Laugh at everyone—primarily at yourself

The best remedy is a sense of humor. Don’t take your self-centeredness so seriously. Undermine the whole process by laughing at yourself. Recognize the irony: “I want happiness so badly, but my self-cherishing just makes me suffer. Even though I know this, I still can’t abandon my attachment to this self!” It’s very funny, when you think about it. Life is full of irony. Samsara is full of irony. Mind is full of irony. So try to be witty enough to see and appreciate this irony. Laugh at all your contradictions, especially the contradiction between your intentions and your counterproductive ways of fulfilling them. There’s no point in being heavy-handed and feeling so serious about your self-importance. When your habits are so strong that your thoughts and feelings are beyond your control, what else can you do but laugh? Humor is very important in the process of dismantling the ego. Without humor, it’s hard to be a practitioner.
–Dzigar Kongtrul, The Intelligent Heart

In 1947, Readers Digest launched a popular humor column called Laughter, the Best Medicine, which is still running. Science has confirmed the positive effect of laughter, but it is only half a story.

Laughing at yourself is both a remedy, as Dzigar Kongtrul says, and an effect of a realization. It will help lighten up and get you to the realization of what the self—your self—actually is. Or is not. The more you realize that, the more people and things will seem funny.

“What’s so funny about _____?”, you say, pointing to some suffering and horror, yours or anybody or everybody else’s.

As a rhetorical question, that seems to make sense, since we can list circumstances and situations that defy the slightest bit of humor. But if you treat it as a real question in all situations, you might find out something about yourself. You might find, as Dzigar Kongtrul points out, that whatever you are planning or doing has no hope of making things better and easing your suffering. In fact it might be making your suffering worse. Not only might there be a better way, but if you take the right path not driven by your own thinking, you already know what that way is.