By Pet Melliza/The Beekeeper
One thing that makes me thankful for having gone to Davao
City to attend the 14th national convention and 40th
anniversary fete of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), January 16-18,
is Dr. Jaime Z. Galvez-Tan for his lecture on keeping ourselves fit and
healthy.
I must confess that most lectures by lawyers bored me; at times the
acoustics worsened them. Yours truly is not alone though in that perception.
My seat mate Atty. Jonel Alipao would invite me: “ ‘Ta, libot-libot ta anay. Kataraka lecture,
ah. Mabalik ta lang kon pirmahany ron kang MCLE attendance. (Come let’s
walk around. The lectures are boring. Let’s go back only when our MCLE
attendance sheets are signed.)
MCLE stands for “mandatory and continuing legal education”
which most lawyers I know of wish abolished for being what it is: ineffectual.
The convention hall, 3rd floor of SMX at Lanang
district, Davao City had 3,000 plus strong delegates seated or milling around.
The lectures of the resource persons got more incomprehensible as the volume of
voices from the floor increased. A panel separated the lecture hall from the
bazaar of kiosks selling law books, souvenirs that ranged from indigenous
fabrics to IBP memorabilia.
The bazaar and other IBP-initiated businesses like issuance
of ID cards, raffle tickets, are unavoidable distractions competing with the
lectures. The unwritten rule that one can skip the lectures so long as he or
she is at the bazaar for whatever reason, aptly works to excuse truancy.
When my seatmate grumbled the lectures bored him to death, I
got his message: it’s time to roam around the mall for window shopping, or to
the IBP bazaar, and even down to “Marinatuna” at the second floor for a taste
of tuna and beer.
Nevertheless, I have no regrets having exerted efforts to
stay put and listen to the lectures because one of these turned out to be a
gem: Dr. Galvez-Tan’s simple pointers on how to deal with
stress.
The tips are doable – like stretching the joints every
morning, a few minutes of silence as we breath in and out to relax and
oxygenate our bodies and, still among others, doing the “Buddha laugh”.
The laughing Buddha with open palms face up, popular in
China and Japan, according to Dr. Galvez-Tan, is done by unleashing the loudest
laugh, standing upright gradually lowering the body until one squats or rolls
on the ground.
Dr. Galvez-Tan not only demonstrated it but also had
delegates laugh their hearts out. We hesitated initially, started off with artificial laughter.
Soon we just let go of our inhibition and roared in real laughter from the
belly.
Galvez-Tan advises us to do the belly laugh daily. Now that
we are back to work, we are yet to repeat the exercise. People might brand us nuts. Perhaps, the IBP Iloilo
Chapter through its president, Paulino “Boy” Salmon, form an “IBP Laughing
Club” as part of a sports event of which the chapter is known for – basketball,
billiard, cheese, badminton, tennis, etc.
Stress is associated with and considered precursor if not
the cause of a host of diseases, especially life-threatening ones like
hypertension, heart ailment, ulcer, cancer, diabetes, not to mention
psycho-social problems.
Laughter, according to Dr. Galvez-Tan releases “healing
hormones” like endorphins and neorotransmitters. These good enzymes together
with other laughter by-products like anti-body producing cells, boosts the
body’s immune system. Further, the “soldiers” in our body defense, the T-cells,
are strengthened by laughter.
Laughter reduces “stress hormones,” enzymes produced by
worry or depression, like cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline), dopamine and growth hormones.
Lawyers who listened to Dr. Galvez-Tan and performed the
“Buddha laugh” suggest of forming groups to laugh their hearts out for health and longevity.
IBP-Iloilo chapter is replete with cases of untimely deaths
among its members which could have been avoided by simple yet effective tools
of stress management. The sudden demise of colleagues is much talked around and
this space needs not belabored its details to spare the survivors the grief of being reminded of their irreparable losses.
Atty. Boy Salmon is doing well in beefing up
sports activities. May we suggest, too, that the “Budda laugh” be included in
the program.
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