"Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied....

Laughter is a physiological response that activates a plethora of beneficial reactions in the body. The elation you feel when you laugh and your body relaxes and releases endorphins is a great way of offsetting the physical effects of stress. The aim of the laughter healing techniques in this book is to help you to laugh more easily through a series of warm-up exercises that are then followed by a range of activities designed to get you giggling.