Savvy Women

Often, while I’m getting ready to go to work, I listen to a live, online broadcast of the day’s news put out by a relatively new media outfit called Russia Today. I like RT because their reporters frequently bring an interesting perspective to their stories. Plus, I once lived in Poland and have traveled a lot in central and eastern Europe, so I like to keep up with what’s going on in that part of the world.

A few mornings ago–I forget which day it was now–I was wandering around my apartment, buttoning up my shirt or brushing my teeth or doing whatever I happened to be doing at the moment, when RT aired a poignant report about Maria Mamzurina-Volkova, a septuagenarian Muscovite with an interesting connection to the small town of Kistelek in southern Hungary. The “Spiritual Mission” hook used to introduce her story was enough to draw me into my living room where I ended up taking a seat and watching the entire four-minute video, the very same one embedded here.

Immediately after seeing this story about “family duty”–that’s Volkova’s phrase–I composed an email to myself which included a link to the archived version of the report and then wrote, in the subject line of the message I was typing, the following: “My Next Savvy Blog.”

For additional information about Volkova, her brother, and her life’s mission, check out this story, from 2006, on Pravda.

I’m so pleased to be blogging about Dr. Madan Kataria and his worldwide initiative to bring peace, joy, sociability, and good health to the world. After watching a ton of videos about the good doctor in recent days, I’m thoroughly convinced that he should be the next recipient of the Nobel Prize for (Inner) Peace.

Dr. Kataria is a Mumbai-based physician who has conducted research on the physiological and psychological benefits of laughter. In 1995, in the midst of his studies on this subject, he had an epiphany: He wanted to start his very own Laughter Club where he could practice something that would later come to be called “Laughter Yoga.” Soon thereafter, he began meeting in a park with a handful of devotees and fellow practitioners. Now, a decade and a half after those humble beginnings, there are thousands of such clubs located in all parts of the world. As a result of this global craze, Dr. Kataria has become the Guru of Giggles and spends most of his time traveling the world over serving as the Head Honcho Consultant of Silliness and Guffaws.

I had a hard time choosing a video for this blog because there was such a wealth to choose from. In the end, I picked one featuring Nili Dor HaElla, a trained Laughter Therapist who resides in Israel. I decided on this clip mostly because she does such a good job explaining the health benefits of laughter.

Like I said, there are dozens of videos readily available on this subject, so if this one floated your boat, you might want to check out this.

Oh, by the way, May 2nd has been named World Laughter Day. In response, Dr. Kataria has penned a lovely message.

This week I used the link I included in my last blog to locate another Tara Stiles video that I felt deserved a bit of commentary. This one is Stiles giving a mini-lesson on meditation, a subject, like yoga, I’m deeply interested in.

Stiles introduces meditation as a method of simultaneously gaining deeper awareness (of the self and things going on in one’s immediate surroundings) and tuning out annoyances, which sounds a bit like a contradiction. How, the viewer wonders, can one take note of noises and sensations and whatnot while meditating without having those things become a distraction?

I think Stiles would answer my question this way: Observing things, taking note of what is happening and then pushing those sensations into the background of one’s consciousness, is a way of becoming disciplined. She points out that we shouldn’t try to ignore the world when we meditate, nor should we fixate on it. Inner peace can only be achieved when we recognize that distractions exist without being upset by them.

One of the things I really like about this video is hearing Stiles de-emphasize the importance of thinking. Because I think for a living and have been given the mission of helping others become better, more critical thinkers, I tend to be a brain-centric person. Shutting my mind down is something I’m often not very good at, and as a result, I frequently suffer from niggling maladies, like insomnia, which occur when my rogue brain begins running amuck at the precise moment I turn off all the lights and then crawl between the sheets.

If meditating could help me learn to get a little quieter on the inside, I wouldn’t care at all about how loud the outside world got.