions can be put to work, too.'"

According to Dr. Kataria's website, extensive research from all over the world has proven that laughter has a positive impact on various systems of the body. Laughter helps to remove the negative effects of stress, which is the number one killer today. More than 70% of illnesses like high blood pressure, heart disease, anxiety, depression, frequent coughs and colds, peptic ulcers, insomnia, allergies, asthma, tension headaches, stomach upsets and even cancer, have some relations to stress. Laughter helps to boost the immune system, which is the master key for maintaining good health.

[TBC: We are told in Proverbs that "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones" (17: 22). However, yoga is no laughing matter. It's an ancient religious method of salvation from this world of maya in which the practitioner yokes himself to, or merges with, Brahman, the Hindu Supreme Deity. No matter how yoga is homogenized for the West, it remains demonic. See Yoga and the Body of Christ for documentation.]