Laughing With The Fun Federation

With a slight blush, I bring you the latest announcement from The Fun Federation. There is an open invitation to the event; for further information check with Hannah Merriman.

The Fun Fed has the delight of bringing you fully trained Laughter Yoga practitioner Tony Plant to our next play session. Tony is going to lead us through an evening of laughter to wake up the heart, invigorate the body and soothe the mind.

 

Laughter Yoga combines simple relaxation and healthy breathing practices from Yoga with playful exercises to induce healthy, hearty, hilarious laughter. Sharing an evening of laughter with a group of unknowns not only offers an oasis of joyful madness within our busy lives, but research has also shown that laughter is a great natural way to reduce stress, take exercise (it’s like internal jogging), boost immune systems, encourage positivity and create wonderful new relationships with others.

Grumps and gigglers alike – all are welcome. Come along and enjoy the delight of mindless, mindful silliness.

When: Tuesday 7th February, 6.30 – 8.30 pm. Prompt start.

Where: 13-17 Rosemont Rd (5 mins walk from Finchley Rd tube and Finchley Rd and Frognal BR station

Cost: Donations basis.

read more | add new comment | play | laughter yoga | fun federation | fun

With A Sense of Inevitability...

It is with a sickening sense of inevitability that I can reveal that, contrary to my previous optimism, the enhanced disclosure process is not out of my life.

Oddly enough, we have not failed on filling in the forms which is the most common error (my wife is also going through this procedure). We have simply been caught up in a change of policy (I think) and an administrative error.

When we were filling in the forms and supplementary forms about the supporting documentation, it stated that we had to show the original documents to the designated person who had to sign a form declaring that she had seen and checked the originals. The originals were to be returned to us, and the forms sent on to the Disclosure Unit. Today, we received a phone call to tell us that the forms must now be accompanied by photocopies of the documents. With various diary conflicts, we don’t have an opportunity to hand in the photocopies to the designated person until Thursday. We started this process in November. It took us until two weeks ago to obtain the correct forms and appropriate guidance on the process.

On the day that we handed in our forms and showed our ID documentation, our designated person phoned up Essex County Council to check how much our administration fee should be, so that we could make out the cheque. She was told that the amount was sixteen pounds each, so we made out the cheque accordingly. It seems that we were misinformed, and that Essex County Council wants another twenty-five pence each. Well, if they say so...But it doesn’t seem that there is much one can do when one takes the time to check with the Disclosure Unit and is misinformed by them.

Playing with Dragons

According to The Times, a rural hamlet in Monmouthshire has lost its Royal Mail deliveries following a Health and Safety assessment of the route. As somebody who is not affected by the application of the report, it is hilarious reading. It seems that every road and uneven surface threatens grazes, broken limbs or death. If you didn’t know this was someone’s job to think in that way, you might suspect that the author of the report harboured a deeply distressing personal pathology, seeing disaster lurking behind every sunbeam and pebble.

The logical extension of almost anything seemed to be a potential risk of death. This was precisely why I felt unable to complete the Health and Safety assessment that I was instructed to fill out if I wanted to run a Laughter in the Park event. I could contrive to see the potential for disaster everywhere, but I had not idea at all about how to quantify or characterise the risk. I knew it was possible that someone might fall into the rill, or fall down the bandstand steps, but I have no idea how likely either or those events would be. Almost inevitable or as plausible as death rays from Mars?

I was thinking of this today when I was watching the celebrations of the Chinese New Year. Local groups staged an exhibition of drumming and dancing dragons. The dragons leapt about, clambered on walls and chased delighted children up and down steps and through the Water Gardens. The young men inside the dragons played with the children and members of the crowds. They stood on shoulders to rear up and take down red envelopes and to hang lucky scrolls.

How Do We Put a Dent in FEAR?

It’s a cliche in positive psychology that FEAR is an acronym: depending on your preference it is either False Experience Appearing Real or False Experience Accepted as Real.

Happiness teacher and writer Robert Holden says that a lot of his work consists of showing people that they are already happy. When working with people it is not unusual to discover that if people look through their present circumstances, there is much for which they are grateful, and much that contributes to a sense of happiness.

