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A funny thing happens when you find yourself falling in love with your meditation practice. Things get lighter. Everything. People who used to make you crazy, don't. (Or at least not as crazy for as long.) You worry less. Road rage turns into irritation, and maybe even simple observation. You laugh more.
I laugh a lot. This may not be a good thing since my laugh is a loud belly laugh. Some people call it a chortle, others a cackle. It is with me always and I don't need anyone else around to laugh so hard I have tears streaming down my cheeks. Birds make me laugh, puppies make me laugh, my daughter makes me laugh.
It took me awhile to realize that spontaneous chortling was related to my spiritual practice. The more I practiced, and the longer I sat each day, the more delightful my world. I was happier and happier with whatever was tossed my way. More things were funny. One day I suddenly realized that laughing was my way of expressing delight with the world around me.
Ok, it was a little scary. Especially in situations where I was the only one laughing. They burned women in Salem for less as I recall. But then I talked to one of my teachers, the one who laughs all the time.
"Should I try to stop laughing so much?"
He just laughed.
Then I read this: "The face of the wise man is not somber or austere, contracted by anxiety and sorrow, but precisely the opposite: radiant and serene, and filled with a vast delight, which often makes him the most playful of men, acting with a sense of humor…..he becomes laughter itself." (Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, p. 231)
This doesn't mean an absence of heartbreaks. They still happen. Instead, more and more, they are mixed with a lightness that promises refuge and a means for chugging through our every days - sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, always ok.
