Joe Hoare

Saturday 22nd nov saw 60-70 people attend this conference and have a 30 minute laughter workshop, including one Ruby Wax. She’d interviewed Steve, the organiser, a couple of days earlier in ‘Ruby’s Room’, he invited her, she managed to come, and the first session she attended was the laughter workshop. She told Steve afterwards how much she enjoyed it.

Were you there?
A lovely email popped into my inbox as a result: I was at the Social Anxiety event on Saturday and am just writing to say I really enjoyed the session you did (even though I thought I wouldnt!).

We had another good laughter workshop at the Pierian Centre on the 18th, we all left with various aching muscles, cheeks, ribs, tummy. The question of practicing came up again, how important it is to keep persevering when adopting a new way of doing something and not becoming dissuaded by the inevitable mind-chatter (why am I doing this? Do I really have time? Is it really worth it? What’s for breakfast?)
This is just our mind’s resistance to what it perceives as a threat to its existence, its way of life, our ego feeling threatened and so throwing up a smoke screen to discourage us from initiating changes. However, as we probably all know either from our own expereince or from other people’s, when we persevere, sooner or later we have an experience that makes us realise that our new practice has just delivered a result. When that happens, we know. Its no longer a debate about whether something works or not, we know from our own direct personal experience.

So, it was a useful conversation we had, and I look forward to hearing how everyone gets on, what results their ‘Start the day well’ practices deliver.