By Cathy Nesbitt

About This Session:

Health benefits from laughing:

• Oxygenate the brain for increased creativity
• Release the love drugs (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins D.O.S.E.)
• Step into the parasympathetic nervous system with easy techniques
• Sleep better, feel better, connect on a deeper level

I'm Cathy Nesbit.
Thank you for attending Laughing for the health of it.
This session in Own youn Summit is all about how to shift your energy so that you can go from
stress into joy in a beautiful, simple way, using laughter techniques and different energy
modalities.
I'm a laughter yoga teacher and the founder of Cathy's Laughter Club.
I incorporate tapping, brain gym, Qigong and other healing modalities just to help people get out of
stress and into joy.
I'm thrilled to be representing the air energy, the mental energy.
Although laughter really fits in all of the categories, I had trouble choosing which to go in.
Laughter has changed my life.
I'm more resilient now and I was introduced to laughter yoga in 2012.
A little brief intro.
About Me it's the 23rd anniversary of Cathy's Crawley Composters selling worms by the pound for
indoor composting.
Not everyone wants worms in the house.
I didn't know in 2012 one more person said, ew, worms in the house.
And I heard it, I felt it, I questioned everything.
And the very next day I was introduced to laughter yoga.
I don't even do yoga.
I know, it's a fine thing, it's just not my mode of exercise.
I jumped right to the fun yoga.
Laughter yoga was started in 1995 by a medical doctor, Dr. Madan Kateria.
His goal is world peace. Can you imagine?
There are clubs in over 120 countries.
Wow. So beautiful.
So laughter yoga is not about jokes or comedy.
It's not doing yoga and laughing, it's laughing as a cardiovascular exercise.
Ever heard the expression laughter is the best medicine?
It's scientifically proven.
I'm going to take you through a short little laughter yoga session and play along and you'll feel the
benefits.
Before we begin, I would love for you to just take a moment and tap into your body.
Just close your eyes for a moment.
Hand on your heart, hand on your belly.
Take a nice deep breath in with your eyes closed.
Hold for a second and exhale through your mouth with a sigh.
One more time. Breathe in, breathe out.
Assess where on the scale of between 1 and 10, where is your stress level?
What kind of day are you having today?
You don't need to say it out loud, you don't have to share it with me.
10 is, oh my gosh, I'm so happy to be here.
I'm super stressed.
I can't believe I'm even functioning. I'm so stressed. Thank you for coming.
Or one.
Oh, I'm so chill.
Thank goodness I'm here, so you can raise my vibration.
Thanks for coming.
That's just for you. Hopefully by the end of this little introduction, you'll feel a shift.
All right, I'm going to walk us through some stuff.
So just rub your hands together like you're starting a fire.
We kind of are just getting the energy going.
Shake them off. Remember smiling.
As soon as we smile, we're sending a note to our brain.
Hey, I must be happy I'm smiling.
So we start.
Have you ever heard the expression laughter is the best medicine? It really is.
So when we smile, we start secreting dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.
The love drugs.
We add a giggle.
A few more, a few more.
Love drugs being secreted. Pum, pum, pum. Ha ha ha. Pum. Ha ha ha.
Pew, pew, pew.
Fun. I hope you're playing along.
I hope you're smiling and having fun.
First is cortisol and AD epinephrine.
When we're stressed.
Also, the brain requires 25% more oxygen than the rest of the body.
As an operating principle, it's a machine, the answering machine.
When we're stressed, we're not breathing properly.
Our beautiful body's not getting what it needs.
For sure, our brain isn't.
Have you ever lost your keys, phone, glasses? And you gotta go.
And you're flapping around like, where are my keys? I gotta go.
And you're yelling at people.
I don't know what you're doing, what you need to do.
I can't prevent you from stopping, from losing something. Sorry about that. How Canadian.
What I want you to do is stop, take a deep breath in, laugh it off, apologize to all the people you
yelled at.
And then you'll find your phone, keys, glasses.
Your brain knows where it is, where they that is, that you've misplaced.
But it's literally deprived of oxygen, so it can't help you.
So breathing is really important piece of laughter.
