"How can we use humour and joy to assist with our health and well-being?"
Answers:I would like to share with you a quote I have been pondering since the last Feast (April 8/98). The theme of the Feast was joy. Our consultation was centered on how to bring more joy into our own lives and into the life of the community.This quote is from "Paris Talks" page 109."Joy gives us wings! In times of joy our strength is more vital, our intellect keener, and our understanding less clouded. We seem better able to cope with the world and to find our sphere of usefulness. But when sadness visits us we become weak, our strength leaves us, our comprehension is dim and our intelligence veiled. The actualities of life seem to elude our grasp, the eyes of our spirits fail to discover the sacred mysteries, and we become even as dead beings."Such power joy gives us. The term "sphere of usefulness" jumped out for me. Also the idea that we fail to discover the sacred mysteries when our joy leaves us. How excited I was when I found this glorious Cause. How happy and intense I became, reading everything I could get my hands on, reveling in every new discovery and meaning. Our consultation centered more on how do we bring that spirit into our community to become attracting beacons of hope; so the community can help us from not becoming dead beings. As individuals we can read, meditate, say our prayers and draw closer to God but how do we translate that into the community? How do we find our sphere of usefulness as a community?Sometimes our community gets bogged down and the light dims dangerously low. The only way out of a bog is to fly out. So if we need to fly we need wings and joy gives us wings. How do we create joy within the community? Sometimes just having the Feasts and Holy Days aren't enough, the event is held but the joy is missing.If you have any ideas or thoughts about this please pass them on. I'm sure we all have had times when we have had to feed the flames of joy. Lyda Greer, Hay River, Northwest Territories, Canada

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HAPPINESS IS A GREAT HEALER
Joy gives strength, has a healing effect. Unhappiness weakens and causes disease. True happiness resides in the spiritual world and is eternal, whereas all unhappiness resides in this material world of existence, therefore the more we detach ourselves from the material world and attach ourselves to the spiritual world, the more happy and spiritually strong we become. The direct means of achieving this is by detachment from all save God. Another powerful tool is the prayer "O God, refresh and gladden my spirit.." (Baha'i Prayers, U.S.A.,1985 edition, p. 152)A very simple physical technique is simply to laugh daily. "One man, Norman Cousins, in his efforts to overcome a painful and debilitating disease, resorted to the exercise of positive emotions such as laughter. With the help of his physician he collected comic films and humorous books which he used regularly in order to laugh his illness away: 'I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep. When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion-picture projector again, and, not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free sleep interval.' "(Rusty Wright and Linda Wright, 500 Clean Jokes and Humorous Stories, p.21) How much more effective laughing can become when it is spiritualized! Thus you can see how interrelated these components are, each tied to all the others, supporting and being supported. This is not a "diet" or a treatment, it is a way of life. Be happy always. "You must be happy always. You must be counted among the people of joy and happiness and must be adorned with divine morals. In a large measure happiness keeps our health while depression of spirit begets diseases. The substance of eternal happiness is spirituality and divine morality, which has no sorrow to follow it." (Abdu'l-Baha quoted in 239 Days: Abdu'l-Baha's Journey in America, p. 94)Dr. William Saunders, Smyra, Georgia, U.S.A.