Yoga is serious business. It asks so much of us: to let our lives go on without us for ninety minutes while we focus on the body, to do challenging physical work, and if we are practicing in a studio, to hand over some of our money. But, just because we are asked to take the practice seriously, we don’t have to BE serious. Yoga may be serious business, but it is also very, very funny. We twist ourselves up into silly shapes and fall over, our bodies make all sorts of weird noises, there is farting and grunting, and after a while, we don’t even think twice when the instructor reminds us to “move the flesh out from under the sits bones.” Can you imagine what would happen if we did that every time we sat down at the office? Surely we would get a nickname. “Hey, look, it’s Assy!” our co-workers would say.

Laughter is marvelous pranayama (breath work). Think of the feeling of laughing so hard that you have difficulty breathing. You’ve expelled every bit of air from the lungs, and just when you think you can take no more, the muscles in the throat and chest release, and fresh air rushes down into the lungs. If you have done breath work in class that includes kumbhaka (holding) this will sound very familiar! When we do breath work in class, often the goal is to completely empty and fill the lungs. Laughter is a wonderful, spontaneous way to achieve the same results.

So, how to let go? Yoga is such hard physical work, how do we find lightheartedness in the practice? I believe the answer is to examine the difference between effort and struggle. I invite you to scan the body in a posture, noticing the muscles that must be engaged to hold the position safely. Then notice which muscles are engaged needlessly. The muscles that must be engaged – e.g. triceps in warrior 2 – are part of our effort. The muscles that are needlessly engaged -a pained expression the face, for example – are struggle. They are working against the posture by using energy that could otherwise be engaged in our effort. It is difficult to be lighthearted when we struggle; our achievements will never match the amount of energy we have expended, and we will be left feeling depleted. Yet, in our effort we can find lightheartedness, for all is well and our difficult work is well done.