I laughed. I cried. I came.

The exhilarating experience of neural-emotional chaos.

I had such a crazy experience the other night, I had to write about it. 

My husband, Andrew, and I often go to bed at different times. He is a early bird and I'm a night owl. After he turns in, I will often stay up late writing, reading, or streaming a compelling series or documentary. It's always a treat when we find ourselves climbing into bed together. We have some of the most hilarious and delicious moments lying there in the dark making each other laugh.

Thursday was one of those nights. 

I'm sure you're waiting for me to tell you what made us laugh but the truth is, I don't even know. Half the time, it's a strategic clearing of the throat or the spontaneous singing of a line from a song that sets us off. Andrew and I speak our own language and you'd have to live with us day in and day out to be in on the jokes. 

What I can tell you about is how I laughed so hard I cried. I'm pretty sure you've been there. A chuckle becomes a guffaw that gives way to a belly laugh and before you know it, tears are streaming down your face and it's hard to catch a breath. To me, if almost feels as if my face gets confused about what it's supposed to be doing. I spent my childhood and adolescence making my mom laugh like this. It's not an unwelcome state of neural-emotional chaos. In her song “People's Parties” even Joni Mitchell says, Laughing and crying, you know, it's the same release. I mean, isn't crying pretty much the measure of a good laugh?

Where the story takes a turn is after the tears. I found myself gasping for gulps of air and emitting some kind of sound that can best be described as a howl or a wail, or maybe a caterwaul. Maybe it's all the Zen training I've done in the last several years, or the recent work I've done learning about somatic experiencing and polyvagal theory, but I had the startling experience of observing myself, almost as if I'd stepped out of my body. I was laughing and witnessing myself laughing at the same time.

I let go completely. It was dark. No one could see me. Had I been with someone other than my darling husband—who was laughing right along with me—I would have tried to control myself or at at least try to stop the wild sounds coming out of my mouth. But in those moments, in the dark in the safety of my husband's presence, I just allowed the fullest expression of whatever was happening to me. 

I was still shaking like I was laughing. My face was soaked with tears. Between breaths came loud, long, sustained vocalizations. I had no idea if I was laughing, crying, or having an orgasm. Truly, it felt like none of those things—or actually, a synthesis of all of them. It was confusing but also incredibly pleasurable...and fascinatingly liberating. 

I spend my days in my private practice working with people to reinvent their sex life. Very often the work is about optimizing relational dynamics to create the conditions in which desire can flourish. But for nearly everyone who walks through my door, there's deeply personal, individual work as well, a process that involves unearthing all the internalized narratives about sex that lead to shame and a certain dissociation of and suppression of pleasure, sensation and the body's natural responses to stimulation. On the daily, I am inviting clients out of the their heads and into their bodies, to stretch into a fuller, deeper, richer experience of their physicality, to create a level of safety in which they can let go completely. 

As my somatic episode unfolded and eventually came to a natural resolution, it occurred to me that I had just done what I ask my clients to do all day long. It was profound and exhilarating.