When we're laughing, we're exhaling.
Ha ha ha, ha ha.
In order to keep on ha ha ha, we need to take a beautiful deep breath in.
So it's. The deep breathing is automatically automatic, although we do incorporate some beautiful
deep breathing exercises in our routine.
Laughter yoga can be done standing or seated.
I'm going to take us through a little seated episode.
Okay, so first we're going to do a little bit of tapping to get into our body.
Actually, let's start with some cross crawls.
So this is the Brain Gym part. A part of it.
Put your hand on your shoulder and just give yourself a little massage.
That's where some people carry their stress.
If any of these places that we're touching are tight or sore, you need a little work there. That's all.
Give yourself a little massage.
Ah, thank you very much.
And then push down and drag across to your opposite hip. The other side. A little massage.
Remember to breathe and push down and drag across what we're doing.
We're going to do this a few times.
And if you have somebody with you, they can be doing X's on your back.
And it's really beautiful.
It connects our lobes.
So then everything else that we do in our body is going to be better incorporated into our beautiful
vessel.
So you can do that anytime, anytime that you're feeling askew.
And I wanted to say if you're ever feeling depressed, anxious, frustrated, low energy, you are
probably homolateral, meaning your energy is not crossing over.
It's really challenging to heal when you're homolateral.
So something you can do is those cross crawls.
And that does help.
There are other techniques that you can do, but we don't have time to talk about that today.
But just making sure that your, your energy is crossing.
All right, so now we're going to do tapping on four spots.
If you're familiar with eft, emotional freedom technique, that's this, but just a little snippet of it.
So I'll talk about where I'm tapping.
Take a couple of fingers.
We're going to tap on our cheekbones, just under our pupil, so kind of in line with our pupils.
Tapping fairly hard.
And we're going to breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth.
Smiling and tapping. So many instructions. Don't get stressed. It's okay.
Breathe in and breathe out with a sigh.
I'll talk about the sigh in a moment.
Again, breathe in and breathe out.
And I would say notice how you feel as you're tapping on these spots.
This first spot is stomach meridian.
If you ever have an upset stomach or you're just feeling a little bit askew, tapping here helps to
ground you.
So this is a wonderful place to tap.
Next spot is on your collarbone.
There's a little divot. So come on there.
And we're going to tap there.
Some people want to rub. Whatever you want to do.
I like tapping. Okay, so we're going to tap here.
This is K27 or the kidney meridian.
So tapping and breathing. So here we go.
Take a nice deep breath in.
Smiling, tapping.
Hold it and exhale with this eye.
Notice how you feel.
Breathe in again and exhale.
K27 is the last point on the meridian before dumping into the cardiovascular system.
All of these spots are important.
Next one is on your thymus.
You can do fingers, you could do little fists.
You can do open hands like the great apes. All right.
This is a wonderful way to get energy.
And the thymus is where T cells go to mature. They're the one, the.
The cancer fighting agents. Pow. Pow.
So you want to keep your thymus stimulated.
So what we're going to do here, we're going to make some noise and get our stress out like Tarzan.
I think zoom sometimes cancels out the noise.
So I'm making noise like Tarzan. If it cuts out. Here we go. Breathe in.
Tapping. And get your stress out.
And end with hahaha.
Again. Breathe in.
And it feels really good. You can do fists.
You can actually tap all around and exhale.
Ha ha.
Oh, it's so good. It just.
Even for me, it feels so good.
And the fourth spot, so stomach, kidney, thymus.
Last one, put your arms like this.
And we're just going to tap on our rib cage kind of where your bra is. If.
If for the ladies.
This is spleen meridian.
So we're going to breathe here and exhale.
And again, I'm hitting quite hard and you might want to go at the same time.
There's no right or wrong way.
Whatever feels good for you.
We all are individuals. Hallelujah. Right?
And I want to say about spleen, when.
When we're under stress, like always today, it's a stressful world we're living in.
Spleen gets no energy.
So giving your spleen a little bit extra love is always a great idea.
You can tap on those spots anytime you like. Okay.
So the laughter yoga mantra is we're clapping palm to palm.
