How can we find humor through meditation?

“If it were not laughed at, it would not be sufficient to be Tao.” – Lao Tzu on Humor, - Tao Te Ching

Did you ever have a bad day? Everything seems to go wrong and you are completely lost in anger, frustration and self-pity. It gets worse and worse, until the final moment when, say, you have just missed the last bus. There is some critical point where it gets so bad the absurdity of it all overwhelms you and you can do nothing but laugh. At that moment you up-level your predicament, you see the cosmic joke in your own suffering.

Meditation, because of the space it allows around events, gives you the chance to see the humor of your predicament. Awareness of the passing show of one’s own life allows a lightness to enter it where only a moment before there was heaviness.

Using Humor to Create Empowerment

Humor has the power to transform your experience with a difficult issue from below it (victimized), to above it (empowered). You may have had the experience of finding an experience funny that you had found upsetting in the past. If this is the case, then you are most likely healed and over what happened.

If you were able to view your life like a movie or play, you could see the natural flow of events go from happy to sad, easy to hard, everything in between and back again. It is a somewhat predictable cycle, though the circumstances do change and may surprise you.

William Shakespeare was criticized for putting humor in some of his plays when people felt the situation called for more of a serious mood. It came across as insensitive or inappropriate. Was it really? Or was it just skipping ahead a bit because from a higher perspective he knew that it was all just an illusion of the same cycles playing out? He figured he may as well have fun with what was happening if he was able to.

Joan Rivers once said, “Everything is funny.” While she created a lot of amazing success in her life, she was not spared the heart wrenching devastation many face in the course of a lifetime.

While I did not always enjoy her style of humor, I have a great appreciation for her intelligence and wisdom. She knew that the value of humor went well beyond the entertainment industry. It is a profound tool that can be used to come back from the depths of sorrow.