Me Time ✨ - Ikigai : Laughter

Good morning, Cadre family. I hope you're all having an amazing day wherever you are. I'm literally walking to a park bench right now so I can sit down, but I don't want it to be in the shade because I run cold. We have arrived. Hi. Happy Sunday. If you're listening on replay, you're here. Welcome, Jules. Hello. Hello. It's nice to see you. When you come into the stream today, my invitation to you is to type in the comments. Hello, Andy. Type into the comments something you're going to do today that you're looking forward to.

What are you looking forward to today? So I live in Minneapolis and this weekend is a really fun weekend because it is called artoworld and there are different buildings throughout Minneapolis that have artists displaying their artwork. It's like they open up their studios or they go to different buildings or pop up events and you get to see the most fantastic local art. Today's the last day. It's been going on since Friday. You're gonna do a puzzle. Be sharp. You're gonna plant some flowers. You're planting flowers.

I love that. Yeah. So today I am gonna head out and go to artoworld and go meet some local artists and hopefully I leave my wallet in the car. Oh, shoot, there's Apple Pay. Right? Gets you every time. So today, me time. Laughter. I'm gonna ask you another question. Type in the comments of the chat. When was the last time that you belly laughed? Like, ha ha ha ha ha, belly laughed. And that sounded crazy and creepy. But I'm also sitting outside wondering what watching me right now. And then at the end of the day, who cares if they're watching me?

They're probably sad. They're not laughing too. But literally, when is the last time you belly laughed? What did you do? Oh, you're going, Andy, you're doing an E ride with your little dog in the basket. Oh, I love that. What kind of dog? I would like to see a photo next time I see you. Laughter. When have you laughed last? Do you remember? Friday. Jules, what day is today? Sunday. You haven't laughed since Friday, but also you remember laughing really hard on Friday, so I'll take it. You know, laughter is one of those things that is free.

Watching a comedian yesterday, amazing. I love it. There was a great comedian in St. Paul recently. I can't remember who it was, but somebody that I know went to go see them. Laughter. It's something so simple, yet so hard. If you watch a child, a little kid, they laugh at everything. Everything they could trip and fall. And if you start laughing with them, they'll start laughing, they'll stop crying. So why is laughter important? You tell me. What does it feel like when you laugh? Let me know. What does it feel like when you laugh when you're a little kid?

There are studies out there, and I'm going to not get this correct. And I meant to search for it before I got on the call, but I was parking my car, which is why I had to walk outside to a park bench laughing. When you're a kid, you laugh some insane number, like a hundred times a day. It's crazy, right? 100 times a day. Can you imagine? There are 14, 40 minutes in a day. So you spend 100 minutes possibly laughing. Oh, yeah, that's who it was. Andy, that comedian. I know some other people that went to go see them, so, yeah, great.

I love it. So maybe you go to a comedian and you laugh and they make you belly laugh. I'm really picky about comedy comedians, because I also like if they toe the line on jokes that might go too far, I'm like, is that really funny? And then I go all moral and don't always laugh. But when you can find the right one, like Chelsea Handler, she cracks me up. I'll go on Instagram and I'll look for her stuff because it is funny and stupid. So sometimes I was just stupid, right? Jules, Laughing releases the good endorphins that make me happy and feel light.

Ah, look at you, all science on me. Yeah. Laughter is so good for our systems, yet we do it so little. So fun fact. I've told you before, I teach spin classes. Andy has been in one of my spin classes. I. On a Friday. Like, Friday mornings, I call them Friday funnies because I feel like I am funny on Fridays. I. I don't know what it is, but I feel like there's a lightness about it. So I literally call it Friday funny. So flashback Friday, Friday funny. All the same to me, because I might play a song that makes you remember something silly or stupid like Laffy Taffy, and I tell bad jokes about Laffy Taffy candy.

And the song has nothing to do about candy, but people laugh every single time I say it. So why is this important? Joel's already touched on it. It releases is good endorphins. But let me let you ponder on this for a second. How many times have you been watching a show or a movie, maybe in a movie theater or maybe at home with friends and something was said or some bit was injected into the movie or the sitcom, and you held your laugh in. Guilty. Guilty. Because I didn't want to be the only one laughing, right?

