Such was the case when I saw my girlfriend from home had posted one of those silly things where screen shots from text messages are auto-corrected and it reads a bit off color or crazy.
The first one I read to the hubs had us laughing. By the fourth, I was engaged in the laugh where you are bent over and not making any noise but tears are streaming from your eyes. Then you just plain guffaw so loud that the neighbors would probably wonder what activity is taking place.
I read all the way through them and we laughed so hard our sides hurt. Having had a good red blend also did not hurt to influence the hilarity that was taking place in our den. Even the pups were having fun watching us. We were a show all on our own laughing at those silly text messages that had been posted.
As I got up the next morning I thought about how great it felt to laugh. REALLY laugh hard, out loud and have your sides hurt from it. What great medicine. What a release of tension and stress and what a great and simple way to put your heart in a good place. And we had not laughed hard like that for any reason in a long time.
As I got the house ready for the holiday dinner, I continued to think of it and recalled a workshop my friend Andre did one year at a learning alliance conference. Andre studies the brain and how it reacts to things such as laughter and exposure to different outside influences and emotions. He told us how laughter literally reduces cortisol (the stress hormone) and relaxes muscles and helps your physical body heal in ways we don't realize. And his workshop was a great example of how we need laughter to offset life. It really was a great demonstration of how important laughter is in our lives.
Andre is from South Africa and we've been friends for years. So this workshop he asked me to help him in an exercise and knew I would do it without hesitation. What I did not know is how much fun we would have. And it is a great example of how to refocus during the tough times and get on track with the laughter we need to heal us.
So here is Andre and he has a room full of people...I'm guessing close to 60. He goes through all of the stuff that is the "information" relating to laughter shifting the body. He then asks me to assist and help him in some storytelling. OK, I'm pretty good at that I think. And the story I was supposed to tell what my most embarrassing moment...
GAH, really? How do you come up with that on the spot in front of a room? I was stumped! Then I remembered something that I knew would bring the laughter...at least from me. I remembered a spring run in my old neighborhood...
I loved to run a good many years ago. Coming off the train from work, I would go straight up and put on my running tights and a t-shirt and my walkman (yeah, that long ago...) and set off for an intersection a little over a mile down the road. Didn't take long but it got the cobwebs out and got me in the right space. Felt great to get a good pace in and listen to good music in the summer air.
Nice run, through a neighborhood of condos and ending up for a pause at a Mobil station on the corner where I would stop to breathe and either use the restroom or get a bottle of water for the run back home. This particular day it was a bottle of water. And off I went back home...
I had Elton John's Yellow Brick Road blasting in my ears when a car with Connecticut plates and loaded with guys about my age pulled up next to me. They were doing the 25 year old guy thing hanging out the windows waving and whistling. Could not hear over Elton but I rolled my eyes and took off faster away from them.
A little over a block later, a woman and her daughter drove slowly next to me and though the daughter did not roll her window down to tell me anything, she kept motioning to me in a way I could not make out. Oh well, Elton and I kept moving. And they drove off.
Next was a car with a guy who just honked like crazy as he slowed next to me. HONKED. LIKE. A. MADMAN. Pointing at me too. By this time I was thinking WTF? I'm sweating like a horse, you cannot be honking at my looks. What the heck was going on?
So I stopped, bent over to tie my shoe that had come untied, and then it hit me.
There was a SIGNIFICANT breeze in the back. One that felt like the word EXPOSURE was connected with it. I ran my hand discreetly over my backside since my t-shirt was not a long one...
And there it was.
The seam in my tights had split WIDE open from waist to crotch. And I didn't wear anything under those tights. No wonder people were honking. What a show... FULL MOON!
OH. MY. GAWD. I had been running down one of the busiest streets in one of the biggest suburbs of Chicago with my bare ass hanging out singing at the top of my lungs. And all of DuPage county was in the audience. And guys from Connecticut... And maybe some neighbors...
Bright RED running tights with NIKE written on the backside and clearly it now read NI KE!
I was about half a mile from home. How the hell was I going to get home without providing more of a show? I could take off my shirt and wrap it around me...my sports bra actually covered more of me than my swimsuit. Which part of my dignity do I sacrifice?
T-shirt it was. I wrapped it around me and walked the rest of the way home. When I got into the courtyard, everyone was sitting around the pool with an after-work beverage and talking in the summer evening's warm breeze. Thank GAWD they thought nothing of me walking up the drive and having stripped my shirt off in the heat. I tore up the stairs to get out of my clothes and into a swimsuit before anyone could notice.
Dear GAWD please don't let anyone I know be in the crowd that passed by. THANK GAWD it was before the age of smart phones, digital cameras, and social media!!!!
So fast forward to Andre's group listening to me engage them in the details of my evening run. I swear, there were times that I don't think they heard me because the laughter was 90 decibels above a jet engine. And I don't think details mattered, it was the picture in their mind and the laughter that took them happily away. Took them to a place where the laughter made them feel light and above the stress.
And at the end of the workshop, Andre asked them all how they felt. Were they still engaged in thoughts of emails not answered and voicemails pending? Were they still fretting over flight reservations for the following day to go home? Or were they 100 pounds lighter from having had the kind of laugh where your sides hurt and you engage in letting go and letting loose in laughter and finding humor in the simplest things?
So as I sit and smile at the thought of my evening run in those tights that left nothing to the imagination, I laugh out loud again. And I think of the silly post I read the other night. And I think of all of the things in my life that make me laugh out loud and the good result of all of that laughter.
We are in a rough world these days. We need more laughter. Find it and see if you can also put it in places that need it. We need it mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. We need to laugh in place of the things that are making us cry or become angry. We need to have those belly laughs where we have tears in our eyes and our sides hurt. We need to refocus and stop listening to the bad stuff.
But I will refrain from providing bare-assed runs to provide it. I'll stick to reading the text messages :)
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