Joy is the ability to maintain your sense of humor while facing life’s toughest challenges. It is a spiritual quality associated with inner strength, faith, and the ability to face life’s adversities with a positive mental attitude. Finally, it is a sign of courage and the ability to inspire others when, together, they face overwhelming difficulty.
To be cheerful, you must allow yourself to be spontaneous and be willing to laugh at yourself. But laughter is like love: it cannot happen by force or by prescription. But you can always thrive in a happy environment.
Here is a list of seven activities that will help you develop joy by teaching you how to be spontaneous and be willing to laugh at yourself. Most of the activities that follow are designed as group activities. This is how you learn to stop judging yourself and others and to become playful, spontaneous, and fun-loving.
1. Host a poetry jam. It can be theme free or it can have a theme. Everyone is invited to write a poem, without rules, but with a cheerful tone. Unleash your imagination and create a poem that you like. Then present it to the group. You could add more drama and fun by dressing up for the role.
2. Have a game night. Pick a game that provides opportunities to laugh and have game night, for example, Charades, Twister, or board games. Prepare a fun and relaxed environment where you can feel free to laugh. Dress comfortably and adopt a playful attitude. Remember, this is not a contest. The one who laughs the most is the real winner.
3. Organize a comedy festival. Remember and describe the funniest thing that ever happened to you or tell a story that makes you laugh. Then ask your group members to describe what makes them laugh. Or you can impersonate people who inspire you to impersonate them. You can make this even more entertaining by dressing up as the people you’re impersonating and presenting a skit or mini-play. It gets even more fun if the people you’re impersonating are completely irrelevant in real life.
4. Share your funniest videos or movies. Create a library of comedy videos with your group and start a regular comedy night, alternating households. Dress comfortably, bring food, relax and laugh. Remember, at no time should an activity on humor be turned into work.
5. Write a funny story as a collective effort. Ask a member to write a sentence on a piece of paper. The paper is then folded so that the sentence cannot be seen and the author says only the last word of the sentence. The next person writes a new sentence, folds the paper so that the sentence is not visible, says the last word to the next person, and so on. The group can decide how long the “story” will last. In the end, the roles are unfolded and the story is read.
6. Create the funniest headline you can from Word Soup. Cut out words from the tabloid headlines and fill a basket. Choose up to ten words from the basket and create your own title. You can write a short article that develops the headline. Unleash your imagination. Read your headlines and articles to the group. Keep in mind the points about humor that are explained in this chapter and have fun.
7. Perform a skit in a foreign language. Create ten cards that describe simple life situations (for example: wanting to go to the bathroom, asking how to get to the pharmacy, ordering a tuna sandwich at a restaurant, trying to buy a gift for a family member at a department store). Pick a card and choose one or two other people you will parody with, but do not allow them to read your card. Let the rest of the group read the card. Then start acting out the stage with your partners. In the play, pretend that you are a tourist visiting a foreign country and that the other actors are natives of that country. All actors must pretend to speak a “foreign” language. (You don’t need to know a foreign language, just pretend you speak one.) Using pantomime, body language, and sign language, try to explain your situation to your peers. The more spontaneous and inventive you are, the more fun your interactions will be. Enjoy.
Remember that joy is a sign of strength and that it is as important to your happiness as it is to give and receive love.