Tears and Laughter

When we are brought to tears or laughter the entire self is involved as a vibration. Our various parts are “disturbed” in such a way that there is a ripple effect created and cascading throughout us, including our thoughts and emotions but also somatically, movements in the body, moisture in our eyes, or a bursting in our vocal chords, a reverberation of our entirety, a literal as well as symbolic shaking of the self, through sobbing or cackling uncontrollably. This shaking has the potential to break us loose from encrustations, stale ways of inhabiting our lives that have come to feel good only because they have become so familiar, all the while deeper down we secretly long for something more. Tears and laughter can reflect a tectonic happening of “breaking free” and “breaking through” these encrustations, a catharsis, and indeed any true catharsis of our highest highs and lowest lows may only happen when the whole person is engaged—heart, mind, and body—with our separation of these three into distinct categories being artificial, even if not arbitrary, a convenient rubric for speaking more easily about certain aspects of our experience when, actually, we are only what we are as a whole, in our totality, a single thinking-feeling-somatic entity. Not an entity with feelings that has thoughts in a body, as this common way of speaking about our existence implies separation. But an entity that resists being rubricized, as Abraham Maslow might have said, and instead desires deeply not divisions but to experience completely, to interact essentially, and to know and be known holistically. When we pigeonhole our experience, dwelling too much in our heads, or lost in our feelings, or obsessed with exercise and image, we cordon off opportunities for irony, hilarity, beauty and being torn—key experiences that keep us whole by bringing us back time and again to tears and laughter, some of the surest signs of a life moving beyond separation and toward integration.