Laugh at it all

It can all feel so serious. Ominous implications. Dramatic circumstances.
It seems so easy to tense up. Hard to lighten up.

Yet when the realization hits, it is so often met with laughter. A deep belly laugh at the absurdity of what you believed, at the hilarity of the identity you always took yourself to be. Full-blown LMFAO-level chuckling. The thing you clutched so tightly, the idea that seemed concrete, turns to dust on inspection. And if that is true, what was all the effort for?

In those moments the natural responses are often laughter or awe, depending on temperament. Laughter tends to show up for the action-oriented, awe for the artistically inclined. Both point to the same place.

Laughter lives in the gap between our habit to predict and explain, and the rawness of what is. It calls out the mismatch between the mind-created world and the real world. The distance is vast, yet vanishes in the space of humor.

Laughter can be a common language of realization. If love softens suffering, laughter reveals how much of it is imagined and self-imposed. Love soothes. Laughter teases the identification with thought. In this way, laughter is a kind of support. A valid, often more impactful alternative to empathy and compassion, it can offer both while bringing situational levity.

It can dispel anger. Flip pain. Spark creativity.

Most of all, it points you back to the present. Like crying can bring you closer to grief, laughter can cut through the swirl of emotion and shine a light on the illusion surrounding it.

The teaching is inside the joke. Follow the turn back to its essence. The moment the opposite of what you expected arrived. The moment the mind was tricked by its own importance. That chuckle, that ah-ha, is the thusness of awakening to this very moment. Being here, now, looking back at what you thought you were, what you thought the world was, and seeing it for what it is. An illusion, grinning back with you.