Embark on a journey through the realms of healing and laughter with Ann O’Keife. In this exclusive MysticMag interview, Ann shares her captivating odyssey from the transformative landscapes of Glastonbury to becoming a practitioner of PSYCH-K®, laughter yoga, and creative writing, revealing how these modalities bring joy, well-being, and positive transformations to individuals and groups alike.
What can you tell me about yourself and your professional journey?
In the early 1990s, I was going to a group near where I lived in London. There, we talked about various things like astrology, crystals, massage, sacred sites, and other things I’ve never really heard of before. I was really intrigued by it.
At one point, I went on a trip to a place called Glastonbury in the UK, where I had a few synchronicities happen to me. I met many interesting people and was gifted my first set of runes, which are ancient stones we’ve symbols on them. It all felt like a big healing experience down there at Glastonbury. That area of the world is connected to the heart chakra of the world, so it’s a place of great healing.
After that, I moved from London to Brighton, which is a place where there’s a lot of alternative and liberal thinking. I got involved in different groups and organisations, and I started training. I can say that I’ve been on exploration since moving to Brighton. I got into a lot of reading, studying, and researching on my own, but I’ve also taken myself to various courses and colleges, which led to my current situation where I’m involved in all these different fields. It all comes from my curiosity.
What healing modalities do you use?
I’ve got a few therapies that I offer. I’m trained in hypnotherapy and I’m also a PSYCH-K® practitioner, which is psychological kinesiology created in the mid-80s by an American, Rob Williams. Instead of people just going to counseling and offloading all their problems and talking about what they are not happy about, he wanted to find a technique that is much more solution-focused. It’s about building new beliefs about yourself, your inner world, your innocence, and the world around you. That’s the technique that I’ve been using for about 15 years now. I’m also trained to be person-centered counseling, and I teach that in a local college now.
One of the main aims of counseling is having UPR, which is unconditional positive regard for another human, even if that human’s done some really bad stuff or was involved in something negative. It’s about having an open-mindedness and an openness in order to allow people to express themselves truthfully and honestly. Because of that, people can find their own healing. I confront a lot of release and a lot of relief that result from people sharing what’s in their hearts and minds.
I also teach laughter yoga, which has been around for a while, since the mid-90s. It was created by an Indian doctor Madan Kataria. He was researching the link between laughing and happiness and people’s health and well-being, so it comes from a medical background. He got a group of friends together to do these exercises in a park in Mumbai. He was doing all these exercises with smiling, laughing, giggling, and eye contact. People reported feeling a lot more stress-free, having improved circulation, being in a better mood, getting on with other people better, sleeping better, and a general improvement in their health and well-being through laughing with other people and connection. I got my training in laughter yoga around 7 years ago.
During the pandemic, I was doing laughter yoga online, as well as a lot of Facebook lives just to cheer myself up and cheer up people who’d been exercising at home. Now that the pandemic’s lifted, I’m doing laughter yoga sessions with different groups of people. I do it with basically any group that is after more uplift, laughter, and bonding. It’s very beneficial for teams and groups of different kinds. In doing that, I’m often going to businesses, charities, or organizations and getting people to laugh. That’s one of the things I do.
Another thing I teach is creative writing, as I’ve been a writer for many years. I was really inspired by my own writing teacher, so I’ve done a course to be an adult education tutor so that I can teach adults. However, while I teach creative writing, my focus is on well-being. We’re not necessarily writing a book, a novel, or an article. We’re writing for expression, so I use different themes every session to keep it interesting and fresh for people and provide resources for them.
I’ve got quite a few different strings to my bow; quite a few different things that I teach. On top of that, I often do things for free, too.
How does Laughter Yoga work?
Well, how does laughter work? We gurgle and laugh even as babies, don’t we? Hopefully, we do so as small children, too, and maybe a bit less when we’re teenagers. Then life can get serious and, unless you’re a person with a positive mental attitude or you’ve got family or friends who got a good sense of humor, people tend to laugh less and less. Obviously, the last few years have been pretty serious for most people around the world. There’s a lot of stuff in the world that’s not making us laugh at the moment. We all know that, but the idea is based on people coming together and having eye contact, as well as on simple exercises where we’re making sounds.
It’s the only exercise class where you can make any sound you want. It’s about encouraging natural laughter. We make sounds like “hahaaha” or “hohoho”. We’re doing these funny exercises which seem quite silly, but they’re actually really good for our brain and our memory, as well as for getting more oxygen into the cells in our body, especially into our heart and lungs. In this day and age following the Covid pandemic, it’s really important to look after our heart, lungs, and our circulation. We also have games so it’s quite childlike. It’s not childish, but it’s quite playful and childlike, and there are literally hundreds of these exercises that we can do, which you can look up on YouTube.
In India, they have a lot of laughter clubs, and I think different countries have a different sense of humour. I think that the British people, for example, can be a bit reserved, but we’ve got quite a good sense of humour and do a lot of comedy shows. On the other hand, I worked with a group of students through Italy and they were wild. They were more expressive and they were more sounds. It goes to show you the difference in cultures. I’m definitely more open to messing about, laughter, and humour. I realize that laughter, smiling, and giggling, bond us, wherever we’re from. It’s really good for our physical and mental health and I’m getting a lot more inquiries to do laughter yoga with different companies and organisations because people need to look after their staff, because people leave companies or they go off sick. It’s important to look after people’s health, not only physical, but also their mental health, and to keep them uplift, paid for, and connected. I would say that this is a very fun way to make a living.
Sometimes there are people who are very sad and something very bad has happened to them. That’s the time when you want to cry and be sad. However, laughter yoga can bring balance into a person’s life. It can remind people that even though they might have had sadness in their life, there’s still something that you can or giggle about. Even hearing other people’s laughter is really good for the hormones in the human body and we start releasing dopamine and serotonin, which are the feel-good hormones. So, even if people are not joining in, but are “just” hearing it, that’s still good for their health.
What are the benefits of PSYCH-K®?
The benefits of PSYCH-K® are that you can change limiting beliefs about yourself. You can minimize and start processing trauma that has occurred in your life. Rather than life happening to you and external events affecting you, you can start driving it forward yourself. Of course, we are humans, so external events are going to affect us. We only have to put on the news, and it will provoke a different reaction and a different response from a different person.
However, PSYCH-K® works in a way that’s quite technical. You’re looking at how you want to change yourself from the inside out. So, you’re looking at any limiting beliefs you might have about your self-value your self-worth, your abundance, your family, your personal life, your health, your well-being, your spirituality, etc. You’re creating new, more authentic beliefs about yourself. You don’t have to be stuck in the loop of maybe negative self-talk or thinking to yourself “My family has always done this, and I’m always going to carry on doing it” or “I’m that sort of person that things don’t work out for.” You can say “Let’s park that and start creating beliefs that are going to be anchored in the conscious and the unconscious of two hemispheres.” We want to anchor them in both the conscious and unconscious part of the brain so that you’re in what is called a whole-brain or whole-body situation.
When we are in such a situation, life flows. There’s a sense of ease, peace, wellness, or success. Rather than having internal battles and conflicts with other people, which many people have, we can start parking the battles and focusing on what is it that you want to create in your life. We focus on how you want to see yourself, how you want to feel, what do you want to experience, etc. The emphasis is put on what the person would prefer to have in different segments of their life.
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
I’ve just started something called “The Joy Club, here in Sussex, which is a combination laughter yoga, meditation, and creative writing. I would say that my mission is to teach, uplift, and inspire people, so this project aims to do just that.
To learn more about Ann and her work, you can visit her website at www.livinglifefully.net
