Episode Corinne Cosseron – Laughter and love of nature

My name is Linda Leclerc and I’m the founder of the Laughter Yoga School and the HAHA Sisterhood. Today’s episode is brought to you by “morale boost”, a free three-day morale-boosting program.

As you may know, I’ve published a book that I co-wrote with my colleague and friend Corinne Cosseron from France. Corinne and I have known each other for a very long time, and although we live on two different continents, we’ve put together a wonderful tool for anyone who wants to know more about laughter yoga, get ideas for their own sessions or have a book that gives concrete tips for laughing more. Founder of the International School of Laughter, she created rigology, a set of mind-body practices designed to stimulate joie de vivre and optimism. Here’s Corinne’s joy element.

Linda: Hello Corinne! Corinne Cosseron. I’m here with my girlfriend. Today, we’re each on our respective continents. Corinne is in Frontignan, France, and I’m in Quebec. Corinne is a bit worried because she doesn’t really know what’s going to happen, so don’t worry.

Corinne: The only risk I take with you is having a good laugh.

L: Exactly, exactly. Listen, Corinne. The element of joy… First of all, thank you for agreeing to be my guest. Today, the element of joy, I’d like to ask you two questions. I seem to be having trouble here. I’ve got a bit of a cold today.

And then she, she’s had a lot of activities, events, so we’re both… You could say we’re not at our best today, but that’s okay, we’re certainly gorgeous anyway.

C: There, all the listeners, they’ve all gone there.

L: No, because they have to think about how they’re going to be, if they’re better. Corinne, you when… We were talking earlier about our respective schedules for the next two or three months, and I could see how busy yours is, too. When you’re really stressed, what do you do to relax, to bring yourself back into a space that’s a little more… a little more relaxed.

C: Then I’m lucky enough to live by the sea, so I manage to get away to the beach. There, I meditate for as long as it takes in front of the waves. That’s something that really refreshes me. And if I’m not lucky enough to be in my region, I manage to find a spot of nature, and sometimes… on my way back from Paris… uh… It still consisted in wriggling out of the window to try and see a little bit of the sky that was full… and spot one or two clouds that were a bit nice… And really, my thing is to… to reconnect with nature. That’s what calms me the most. Or maybe, if there’s an aquarium with a few fish in the hotel lobby, that’ll do the trick. De La nature de la nature, de la nature…

L: Oh yes, then listen to me, I think it’s great because I remember several years ago, you sent me a video of your seaside with the waves. And we could just hear the surf. It was so soothing. I loved it, I envied you, in fact I still do.

C: But you know that the sea, the sea isn’t at all refreshing every day, in fact. On days with high winds, big waves and so on, you can arrive relatively calm and then leave completely pissed off, electrified because the waves are wild, so there are times. For meditation too, I love teaching meditation by suggesting that students watch the clouds go by. You need a very special sky. You need a blue sky with white clouds moving across it, and I tell them: “Don’t move your head, let them come and go like passing thoughts”. And if I don’t have exactly that weather then my course is ruined.

L: That’s it. And today, in Quebec, we have a cloudless sky. It’s azure blue, impeccable. So we can’t do this meditation. We’d have to think of something else. Then you also put… Another video I saw recently, I think it was of you in an alley with trees, sitting in a park. You were saying we’re going to do… we’re going to take breaths with the trees. in nature. So when you’re stressed, you connect… no matter where you are, you go and find an element of nature to connect with and…

C: Trees, trees are much less restless than we are, except on stormy days.

L: Yes, it’s true, it’s true. And when you have days when you feel a bit sad or something might happen that makes you feel a bit morose or nostalgic or melancholy.

What do you do at times like these to cheer yourself up a bit?

C: I don’t start by cheering myself up. I start by welcoming this sadness, listening to what it has to say and accepting it. And I’ve noticed that when I let it have its full place, when I’m not too afraid of it, because it’s actually… when I’m afraid of my emotions, that they’re going to be long and annoying.

But when I let it go, well, it goes right through me, it’s there, it’s not necessarily pleasant, but eventually it goes away and then I can reconnect to something softer. and that will be authentic. At that point, I might cheer myself up afterwards, but I always start by welcoming that sadness in its entirety.

Is it what she has to say that’s there. Sadness can take a long time, you have to be patient. And then, after my thing here, it’s going to be to reconnect with the human warmth of someone I love. To take my mind off things, but in the sense of reconnecting heart to heart with someone who will either make me laugh, or who can hear my sadness too, if I need to rest. It all depends on what it is, but in any case, I always start by welcoming my unpleasant emotion, whatever it is.

L: I also really like that you use the word unpleasant because… we sometimes see, we hear it’s negative emotions. I don’t think an emotion is negative, it’s… an emotion, it’s pleasant or not so pleasant.

Indeed, when we feel sad, it’s because there’s something going on. There’s something that draws our attention to an event, an activity, whatever, that’s perhaps less pleasant, and we have to deal with it.

