How not to laugh at Funerals!

So, one day my mother forced me to go to the temple with her. This was when I was 13 years old and at that age, I had this belief that I don’t have to go to any worshipping place to pray. The universal belief was, God is all around, in fact he is inside us. I might as well stand in front of the mirror and pray. But then who’s going to listen to a 2-hour lecture from my mother. This thought made me reluctantly go with her. But the trip wasn’t as boring as I thought. I saw one of my school teachers (the one I wasn’t too fond of) missing one of the temple steps and hyper looping herself downhill. Hell, I laughed! So loudly. And I got all the possible curses from the spirituals at the temple, not to mention the teacher. In my Défense, she fell in a very funny way. The Abraham Lincoln’s statue would have fallen off the chair laughing.

Okay! There were repercussions at school as well with all the cold looks from the teacher. Another aspect about this teacher was, she would yell so badly that she could possibly blow away your ear drums to a far-off land. I used to find that amazingly funny as well. I had this thought. What if she yells at me in school for the temple episode and what if I laugh? I think that would be my last day on earth.

It is true. I didn’t have anger issues when I was young. I had laughter issues. Once I had started laughing at a funeral because there was one person crying in a funny way. It appeared he was crying so hard, so badly that it seemed he was laughing. It was like too much crying becomes inverse and hence you start laughing. How the hell do they get that competency. But I was young and because of this special talent I had, my mother had to face a lot of criticism from my grandparents.

So next time, when I felt like laughing in a situation when I’m not supposed to, I got my mother’s picture in my mind. But that didn’t help much. Clearly, I needed to have some strategy in my mind to control the popcorns. One day I tried this! In one such hilarious situation, I imagined that a Lion was in front of me and about the pounce on me. I ended up making a hilariously terrified face in front of my Principal who had referred to disc as dicks. What the hell was I doing? So, I sat on my desk in school and thought. What is the opposite of laughter? Probably cry but I didn’t want to cry. I just wanted to look grave or serious. What would make me serious? If something threatens to hurt the most precious thing I have. Bingo! I had found my Collapsing Anchor. It worked like magic. So, the next time my teacher said, “Divide you fage into two farts” (divide your page into two parts, couldn’t say P), I said to myself, “If you laugh, you’ll die virgin”! Eureka Moment!

Now I’ve used this technique in lots of places. For example, I had some irritating people in my life. Clearly, I don’t enjoy being irritated. The collapsing anchor here is, “Feel good about yourself, confident and self-made because that’s the intention of the other person, to irritate you. Are you going to let him/her succeed in this? Certainly not because s/he is a loser and can’t even succeed in irritating you.” Your internal dialog itself is capable in collapsing certain unwanted anchors in your life. We have other ways of doing so as well such as Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic anchors which are taught during NLP Practitioner Certification with Agile Neuro.

In fact, a lot of us use Music as a collapsing anchor while going to work on Monday mornings. This is probably to get rid of the Monday Blues. The techniques are so simple, and they have to come from your model of the world.