And so when we're clapping palm to palm, we're activating meridians.
We can get energy just by clapping palm to palm.
But the rhythm is 1, 2, 1, 2, 3. Here are the words. You ready? Easy.
Ho ho, ha ha ha.
Ho ho ha ha ha. Play along.
Ho ho, ha ha ha.
Ho ho, ha ha ha.
Then we go between exercises, we would say, very good, very good. Yay.
Because you can imagine a whole room of people laughing together.
Or even on zoom, on gallery view, all laughing together.
It gets pretty loud.
And as the leader, we need to watch. Oh, okay.
Is this exercise coming to an end?
You don't want people talking. You want people to feel.
Feel the laughter, not think about what's Coming up or what am I going to do next?
Or, or chatting with somebody else in the class.
We really don't want any talking at all.
We want people to be fully present when we're laughing.
When we're laughing without stimulus, it's really different as adults.
It takes, you know, when we hear a joke, it takes time for that joke to filter down.
Is it funny? I heard this before.
Oh, it's a dirty joke.
It's not my style.
What are the people that I'm with going to think if I laugh at this joke?
There's so many filters that it, that a joke goes through before we can go, yes, it's funny.
And then we laugh and then we just laugh a little bit.
Imagine you're at a comedy club or you're watching a show.
If you're laughing too loud or too long, they'll probably kick you out of the comedy club.
Like, hey, ma', am, you're, you're laughing too loud.
We can't hear the next joke.
Same if you're watching a funny movie or funny show on tv.
If you're with people, they're not, they're going to get mad because they can't hear the next line
too.
So laughter yoga is just laughing with intention.
And when we laugh with intention, where our energy goes, of course we know our energy flows.
And laughter is up here.
It's high vibration, magic energy.
It's complementary medicine.
It, I haven't, I don't know anyone who has OD'd from laughing.
There are no side effects, except when you're laughing full on for, for a few minutes, you might get
the sore belly or your cheeks are like, oh my gosh.
And you're like, I can't stop laughing.
It's rare and it's rarer as an adult.
Children laugh more.
Although I would hazard that today, in today's stressful world, even children are laughing less or, or
not as hearty.
So this is a. Laughter yoga is a way for us to be childlike, change our state in an instant.
When we're laughing, we can't think.
We're not thinking about that thing we did yesterday, that meeting we have coming up and talking
about that.
Rub your hands together.
I'm going to give you another technique. Shake them off.
Put one on your forehead, one hand on your forehead.
There are neurovasculars here.
I think our ancestors must have known.
Like, ah, I'm so overwhelmed.
And sometimes we do this, right?
Like, oh my gosh, I have so many things going on. I don't know what to do.
And so we do this.
It's, it's like instinct.
Because what this does, this will help bring the blood, like when we're stressed, blood, lymph,
oxygen leaves our brain.
This brings it back up to our brain.
This spinal cerebral fluid helps to flow up there.
You can close the loop by taking the, the other hand and putting it on the back of your head.
Now again, you can close your eyes or, or keep them open, whatever, whatever you want to do.
And, and I would say take three deep breaths.
We're just going here.
Take a breath in and exhale with a sigh.
And you can keep, keep on holding there while I'm speaking.
You know, sometimes we see something on social media and we're like, oh my gosh, how could
somebody think that?
And we might start composing a response.
I would say don't do this instead.
And after you've done a couple of breaths, if you still feel like responding, do it again.
Because social media is really designed to make us emotional and, and in a negative way quite
often, like comparing and, you know, people saying things that we don't agree with. So what?
We're all different. Hallelujah.
I know I said it before, I'll say it again. Again.
Laughter changes our state.
We're completely present.
It oxygenates our body.
We're secreting all the love drugs and it's a practice.
We don't have a good sleep once in our life or go for one walk, drink eight out eight glasses of
water once in a day, you know, in our life and check it off the list.
These are practices.
Having a good night's sleep every night is essential.
Drinking the water every day, essential.
Laughing every day.
According to Dr. Cathy, every day.
It's a part of your, your health plan.
It's a part of my health plan and it's made me more resilient.
