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Tickle the Tummy of Your Adversity

Woman and young girl embracing outdoors smiling

Laughter is not a once-in-a while event – it is a lifestyle – a way to look at life. You not only find the good things every day, but you find those moments when you can take an intolerable situation, one packed with emotions and stress, flip it on its side and tickle its tummy.

“I’m giving so much money to my therapist; they will want to erect a statue in my honor.”

“I’m hanging on so tight, I’m getting rope burn.”

It isn’t laughing at someone – it’s laughing at intolerable situations –  its taking the edge off the adversity that is in front of you – it is enlarging the joyous moments – expanding the depth of our love and enjoyment of life. Humor takes the edge off any crisis.

 “When we admit our schnozzles, instead of defending them,we begin to laugh and the world laughs with us.” Jimmy Durante

Perhaps the greatest gift we give ourselves is our ability to laugh at ourselves!  Don’t take yourself so serious.  When we laugh at ourselves nobody can laugh “at us” – they can only laugh “with us….”

Make laughter and humor a normal part of your life

Exaggerate. Take a bad day and blow it out of proportion. Make a mountain out of a molehill. Imagine you are giving a performance at a local theatre and your material is coming from what is happening right now in your life.

 

“I had such a bad day. . .   You wouldn’t believe how bad it was… It was so bad…”

“I wouldn’t say the rooms in the last place I stayed were small,  but the mice were hunchbacked!”

“Accent– chew– ate the positive, eliminate the negative…” was a popular song in the 1940’s. Choose to look at the world on the positive side vs. the negative side. Rewrite current events to include humor.

        A 50% chance of sunshine instead of a 50% chance of rain.. . 

        A glass half full vs half empty.

Smile at yourself every time you pass a mirror!  You will be surprised at how just putting a smile on your face can make you feel different inside.  Then make a point to smile at others – at the busy, harassed store clerk, the gloomy person walking down the street, at the retiring neighbor.

Start a “Happy Journal”. Paste a large smiling face on the cover. Record a happy, pleasant or joyful event each day.  Put warm comments, favorite sayings or anything that made you laugh in your journal along with cards and letters or articles that focus on the positive. Look at your journal every day.

Look for that blessing in whatever is happening. Sometimes blessings are hiding under a big rock of troubles. Lift the rock and release them.  Let them penetrate the gloom in your life, the sadness and worry and fear.  Let the blessings shower you with gratitude and put a smile on your lips.

Marlene Anderson

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