Get ready, get set ... laugh! It’s harder than it sounds, but John Chen (陳達誠), a practitioner of laughter yoga, is confident that the chuckles will flow at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on Sunday morning for World Laughter Day.
Chen, who heads the Taiwan Laughter Yoga Club, said last year 150 people showed up for the event, which is held yearly on the first Sunday of May.
This year, Chen aims to gather “100 pairs of family members” to laugh together for 100 seconds under the theme of “World Peace with families” and hopes to see participation from the foreign community. All are welcome to join in and participation is free of charge.
World Laughter Day was started as an offshoot from the laughter yoga movement began by Indian Madan Kataria in 1995. Kataria, a former physician, came up with a set of breathing and laughing exercises while researching the health benefits of laughter.
He founded the first laughter yoga club in Mumbai, which quickly grew into a global phenomenon. Today there are more than 6,000 such clubs in over 60 countries, according to Kataria’s Web site www.laughteryoga.org.
Chen, a 52-year-old who runs a shop selling medical equipment in Taoyuan, learned about laughter yoga through a Discovery Channel program that featured Kataria and his laughter yoga regimen. He was immediately impressed.
“It was so easy, the laughter was so great,” he said. “[You don’t] need any equipment, or devices, or special places.”
Chen started his own laughter club in 2004, now one of 21 such groups in Taiwan, and became a certified instructor. He leads a group 30-minute session of laughter exercises every morning at a Taoyuan park, which sometimes starts with a routine of fake laughter for which participants chant “ha ha ha, ho ho ho.”
Fake laughter inevitably turns into real laughter, says Chen.
For more information on laughter clubs in Taiwan, visit www.laughter-yoga.org.tw. This BBC television report by John Cleese (via YouTube) offers a nice introduction to Kataria and laughter yoga: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEfjVnYkqM
Dec. 9 to Dec. 15 When architect Lee Chung-yao (李重耀) heard that the Xinbeitou Train Station was to be demolished in 1988 for the MRT’s Tamsui line, he immediately reached out to the owner of Taiwan Folk Village (台灣民俗村). Lee had been advising Shih Chin-shan (施金山) on his pet project, a 52-hectare theme park in Changhua County that aimed to showcase traditional Taiwanese architecture, crafts and culture. Shih had wanted to build all the structures from scratch, but Lee convinced him to acquire historic properties and move them to the park grounds. Although the Cultural
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
RSS