I would say I bounce back faster from stressful episodes because I'm more mindful of my beautiful
body.
When I find myself getting stressed and breathing shallow, I'm like, I notice, I'm like something's
happening.
My shoulders are at my ears again.
Then I laugh and I laugh and it changes my state.
It doesn't take away the problem.
What it does do, it opens my mind for more creativity.
How wonderful. Right again.
When we're stressed, our brain's not getting oxygen.
We can't come up with solution when we're stressed.
That's why people will say to me, Cathy, how can I laugh?
It's so stressful.
During this time, there's so many things going on.
My response is we have to laugh.
There's so many things going on.
If we're not laughing, we're crying in the corner because we're so stressed.
We're wrapped up in the fear, the anxiety, the uncertainty of it all.
We can't control out there.
All we can control is in here.
Imagine if you were able to be in a joyful state no matter what.
That's what I'm working on.
That's what I'm working on.
That's what I want you to work on.
Joy is our birthright. I believe it. I believe it.
Right now we're living in this perpetual state of stress.
Like, we're like the old LPs.
If you're of a certain age with the records and then the needle goes in and then it skips and that it
goes around.
We're living in that state of stress and we dip into joy every now and then and we go, oh, that was
fun.
Like maybe two weeks, we go on holiday or something and.
And we experience joy.
Or maybe on Saturday, if you work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, Saturday might be your day of joy.
And then you're going like, Sunday.
Oh, crap, it's Sunday. Now.
We have very limited expanse.
We're not very expansive.
That's what I want to say.
We're really not living in joy.
We're living in stress.
And I want you to know that living in joy isn't. Is a choice. It's our choice.
We can do it and then dip into stress every now and then just to go, oh, my gosh, no. Back to joy.
Yes, please.
So I want to give you some tips for just getting out of stress.
Just the old soup spoon from the kitchen, and I've got a magnet on the back just to show that it's
stainless steel.
The magnet doesn't have anything to do with this exercise.
I have a spoon on my headboard, and a spoon is something you can do.
The iron in the spoon attracts to the blood. Iron.
Or the metal in the spoon attracts to the iron in our blood, so will bring blood there.
So if you have a pain, I want to tell you what I do with the spoon. Okay.
I have one of these on my headboard.
So every night after I've washed and done my hygiene, I jump into bed and imagine this is my foot.
I draw figure eights on my foot.
Although you could just do, like, up and down.
It doesn't matter what you do.
I just like figure eights.
Because whenever you do figure Eights.
You're incorporating your beautiful energy.
It's so beautiful and what spooning your feet do.
So I spoon both of my feet.
We have polarities, north and south polarity in our energy field world.
Sometimes when we're out and about, our energies get spun.
And I would say whenever you're stressed or again, feeling any of those low vibrating energies,
your polarities may have flipped.
Spooning your feet corrects your polarity.
And you can feel it when I do it.
Sometimes I'll yawn, which means I've shifted my energy and now I've gone from stress mode
sympathetic into parasympathetic.
I'm ready to go off into la la land.
So that's one tip. And.
And again with the spoon, if you did have pain somewhere, you could draw figure eights. I'm doing
my elbow.
But imagine it was your should or something.
You could do figure eights.
Or if you're working with someone, you can do figure eights for them with the spoon.
It just, it's soothing and it's lovely and, and it brings the energy that.
My next little hack is with the ice pack.
It's the ice pack hack. How fun.
We've all heard of cold plunging.
Maybe some of you are cold plungers. That's not for me.
I really enjoy the heat, but this is something that I do.
So you can take your ice pack. It is frozen.
You can't see that it's frozen, but it is.
And you don't tense up.
What you do is just put this on your.
On the side of your neck.
This is to tone your vagus nerve.
So this is to cool down the fire, especially if you're really stressed.
So you put it there and you breathe into it.
A few beautiful deep breaths.
10, 15 seconds.
And then you do the other side.
Ah.
It gives not exactly the same effect as doing the cold plunging, which does cause a stress
response.
First for your body, which is a good thing. Like it's.
That's part of the healing for the cold plunge.
This is kind of a little hack.
