Great Neck resident Elsie Blum just wants to make people laugh – even at age 94.
Every week, Blum conducts sessions of what is known as Laughter Yoga, a series of exercises intended to get its practitioners to laugh to better their mood and health.
The exercises are mostly “silly” actions and phrases, according to Blum.
“When you laugh, you feel good,” Blum said. “The brain responds to laughter.”
Laughter yoga is more casual than traditional yoga, and focuses on breathing control and eye contact.
“It’s just laughing deeply and looking into their eyes,” Blum said. “When people don’t look others in the eye they typically have trouble with themselves or other people.”
Blum said this type of yoga was started by an Indian physician named Madan Kataria, after he found his patients were more healthy the more they laughed. She said she has been doing Laughter Yoga for about 15 years.
“It takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown,” she said. “If you smile more you’re relaxed all over.”
Blum said she came across laughter yoga a number of years ago after her husband died. She said she heard something about it on television and thought “what is there to lose?”
“It helped me in my every day life,” she said. “You can get up in the morning and say ‘this is my day and I can make it what I want,’ or you can say ‘it’s cold again.’”
Blum said she went to Vishwa Prakash, a laughter yoga instructor in Manhattan, to learn how to teach it to others. She holds laughter yoga sessions every Saturday at 2 p.m. at Reddy Care at 475 Northern Blvd.
When asked about still working at 94, she simply asked “Do I look 94.”
Before finding laughter yoga, Blum said, she was a dog trainer who owned Pet Pals in Great Neck.
Blum, who has a background in social work and psychology, said training dogs also started out as a hobby.
“I ended up as a dog trainer because dogs follow Pavlov and Skinner just the same as people,”she said.
Blum said she got a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University and her master’s degree in social work from Adelphi University as well as an honorary degree in psychology from Pepperdine University.
She worked for Temple Israel of Hollywood for two years doing social work for families and with people and families at the University of Judaism’s Wagner Program for Personal and Family Enrichment for two years.
Blum said the most important aspect to both of her – whether it be psychology or yoga – is knowing yourself.
“If a dog bites a person, I can’t say ‘why did you bite them?’” she said. “But I can ask the person ‘what were you doing just before the dog bit you?’ What you do has a great influence on what other people do.”
Blum said whatever Pavlov and Skinner taught about people works on animals as well.
She said she has even trained chickens to dance when she picked up a pencil, and pot-bellied pigs to play the piano.
“Someone had pig as a pet and she had a children’s piano,” Blum said. “You can teach pig how to play piano – you just put food on the keys and he’ll bang on it.”
The laughter yoga classes are free of charge, but she said her need to do the classes is selfishly altruistic.
“Nobody does anything for free,” she said. “I do it because I love to laugh.”
Blum said that during a good session 20 people will be in attendance, but that on bad weather days membership can be as small as four. The sessions are promoted on meetup.com and by word of mouth.
Blum said she gives out brochures to those attending her yoga classes that gauge their happiness on a scale between one and seven both before and after sessions. She said the students don’t have to put their names on them, but she can usually tell by the handwriting who they belong to.
She said most of the brochures always have higher numbers after sessions.
Blum said she will do anything to make people laugh.
“If they’re sitting there, and you do something to get them to smile, you can get them to move,” she said.
Besides her weekly free sessions, Blum also works with dementia patients at the Highfield Gardens of Great Neck.
Blum said she tries make physical contact and eye contact with the patients.
She said this, along with trying to get them to laugh, helps them feel better.
Blum also said she works with North Shore-LIJ nurses as well. She said if she can get the nurses in a good mood, they will be more likely to bring a smile to the face of one of their patients.
“If they’re feeling good, they’ll come to their patients with a smile on their face,” she said.
Blum said because of laughter yoga, she finds it very easy to walk around and smile all day.
“When somebody is made it takes up a lot of energy,” she said. “If you keep that up, it is not healthy.”