But what if I reframe that a little bit? What if I unpack that a little bit? And what if I don't care if I'm the only one laughing? Do you know those people in your life? Like, I'm laughing at my hair right now because it's all over the place. It's funny. So. So you know those people, right, who just laugh out loud at the smallest, silliest things. And what do you feel inside? Like, sometimes you feel just, like, annoyed. Sometimes I feel annoyed. Like, why are you laughing right now? And then it's like, why am I not laughing?

So laughter is something that I just want to invite into our days, into our stories, just a tiny bit more. Because there are actually studies that will tell us that, how laughter is good for us. I'm gonna laugh at my hair right now. You can laugh with me. But laughter is fuel for the soul. Laughter allows for a sense of lightness that Jules already said a lightness, a feeling of lightness in a world and a space where we carry space much on our shoulders. We carry so much within our hearts. What if we just laughed a little more?

What if we saw that little kid and saw them laughing and sat down on the floor with them and just started laughing? I heard of the most ridiculous thing. If you've ever heard of this, then type in the chat, because I want to know, and I want to know if you've ever done. Done this before. Have you ever heard of laughter yoga? Like, literally, laughter yoga. Andy, I'm going to read in here. You just watched the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize Awards on Netflix. Conan o' Brien got the prize. Awesome guest, and he gave great speech at the end about the importance of silliness.

Yeah, Conan o' Brien, he's freaking hilarious. Like the stuff that they come up with and the voices, the comedians that can do voices. Eddie Murphy was one of my favorites. I don't know why. He just made some great movies. But when we can find that opportunity to be silly, to laugh, to laugh at ourselves, there's a lightness, there's a levity, but it starts to shift how we think. It starts to shift how we feel. It starts to create a space for us to have less heavy. I don't know how to say it differently.

It's like when you laugh, you sit taller or you belly laugh, you squeeze on in. But finding opportunities to be silly and giving yourself permission to be silly and laugh gives everybody else around you the same permission. So I, as I mentioned, do the spin class things, and I do Friday funnies. So I had two people in my class recently. They both were hitting a milestone of a hundred rides. Like, think about that. That's 4550 minutes of them investing in themselves, saying yes to themselves when they could have said yes to any other thing.

So on that particular morning, the night before, I'd gone to Target, and I was going to get some treats for class, and I walk in and Target, then they get you. Every time I walk in, and there's, like, this huge display of, like, all the fun summer things. And I see these little paddle boards, and I'm like, or for pickleball and the little wiffle ball things. And I was like, oh, maybe we could play wiffle ball or pickleball in the studio. Nah, that would probably be a bad idea. I could bring something.

So I keep looking up and down these things. Next thing, I find bubble makers. Who doesn't love bubbles? Like, we love bubbles, right? Kids love bubbles. You go to a street fair and there's bubbles. You find kids, kids, and then you hear laughter, and then you want to laugh, and then you want to play with the bubbles. So I got two tiny bubble makers, one for each of the riders hitting their hundredth milestone. And then I got a great big one. And I'm not even kidding you, I put the little bubble machines on their bikes for their little, like, present.

And I put the big bubble machine right in front of my bike on stage where I teach. And then I saw these things, and they're called skip its. I used to call it a lemon drop. I don't even know why. When I was a kid, I had one, and it was the shape of a lemon, and somehow lemon drops stick in my head. But kids these days, they call them skip its. It's this little circle. You put it on your ankle, it has a little rope, and at the end, it has a ball that bounces or makes a noise. And these ones glowed up.

So. So I literally kid you not Friday morning, not this past Friday, the last Friday morning, I brought in bubbles and skip it. And I did the skip it as people were coming in, and I was like, try it. And I got a couple of people to try it, and everybody was laughing. And then I brought the bubble machine in, and I just set it in my class. And as soon as class was ready to start, I ran around the room like a crazy girl. Blowing bubbles at everybody, and everybody started laughing, and you'd see them, and they were like, oh, play with the bubbles.

