Love To Disarm And Soften Humor

If there are two key factors to maintaining better mental health, better relationships, and generally just happier feeling, they are love and humor.

Often we may end up overheating with other people, go on the defensive, stress too much about a single event, etc. And then we realize that maybe our attitude hasn’t been right and after all we’re losing out here.

Let’s look at an example of this: There are couples who tend to criticize each other without ever reaching a consensus, because most often when we “attack” or are attacked, we raise firewalls and try to defend ourselves so that our egos are not harmed.

But this is a mistake. If I defend myself with the same weapon that the other one uses to attack me, war will begin. It’s not worth it and it doesn’t lead to anything other than a bad situation and bad taste in your mouth.

Gandhi gives a very clear and radical example of the use of love as an effective, disarming method. He achieved independence for India from the UK without firing a single shot, without aggression, simply by using “Ahimsa”.

What is “Ahimsa”?

Ahimsa is a strategy for finding the loving and awesome side of an aggressive person.

It’s about showing love to another person no matter how he or she behaves towards us. We remind ourselves that he is a great person who is really good at heart and that we love unconditionally, even though he is not behaving properly at the moment and even though he is very aggressive towards us.

Ahimsa is a weapon that works slowly but extremely effectively. We must persevere in giving love until the other person begins to reflect on their own behavior and begins to change.

We can practice this technique in our daily lives and see its powerful effects emerge. We will see that when we break down the walls between ourselves and others, as a result, another person will eventually begin to treat us well.

If our partner, friend or family is very angry with us and yelling at us, criticizing us, etc., the wisest thing we can do is avoid this absurd fight by going close to them, and give them affection, a hug or a kiss.

They may fight it off first, but if we hold our ground and don’t stray from their words or attitude, we will eventually be able to radically defeat them on our side.

And what about humor?

On the other hand, using humor is a great buffer in adversity. Like love, it also improves personal relationships and makes difficult life situations much more bearable.

“If a person had had a greater sense of humor, things could have gone differently.”

-Stanislaw Lem-

A sense of humor makes us aware that nothing is so serious. Most of the time, things feel worse than they are and we dramatize the events of our lives, making us feel even worse.

It is true that there are circumstances where there is no room for humor, but they are rare. Whenever possible, we should open our minds, be more flexible, and laugh at adversity.

First, adversity is unavoidable and happens throughout our lives. Secondly, because the situation is almost never as bad as we think, we ourselves are to blame for inflating the situation with our thoughts.

In addition to this, humor stimulates creativity and problem solving as it helps in relieving stress, and thus it is easier to solve problematic situations with a more open mind.

This sounds simple, but practicing humor and love often feels laborious. We need to be tenacious to make it a part of ourselves. We become loving people full of laughter and this makes our lives a lot easier.