C: Well, that’s what I do, I’m a rigologist. A rigologist teaches us to free ourselves from all our emotions, whatever they may be. They’re all equally important. It’s no better to be happy than to be sad. What’s important is to be authentic to the emotion you’re feeling. And the price of laughter, since you and I obviously love laughter. The price of a good laugh, a sincere laugh, is going to be something we can connect with, provided we’ve really left room for all the other emotions. If, when I’m sad, I stick an artificial laugh over it, it’s monstrous, it’s very violent, it solves nothing and the laughter will sound false anyway. That’s why positive and negative mean nothing in rigology. They’re all equally important. They enable us to live and move forward. They set us in motion, and one emotion is no better than another. The only good emotion is the one that corresponds to what’s really there at that moment.

L: Yeah, that’s it, that’s in the background. I. Several years ago, I gave a workshop.

In fact, it’s a webinar on laughter and emotions. And it’s something I’ve been stressing. You shouldn’t deprive yourself of experiencing an emotion because it’s unpleasant, you should let it… In any case, it’s to your advantage to let it tell you what it has to say. And then we carry on.

C: An emotion is a bit like a child having a tantrum. It’s going to make a racket until we deal with it anyway. And in the end, the fear we have of it is much worse than the fact of living it and feeling it. For example, for a very long time, I was very afraid of my anger, because I’m a very energetic, volcanic person, and I had the impression that if I let my anger go, I was going to kill people, act out. But in the end, when I welcome that anger too, and try to put it into perspective by saying: “Well, now, do I find that it’s actually encroaching on my territory and I’m right to be angry or not.” Well, in the end, it’s much less violent when I listen to her than the whole idea I have of her by pushing her away. So in the end, it’s always in our interest to let our unpleasant emotions live.

L: So completely, so, so, so, so, so.

C: And then afterwards… so good to laugh for real!

L: Exactly!

C: We deserved it after all!

L: And I had a teacher, me at university, she used to tell me “what you resist, persists” and then uh… She had a few phrases like that that she would… She’d drop these pearls here and there in her classes. And then this one, me, what we resist persists. I held it back so, so, so much, because it’s so true.

C: Then I’ve got one you’ll like. “An emotion is made to be expressed, i.e. to come out of us, not to stay inside. And if it’s prevented from living its life, it will imprint itself inside us, derogating either physically, in the form of tumors and the like, or psychologically, with burnouts and the like, or even spiritually, where we can lose our faith and be completely suffocated because we don’t allow ourselves to live… Everything that can’t be expressed, gets printed.

L: How wise we are. And you, my Corinne, your element of joy, what would that be? The thing that makes you happy? In a state of joy, what would that be? I’ve got an idea, I’ll let you say it.

C: Ah you have a little idea, I’d love to hear it! I don’t know if that’s what you’re thinking! So really, what makes me happiest is laughing with someone I love. Preferably just to make them laugh, that makes me even happier. But that’s it! I mean, I’ll do absolutely anything to see the people I love laugh. That’s why I say a lot more ridiculous things than other people. I’m a character like that, completely out of touch, very often, I’ll do anything to make the people I love laugh. That’s my deepest joy. That’s what you were thinking. Linda? You thought I was going to say that?

L: Listen to this… I had it in mind. There’s the complicity you have with Fred, then the moments of laughter you share… There was that. Fred’s your son, so there was… But I was thinking a lot about Fred in your joyful element… When we’re laughing together. I…

Him but you too, my friends, I love to laugh with the people I love. It’s really… I think it’s the shortest connection from heart to heart, it’s laughter. It’s a relationship gas pedal. When we laugh together, it goes so well. But even with strangers, if I go to the guichet treize de la Sécu to fill in some paperwork I don’t understand, if the guy has a twinkle in his eye and smiles a little, has a bit of a sense of humor, I know we’ll get there, it might take a while, but we’ll get there. If I come across someone who’s like a Norman wardrobe, completely closed, with no smile, no sparkle, then I think it’s going to take a very, very long time, if ever. Laughter is also reassuring. So yes, that’s my element of joy, it’s seeing the curly eyes of my lover, you were right, but also of my girlfriends, my loved ones, even everyone.

L: That’s fine, you see, I wasn’t very very far away. I knew that laughter certainly had a nice place in it, but I suspected that it had a prominent place. So when you’re stressed, you reconnect with nature, you try to immerse yourself in nature. When you’re a bit sad, you let the emotion settle, you let it live without trying to camouflage it or make it up, or whatever. And your element of joy is laughing and making the people you love laugh!

C: Yes, laughing together!

L: Well, thank you very much, Corinne, for sharing these moments with us and… from across the Atlantic.

C: Thanks Linda! And have a good laugh!

Thank you for listening to this episode, which I hope will inspire you. To find out more about the Laughter Yoga School’s programs and activities, visit www.yogadurire.com. And for the community of women who laugh intentionally, visit www.hahasisterhood.com. Have a great day!

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