It doesn't cause the stress response.
It cools down the fire.
So this helps to tone your vagus nerve.
And while we're talking about the vagus nerve, rub your hands together and just put them on your
neck.
So I want you to take a nice deep breath in and we're just going to hum it out here so you can feel
it in your neck. Hum.
Feel the vibration.
Ha.
That's also great for vagal tone.
Laughing is great for your vagus nerve.
Deep breathing, humming, the ice pack hack, spooning your feet.
All these things are great for the vagus nerve which governs your joy.
When we're in stress, we're not in joy and we want to be in stress or we want to be in joy.
No, we want to be out of stress and into joy.
Yes, yes we do.
So I wanted to also say about sleep, sleep is very important.
When I go to bed, I spoon my feet, then I put one hand on heart, one hand on belly button and I do
three humming breaths.
So I breathe in and I hum it out.
Our body is the original instrument.
We can, we get our own resonance and we just get in tune.
And that helps also to put us into parasympathetic so that we're ready.
And sometimes, depending how, how attuned I am or what kind of day I had, I can feel that
vibration right down into my toes.
And it's so beautiful.
It's just like aha.
It's, it's wonderful.
I would invite you to incorporate any and all of these techniques into your daily practice.
We are worth it.
Self care is self love and it's self important.
It's really important that we take care of our beautiful body and.
Well, before I wrap up and let you know how you can get in touch with me, I want to do another
episode, an exercise.
I didn't do many actually.
Laughter yoga is a series of little games to inspire the laughter.
So we, you know, there's milkshake laughter.
You make a milkshake and you mix it together and, and then you drink it and laugh. Ahaha.
I would like to take us through an exercise that I created before I was introduced to laughter yoga.
Really interesting and I call it the Giggle Jiggle.
So you wrap your arms around yourself like you love yourself and I hope you do.
We only have one beautiful body.
And no matter where you are in your journey, if you're struggling with any kind of ailment or low
energy or anything, love what is, and then go from there and be grateful because gratitude, it does
magic things.
Okay, so just wrap your arms around yourself like give yourself a big hug, give a little squeeze.
And even just rubbing your arms like this secretes dopamine.
So this is also a wonderful way to secrete some of the love drugs.
So this one's called the Giggle Jiggle.
I'm going to add the wiggle in the front.
So it's called the wiggle Giggle jiggle.
So the more you wiggle giggle jiggle.
Even just saying is fun, the better. You feel. So here we go. And play along. So here we go. One,
two, three.
Oh, my gosh. Oh, wow.
I'm so grateful for you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for tuning into my session. Own your energy.
It is ours.
And if you don't have enough energy, then you gotta shuffle it up because we can make our own
energy by moving.
Movement is what gives us energy.
So I'm Cathy Nesbit from Cathy's Laughter Club.
I'm a laughter yoga teacher and I would love to invite you to my free Laughter Club.
It's every Tuesday, 9:30am Eastern on Zoom.
30 minutes of super fun self care.
I incorporate tapping, brain gym, Qi Kong, other healing modalities.
I'm a philomath, which means I'm a lifelong learner.
I love learning and my gift is I learn all this stuff and then I'm able to impart the knowledge in a
way that is fun and informative and people can hear the message without the scientific jargon and
all the extra big fancy words.
I help people just understand.
Oh, that's why whatever it is that I'm teaching about that week.
So come experience the magic of laughing for the health of it.
We just celebrated five years.
We started in June of 2020 and we've been going every Tuesday since then.
We get people from around the world.
Yeah. So, yeah, just come and check it out.
It's Cathy's Club dot com.
You just sign up just.
And then you'll get the. The link to. To join.
And I'm also Laughter Yoga teacher.
So if, if you want to learn how to do laughter yoga, if you're a yoga teacher, Pilates, if you're a
school teacher, any kind of modality, you can add laughter with that.
And you don't need to take the training to lead laughter necessarily.
You can take it just for your own knowledge.
So my website is Cathy's club.com Cathy with a C. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of the conference, the summit and yeah, own your energy.
That's what we got to do. You.
Thanks for tuning in.