So halfway through my class, I grabbed the bubble maker and I got off my bike, and I was coaching them to do the thing. Well, I was spraying bubbles, and at the end, I did Katrina and the Waves Walking in Sunshine as, like, my cool down song. So when they walked out of class, they walked through the bubble rainbow that I was creating, and they were singing this song, and everybody was laughing. So what better way to start a day or create a community or to create a connection with you or anyone else than to find the things that make you feel silly and just laugh?

What is it? Maybe it's watching a comedy. Betsy Hodges was out here the other day, and she had her agreements. And if you go back and find her live conversation about the agreements in there, she talks about laughter and the importance of laughter. So we can wake up and I don't know how many of us wake up, and first thing we do is we grab our phones or maybe we see you text at us or jump on some. Oh, yeah, it was called a lemon twist. There you go. I don't know what it was, but, yeah, I had one of those, and it was, like, hilarious.

So whatever it is that you call it, grab a hula hoop, go to the store and buy bubbles or whatever it was when you were a child and you just felt silly doing it. Like, I'll go to the Ragstock store and buy tutus, and I'll wear those in class sometimes. Or I'll show up at a 5k and I'll wear that just to be silly, because why not? You know? Do I do it every day? No. Do I laugh as much as I would like to? No. But my invitation to you today is to find something that's gonna make you laugh, do something that allows you to raise those endorphins.

There are so many things around us that can feel heavy, and we could be having a crap day, right? And on that day, you might not feel like laughing because life is just heavy that day. But maybe you know somebody who's silly. Maybe you have a friend that laughs at the dumbest things. Maybe you find that, or maybe you jump out into Netflix or whatever. You can watch and find that favorite comedian and watch that for a little while and just see how you feel after or legitimately laughing. Yoga is this.

I watched part of it once because somebody told me that they experienced it, and I was like, I need to know what this is about. They were Literally laying on the floor, hands on their belly, and they just started laughing. And for the first like 30 seconds. And it was the most fake laugh I've ever heard. It was like, it was like, you're like this, you're like. Then something happens in your brain and you're like, start laughing at yourself for how bad you're laughing to start. And then all these people are just like laughing really loud.

I'll tell you one last funny story. So I would go visit my mom on Sundays and it was, it was comical. My mom, like, I feel like kids and people that get older, like, man, they've got it figured out. But she would laugh all the time and like her laugh would go down the hall like she lived in a long term care facility. They would leave the doors open. And sometimes I'd bring my dog Major in. And I just remember this one particular day, my mom was still laying in bed. I must have gotten there earlier in the day that day, but she was still laying in bed.

Or maybe it was she just waking up from a nap. And I have a 70 pound golden retriever, right? So he's our boy and he's fantastic and he brings so much joy. But my mom was this tiny, tiny little person and he comes flying into her room, jumps on her bed and lands on her leg. And my mom squealed. She's like, major. And she starts laughing so hard as this tiny, tiny little lady is trying to push this big dog off. And Major thinks she's starting to play, so he starts rolling all over and she starts cackling so loud.

The nurses come in and they're like, carol, what are you laughing at? And she's like, look at this big oaf. He's taken over my bed. And everybody started laughing. So, you know, find it, feel it. And if you're not feeling it today, try to go to YouTube and look up laughing yoga or laughter yoga or belly laugh or something like that. And just watch it because it'll crack you up. Or go to Target and buy a lemon twist or a skip it or a bubble machine. And on the days where you just need a lift, use it, why not?

Or go out to Conan o' Brien. Just my invitation to you is to find ways where you can laugh a little more. I think I started by saying kids laugh Somewhere between 50 and 100 times a day. The opposite side of that statistic is adults laugh somewhere between one and five times a day. So how might we change our own statistic so that we interject just a little bit more? Silliness into our days. If you're in Minneapolis, Twin Cities area, I invite you to go check out Ardewill, check out some cool art, support local artists.

They're beautiful people, kind people, and I hope you all have an amazing day and we'll see you on Monday. Check out the title. I changed it. Oh, last thing. Mark your calendar. June 8th. Luke and I met this week. We're gonna do an in person meetup on June 8th. More details to come. Jules, I know it's your birthday weekend and you're gonna be in town, so hold some space for us. We're gonna do a Cadre live meetup on June 8th. More to come. Have a great day, everybody.