Laughter as a Healer
Our emotions impact our physical state.
Many years ago, when I separated from my spouse and moved into my first apartment with my kids, I was filled with a deep sadness and a sense of failure. I was doing my best to keep everything together; I made the apartment as cool and cozy as possible, I sold my car to cut expenses and found a new job that was walking distance from our new home.
A few years prior, I’d left a well-paying, but seriously unsatisfying government job to become a consultant and found self-employment too financially inconsistent to weather with two young kids as my husband was also building a business at the same time. Against my better judgement, I began working as his assistant and all the cracks in the foundation of our marriage broke wide open.
Finding this new job was a relief, but it was so far removed from my skill set, working as a Temp administrative assistant to an Actuarial team where detail work was of high importance. I once had one of the actuaries admonish me because I’s missed correcting a italicized period in a document. “How can you miss this? It sticks out like a sore thumb!” she said to me as I squinted my eyes to try and see the offending period. While I was extraordinarily thankful for this work, his was not the right job for me. I continued to get through the days, learning as much as I could about formatting documents and skipping my lunches so that I could pick my kids up from school on time.
One day, I stepped off the elevator and felt a “twang” in my lower back and felt a wave of pain go down my legs before realizing that everything had sort of seized up. (In case you’re wondering, stepping off an elevator is not a strenuous activity). I found myself nearly immobile and needed to take a few days off of work because I couldn’t even pull up my own underwear. Because I was a Temp with no benefits, time off of work meant no income. I could feel my body getting stiffer and more tense with each day.
I called up my best friend and told her my latest “tragedy” and she came over right away and instructed me to stand up and get dressed, we were going to go for a walk despite my insistence that I was unable to move. “Yes you can, and you will.” It took me 30 minutes to get dressed (not without a series of moans, gasps a some tears) and I gingerly made my way down the stairs, catching my breath with each step. She slowed her pace for me and we began to make our way around the block.
“There’s nothing wrong with your back”
“Di, I can barely move”
“I know, but there’s nothing wrong with your back. You’re angry… And you’re not expressing it. You’re just wallowing in it. You need to start laughing again.”
This was a turning point. My doctor confirmed there was nothing physically or structurally broken and so I went home and declared it to be a year of laughter. I banned sad and dramatic TVs and Movies from my watching rotation and sought out each and every reason to laugh.
As I began to lighten up, so did my life.
I found a better job with benefits. I found a better home for my kids so they could reconnect with their friends at their old school. I made different friends who were as invested in laughing as I was. I continued to fuel the lightness that laughter provided. To be clear, this doesn’t mean I wasn’t experiencing sadness. During this time, I was filled with sorrow and cried heavily on a weekly basis. But my medicine was laughter. Think of it as being the opposite of when you’re premenstrual and watch sad movies to get the tears out - things that made me laugh helped heal the tears. It was a year of the meditation of laughter.
I know this strategy doesn’t fix everything, however there is significant scientific data that supports the claim the emotional states we bathe our cells in impact the body and mind.
The brain is a bag of hormones. Those hormones affect not only the brain, but every aspect of body and mind; many memories are stored throughout the body, as changes in the structure of receptors at the cellular level. The body, is the unconscious mind!
Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion
Take a moment to ask yourself what emotional states you’re filling yourself with; are you on a not-so-merry-go-round of emotions based on past trauma where you replay and relive the traumatic state over and over again? I’m not saying it’s easy, but you can begin to create new emotional patterns by intentionally creating new emotional experiences in your imagination and mind’s eyes because our minds don’t really know how the differentiate between whether the emotional experience is real or imagined - think of how real a dream state seems when you’re in the dream state or how athletes that use visualization and meditation to “see” the outcomes of the performance before the actual performance (which improves said performance).
I use a lot of this work with my clients in my Emotion, Energy in Motion Program, exploring the root causes of the negative emotional states and then consciously creating a new experience. It’s powerful to experience this shift and reconnect to yourSelf in ways that open communication between body and emotion rather than view emotions as inconvenient and something to avoid.
So I ask you today, are you ready to laugh more? Experience more joy, connection and contentment within yourSelf? You can create a shift; reach out and begin your journey with me.
XO Jessica