CASEY: 'Laughter Yoga' promoter guffawed his way back to health

CASEY: 'Laughter Yoga' promoter guffawed his way back to health

When Bill Baker showed up Saturday morning at the Roanoke County Public Library in Vinton, he didn’t look like a retired Navy Reserve captain who once worked as an aide for the secretary of defense. Nor did he appear to be someone who’s twice suffered traumatic brain injuries.

The 81-year-old Roanoke County man carried a ukulele. A black-and-white-checkerboard fedora rested on his head. That was hard to miss. But just in case you did, a string of blinking lights lit up the brim.

The only thing brighter was the broad smile on Baker’s face.

A few minutes later, he strummed the first notes of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands” to a group of 16 in a second-floor meeting room. Baker was the warm-up act for a class conducted by Connie Scaggs, a former Carilion Clinic executive.

The class is Laughter Yoga, which Baker helped bring to the Roanoke Valley a little more than a year ago. The class started at Roanoke County’s South County Library. Now there are regular no-charge classes in three libraries and Baker has plans to expand to the Glenvar branch soon.

“We want you to pretend you’re in a sandbox as a kid,” he told the students, most of whom passed 50 a good while back. “Bring out your inner child.”

For the next 60 minutes, peals, howls, squeaks and roaring belly laughs filled the room. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. It felt great. And I doubt I was the only one who left feeling that way.

The story about Baker’s foray into Laughter Yoga is improbable, inspiring and serendipitous. He grew up here in the Roanoke Valley and graduated from Jefferson High School in 1955. For a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked as dean of students at the University of Richmond, he said. He also served as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy Reserve.

Baker later spent four years of active duty working in the Pentagon for Caspar Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense. After retiring from the Navy, Baker returned to Roanoke to complete work for a doctorate in education at Virginia Tech (May 1994) and to care for his elderly parents, who were here.

Between them, Baker and his second wife, Judy, had six children and were planning a move to Florida to continue his career in academia. First, they went on a beach vacation to North Carolina that summer. There, a personal watercraft piloted by a 16-year-old ran over Baker at 40 mph and changed his life forever.

Baker said the crash broke all his ribs, fractured his jaw in three places and left him with a traumatic brain injury. If an ambulance hadn’t happened to be passing the scene at the time, Baker might not have made it.

“I died in the ER,” in Morehead City, North Carolina, Baker said. “They had to bring me back with [electro-shock] paddles.”

He woke up in a hospital trauma center in Greenville, North Carolina — a helicopter flew him there after he’d been stabilized.

“Some weeks later, they brought me back in an ambulance to Lewis Gale Hospital,” which is where his lengthy rehabilitation began, working with a pulmonologist, psychiatrist and neurologist. That lasted years.

The debilitating injuries destroyed Baker’s Florida career hopes.

“I fell into a deep depression,” he said.

During his recovery, he read a book by noted journalist Norman Cousins, “Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient.” Years earlier, Cousins had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease from which doctors gave him a 1-in-500 chance of recovering.

“[Cousins] checked into a hotel room with a nurse and all kinds of funny films and TV shows,” such as “Candid Camera,” and Charlie Chaplin and Marx Brothers movies, Baker said. Eventually, Cousins laughed his way back to health. The author’s doctors were amazed.

“I read that book and I said, ‘You know, I’ve got to try that,’ ” Baker said. “MASH” was his TV sitcom of choice. “I also read joke books,” Baker said. “I kept myself laughing. And I just got better.”

Unbeknownst to Baker, it was around that time that Laughter Yoga was getting its start. It was founded in Mumbai, India, in the mid-1990s by physician Madan Kataria. It launched in a public park with five people.

Kataria went on to write the 2002 book “Laugh for No Reason.” Today, the practice has adherents in 6,000 laughter clubs all over the world, Baker said.

The beach accident wasn’t Baker’s only calamitous brush with death. In 2003, he said, a tractor-trailer driver suffering from a diabetic coma crashed into Baker’s car on Interstate 581 near Peters Creek Road.

The vehicle was so smashed that emergency responders had to cut Baker out of it, he said. The accident re-injured his brain. Again, he augmented his medical recovery with laughter. But he hadn’t yet learned about Laughter Yoga.

That happened in 2013, as Baker researched a book he was writing, “Jollyology.” That’s now in the hands of a self-publishing company in Indiana, he said.

“I had researched Patch Adams,” a West Virginia doctor who used humor in healing, and who was later the subject of a Hollywood movie starring Robin Williams. “I was on the internet when I saw something about Laughter Yoga,” Baker said, “and I thought, ‘What is that?’ ”

In short order, he was on the phone with Dr. Kataria in India. The physician said he was hosting an upcoming gathering in Stony Brook, New York, and invited Baker. That was his introduction to Laughter Yoga.

In 2016, Baker and eight other Roanoke Valley residents got together and hired a certified Laughter Yoga trainer to come to Roanoke and train them. Baker and local artist Kyle Edgell, a friend for 25 years, “had been talking about wanting to bring laughter to the valley,” he said. Connie Scaggs was part of the original group, too.

That December, they launched Laughter Labs at Roanoke’s South County Library. Edgell conducts those sessions at 6:30 p.m. the first Monday of each month. The classes later spread to the Vinton library (11 a.m. the second Saturday of each month) and Hollins (2 p.m. the third Saturday of each month).

“Doctors acknowledge that laughter is nature’s wonder drug that triggers healthy physical and emotional changes in the body. Laughter lifts you up to see the world in a more positive, joyful way,” Baker said.

He’s now aiming to help spread Laughter Yoga by establishing the Jollyology Institute, a nonprofit group that will raise money to pay for training for other would-be teachers.

“It costs $300 to $400 to get the training,” Baker told me. “A lot of people don’t have the kind of money.”

Last week, Baker sent out a press release trumpeting his most recent accomplishment: He persuaded Roanoke Mayor Sherman Lea to issue a proclamation. According to it, May 6 and 7 shall be known as “World Laughter Days” in the city of Roanoke.

“LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE,” the news release trumpets.

I’ll vouch for that, based on my experience in the class Saturday morning. I didn’t arrive in a particularly humorous mood. But laughter indeed is contagious, and fake laughter soon turns into the real thing.

“Kids laugh 80 to 100 times a day,” Scaggs told us at the start of the session. “Adults, five to 10 times.”

That’s a ratio they’re trying to change, one guffaw at a time.

,2018-04-16 23:08:00, , http://www.roanoke.com/news/dan_casey/casey-laughter-yoga-promoter-guffawed-his-way-back-to-health/article_96d629ff-abde-5535-a83e-2bc8585ea8f6.html https://weightless.site/2018/04/24/casey-laughter-yoga-promoter-guffawed-his-way-back-to-health/