Participants in my Happystance workshops can be initially reluctant to join in some of the group exercises: they frequently say that they can not visualise and have no power of imagination. Yet, in my experience, most of those people are experts at being frightened by something that hasn’t happened yet. They are afraid of something that may happen in the future: they can imagine this event of set of circumstances in full technicolour gore, and may even be capable of experiencing some of the accompanying emotions in advance.

“They need to do better than what is going on to make a dent in the fear that is affecting a million people.”- ANDY APAID, a businessman in Port-au-Prince, on the United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.

I read the above quotation in today’s New York Times. And I had it in mind when I met a few people this morning who all reported themselves as unhappy. After we had worked together for a while it became apparent that none of them was unhappy because of their current circumstances. The unhappiness lay in their expectation of future unhappiness, and they brought that emotion into their present, although it doesn’t belong there, and there is no guarantee that a future event will occur that will justify their present emotional state. It is well established that negative emotions have an adverse impact on people’s immune systems and can undermine their health and wellbeing. Fear of an adverse event in the future can undermine an individual’s ability to cope with it.

A Quiet Crisis of Unhappiness

There’s an interesting piece about the political need to address optimism and happiness in today’s Guardian. Jackie Ashley quotes from a report by Mulgan and Buonfino of the Young Foundation who conclude that british social fabric has been bruised over the last few decades and that Britain is suffering “a quiet crisis of unhappiness”.

Many of the issues are the same ones that I’ve been writing about in my attempt to explore what would make Harlow happy. Similarly, one of the issues that Ashley refers to is the ready deprecation of happiness as an optional extra. Both as individuals and communities, we seem to be in the grip of the same psychological process. We are deferring our happiness ‘until’ other things are achieved first: in transactional analysis terms, this is known as running an until script. Sometimes, the shopping list of what must be sorted first keeps growing to ensure that it will never be the right time to address the outstanding issue. Or we pack out our list of ‘to-be-dones’ with wicked problems that can never be resolved satisfactorily.

A common finding in transactional analysis is that the until script often runs concurrently with the injunction “Don’t have fun”. Fun is too frequently seen as equivalent to play, and therefore the opposite of work, achievement and productivity. However, Pat Kane argues for a play ethic that is essential for us to maintain “our adaptability, vigour and optimism in the face of an uncertain, risky and demanding world”. Kane quotes Brian Sutton-Smith: “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression”. It’s a startling observation that seems to have a remarkable amount of validation in the world around us, whether that is at work, school, college or our homes.

Laughter in the Park

At the end of my Sunday stroll I dropped in on a Social Entrepreneur who runs the cafe in the local park. We had an interesting chat between the times when he was cleaning around and serving his customers.

I was delighted to be offered the cafe as a venue for running future Laughter in the Park sessions. I’m very pleased about this as I have previously attended and enjoyed laughter sessions in Regent’s Park and other similar venues in London that offer a suitable bandstand. Although we have a bandstand in Harlow it is not in suitable condition for use by the general public and has the added (albeit picturesque) disadvantage of having a rill running very close to it. The last time that I enquired about using the bandstand for a voluntary event I was instructed to put together a Health and Safety Risk assessment. Now, that’a pretty much like telling me to look at a bare field and assess its crop potential. I have no background in agronomics or Health And Safety and any assessment that I made would have been pure guesswork rather than based on informed principles. So, the planned Laughter in the Park events didn’t happen.

The events will need to be scheduled for times when the cafe is not in use so that will affect the audience that can attend. I’d like to think that young people could attend but homework and other obligations would probably preclude family events for weekday evenings. I’m going to think some more about what I can offer on weekdays evenings or at weekends and with what sort of regularity.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

More on Making Harlow Happy

Back in early and mid-December I wrote to my local papers to ask the question “What would make Harlow happy?”. The letter didn’t appear. Nonetheless, I wrote to them again last week after some widely reported anti-social activity that led to the damage of more than fifty vehicles and was the subject of a lot of depressing editorial. The following letter was printed in my local papers this week.

Before and after the New Year, our newspapers seem to have been dominated by reports of vandalism, violence and anti-social activities in Harlow. All to a backdrop of continual squabbling of local politicians. I’ve even read that Harlow has been labelled as Grief City. Only two weeks in, is it already time to give up hope and just batten down the hatches?

