Then we see German soldiers reading leaflets dropped by British, breaking into laughter, and keeling over.

Imagine how much fun they had shooting this bit of dark humor!

Imagine watching a bunch of cut-ups pretending to read a piece of paper, laughing, and falling over.

Can you imagine if someone got giggles? I’ve love to see outtakes!

That’s because when you engage physical laughter mechanism, you really do start laughing.

You don’t need a reason. When hard wiring is activated, body laughs. No joke required.

Force yourself to laugh. It’s silly, but you will really start laughing.

It will change your state of mind.

And you will experience something completely different.

Copyright 2004 by Tony Papajohn. Tony writes and speaks on success. Subscribe to his free SuccessMotivator e-zine at http://www.successmotivator.com.

However, if you are using meditation to bliss out and avoid your pain, you are using your spirituality addictively. You are using your spirituality to bypass learning about and taking responsibility for your feelings.

This is what Lian was doing. Because he was avoiding learning from his feelings, he was continuing to think and behave in ways toward himself and others that caused him to feel depressed. Then, instead of exploring what he was doing that was causing his feeling self, his inner child, to feel depressed, he was meditating to try to get rid of feelings.

In his work with me, Lian discovered that he was constantly either ignoring his inner child – his feeling self – or he was in self-judgment. The combination of ignoring himself – which he did primarily through meditation – and judging himself resulted in his inner child feeling unloved, unimportant, and unseen. Lian saw that if he treated his actual children in way he treated himself – ignoring their feelings and constantly judging them – they would also feel badly and maybe depressed. But Lian did attend to his actual children’s feelings and needs. It was his own that he was ignoring and judging.

Lian realized that he was treating himself way his parents had treated him. He was a much better parent to his children than his parents had been with him, but he was parenting his own inner child in way he had been parented. He was not only treating himself way he had been treated, he was treating himself way his parents had treated themselves. As a result, he was not being a good role model for his children of personal responsibility for his own feelings, just as his parents had been a poor role model for him.

In course of working with me, Lian learned Inner Bonding process that we teach. He learned to welcome his painful feelings during meditation. He learned to quiet self-judgmental part of himself and to treat himself with caring and respect. He learned to take loving action in his own behalf so that his inner child no longer felt abandoned by him. It was inner abandonment that was causing his depression. He discovered that his depression was actually a gift – a way his inner child was letting him know that he was not being loving to himself. With practice, Lian learned to take loving care of himself and his depression disappeared. Now his meditation practice was no longer a spiritual bypass.