We All Need a Giggle Doctor

Because laughter is the best medicine

Once I applied to be a Giggle doctor, but … I was told I need to get serious and get some relevant qualifications. Then they would consider my application.

This is not a joke!

I’m telling you, it really happened. If you need proof I could email you my application — I’m sure I have it somewhere.

So, in all seriousness, there is an organisation here in the U.K (I think it might have began in Italy) that sends Giggle Doctors into hospital wards for children. The Giggle doctors are people who have studied say, drama and mime or gone to Clown College at the very least. On those scores, sadly, I was not qualified at all. Still, I really really wanted to be a Giggle doctor.

The little ones are in pain. They are frightened. They are missing their parents, and their school friends. And then a Giggle Doctor turns up, in a white coat and stethoscope, perhaps with balloons, wearing elements of a costume, who trips over in his big shoes… and hey presto, for a few moments, that child has forgotten about her fear, her pain, her sense of dislocation from normality.

So, my heart-felt, very serious advice to all of us, (including myself) going through whatever crisis Kismet and Karma have joined hands to conjure up is … let the toast fall, butter side down. Put it out where the worms will get a treat.

Never mind not crying over spilt milk, I say, slurp up the spilt milk and don’t wipe off your white moustache. Let the laughter roll. You might well pick up a few million germs as you slurp up the spilt milk, but honestly, it’ll do you good. Your immune system will get stronger.

If people around you, need to feel superior, trip over your words and gift them the comfort of feeling better, as they correct you.

If you wake up feeling down, get yourself a trampoline, and jump up. Of course the nature of a jump is that … you will also come down, but — I defy you to hold onto sadness or grumpiness while you are jumping.

And if the rug is singing to you I say, enjoy it. And why not join in?

Though the barbarians who went by the motto, ‘Might makes Right’, have too often, won, perhaps the last laugh will be from the few survivors of the civilisations that pronounced, everything, from soil and bacteria-filled slime, to the keening eagles on rocky Mountain tops, is alive.

They believed, everything vibrates, everything breathes, and the beat of your heart and the hum of the universe, can synchronise. We are all matter that in a multiplicity of forms, is alive.

For sure, our brains alone, are not the ultimate arbiters of what is real, or true, or even, good.

Anyway, I think I would have been pretty good as a Giggle Doctor. So in my blundering, Buddhist-aspiring way, I resolved not to let that rejection get me down. Instead, I would practise on unsuspecting people, every day.

Today, it was your turn. Do you feel at least an inch of levitation, if not an invisible upliftment?

This is a question that requires an answer!