 

The people who live, study and work here have talent, imagination and resolve. So do many of our officials. Every week, tucked away on the inside pages, are stories of innovation, community spirit and individual achievement. Unfortunately, somewhere in the daily grind of living in this town, it all seems to leak away.

 

Of course, many of the issues we face are complex. Some will take years to work out and others may never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. One issue is make-or-break and needs immediate attention. It concerns hope in our future.

 

People get involved in their neighbourhoods and work their fingers to the bone to maintain their families, homes and lives: but they find it harder when they believe that their community has failed them. We need to believe that our community is willing to protect and support our efforts. Citizens of all ages, businesses and social enterprises all need to believe that there is a commitment before they continue to spend their resources and stake their futures in Harlow.

 

read more | add new comment | resilience | happiness | community

It's Out of My Life (I Hope)

I filled in my enhanced disclosure forms and trucked them up to my local Voluntary Services Council along with the specified forms of ID. I am heart sick of this process that has been dragging on for far too long. This form is so notoriously difficult to fill out correctly that it has Guidance Notes that are x6 longer than the relevant part of the original form. Even despite the notes, we had to contact the helpline to enquire about my wife’s name (it contains an apostrophe) and how it should be filled in on the form.

Tedious though the form is, filling it in is relatively easy for a man. Following the prevailing norms of when the Police Database was put together, completing the form is a minefield for women. There are copious notes on who is allowed to use Ms, and what must be done if a single woman (other than divorced or separated) chooses to use this title. And then, for women who did not take the husband’s name on marriage, the husband’s surname has to be included under “Other Names” and then the disclaimer, “Not Used” inserted along with the date of the marriage. Presumably because that is the starting point of when the woman had the name available to her and started to not use it. Sigh.

I’m glossing over the intricacies of how you describe your volunteer job title. And the complete irrelevance that this seems to have when considering one’s eligibility to deliver laughter workshops to groups of people who mostly do not come under the classification of vulnerable groups.

Clowning Around

I’ve just been invited to a clowning session with the Fun Federation. There is an open invitation to the event, although it would be wise to check with Hannah Merriman to check that there are still places available.

The information that I have is as follows:

Contrary to common belief, clowns are a lot more than red noses and squirty flowers. The state of the clown is one of openness and deep listening to oneself. It allows us to see ourselves, others and the whole world afresh. Imagine that … what a way to begin a new year.

 

Starting from our ordinary experience of ourselves and our bodies we will discover comic characters by small changes and exaggerations of particular ways we move. Once we are in the open and sensitive state of the clown everyday objects become sources of immense play and discovery that we will explore through pair and group exercises. The session will also involve hilarious games and improvisation that allow us to enter into a state of freshness and naivety that will open us to new possibilities, in ourselves and others.

If anything in you is yearning to “do things differently”, this may well be just what you’re looking for.

Jayachitta [who is leading the event] trained at KIKLOS SCUOLA. She has been a Buddhist since 1981 and has a deep love of performance and the infinity of human expression. This session is open to all and only requires a willingness to play.

When: Tuesday 24th January, 6.30–9.30 pm. Prompt start.

read more | add new comment

What a Difference F2F makes

Today I managed to have a face-to-face meeting with a Carers’ Co-ordinator at my local Voluntary Services Council. This was a text-book example of how dealing with people remotely can lead to bad advice and a lot of wasted time and effort. I met with this co-ordinator face-to-face this afternoon and within minutes I had: the forms that I need to fill in; agreement as to the multiple forms of ID that I need to provide; the news that after some investigation, my VSC can provide a registered body number to support the application; and the welcome information that my personal financial contribution will be an estimated 17.50 pounds.

I don’t know why I could not have been given all of this assistance at any of the times when I’ve been in touch since November. And it makes more of a nonsense of some of the advice that I was previously given and that I’ve whinged about in earlier entries. However, at least I now have some paper that makes me feel that I am on my way to obtaining this wretched enhanced disclosure. Some people do respond better to face-to-face meetings: I’m of the business mind-set that thinks asynchronous communication like emails and voicemails are still valid forms of communication and worthy of consideration and response. However, this is progress and I welcome it.

A good outcome from today is that I’ve been invited to attend a Carers’ Networking meeting on 7th February. I’m being allowed to run a taster session of some of the workshop content. I’m hopeful that this will be not only a good networking opportunity but a chance to sign-up some groups for the Happystance workshops.