Serious Laughter
Laughing like our lives depend on it
For the past month, give or take, I’ve been engaging in group laughter sessions with some of my colleagues. We’ve found ourselves in need of something to temper the ambient stress, worry, anger and helplessness we feel ourselves to be moving through and (let’s face it) contributing to. Once a week on Friday mornings, members of the Serious Laughter Working Group launch ourselves into a laughing fit that lasts three, four, five, six or, most recently, seven minutes. Then we settle down, talk about what in the world just happened, and repeat the process again.
We’re not experts, and laughter meditation is not something we claim to have invented. A couple of us had prior experience with the practice as described and facilitated by musician, composer and cosmic visionary Laraaji. But week after week we find ourselves feeling lifted and somehow reconfigured by something as seemingly unnatural as on-demand laughter.
A good spontaneous laugh is as much physiological as it is mental. You smile. Your cheeks flush. Happy tears fill your eyes and bathe your face. Your pulse races. Your respiration goes syncopated: shallow and quick one instant, deep and drawn-out the next. From start to finish in a good gut-busting session, this process and more transpires several times over. Sometimes laughter lifts you to your feet, or drops you to your knees and rolls like a dog you onto your back. Sometimes it makes you need to walk or run or shimmy as if dancing in place. How defenseless laughter can render you, how humble, how willing to step out from behind what protects you. I am therefore inclined to think of certain kinds of laughter as akin to something like praise, rapture, love.
In other words, the self-abandonment of certain kinds of laughter draws us closer still to the forms of precarity we fear and often feel, but defend against in the day-to-day. It’s a margin where willing surrender rubs up against the awareness that the culture we belong to and steward together is also in many ways an engine of disregard. We ache even as our obedience to so many social norms acts to exacerbate the strife of others we see yet fail to see.
