We’re still working on links to other websites. If you’d like your site linked to ours or are willing to have ours linked to yours please get in touch with us by emailing janegrodem@yahoo.com.

Dave Rich, from San Carlos, is forming a new group in the Menlo Park or San Carlos area this Fall. It’s likely this group will meet in the morning before work. The details are still being worked out but if you or anyone you know would be interested in a morning group in the Peninsula, please contact Dave Rich at 650/346-6158 or drich @nuance.com.

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San Francisco: Tuesdays, bag lunch: Paladin Capital Management, 41 Sutter Street, Suite 720 ; 12:10 to 1:10 p.m.

San Carlos: Tuesdays, monthly after work, contact Lisa Thompson, 510-574-2811 or Lisa_Thompson@net.com

Palo Alto: Thursdays, twice monthly: Stanford Children’s Hospital Cafeteria, noon - 1:00 p.m. Contact Horace Greeley, hgreeley@leland.Stanford.edu

Sunnyvale: Alternate Tuesdays, bag lunch, Amdahl, contact Paul Morgan, Paul.Morgan@nsc.com, 408-721-2494

Berkeley: Thursdays beginning Oct. 12 YWCA 2699 Bancroft; 12:10-1:10. Contact John McGuinn jfmcguin@bechtel.com

Coming: Peninsula group, day and time tba, Contact Dave Rich, 650/346-6158 or drich@nuance.com.

My reflection was provoked by some tapes I’ve been reviewing, tapes of the first meetings of a colleague group I helped start over five years ago. The six women in this group are all are involved in work intended to facilitate transformation in the lives of those we serve -- and in our own! (We’ve named ourselves informally, the "midwives.") Our life together is structured loosely around an action-reflection research method called "collaborative inquiry." It’s a learning strategy in which inquirers make meaning of their own experience by generating first an inquiry question and then action steps intended both to answer the question and to transform the life and work contexts of those who are asking the question. One of the things that struck me as I listened to the tapes of our sessions was how much we laughed! And how life-giving and energizing that laughter was. Our early sessions were six hours long but all of us agreed that we left the meetings more energized than when we’d arrived. (How many times have you been able to say that of a six-hour meeting?!)

Our meetings are shorter now but we still laugh a lot, and when we recently tried to articulate for ourselves the ways we’d experienced the presence of Spirit in our life together, laughter was near the top of our list. Fact is, the taped record of our process shows a remarkable correlation between laughter and insight: it’s as though laughter both facilitates and signals the generation of wisdom and understanding.

Then my musings took me back to a conversation I’d had with a wise and dear friend during a time in my life when I was letting go of an important relationship. Emily, who was well into her seventies, listened carefully to my anguish-filled description of this difficult process and then … laughed. Now this may seem an odd – even insensitive – response. And yet that’s not at all the way I experienced it – quite the opposite, for her laughter had the unexpected effect of reassuring me. It was as though her warm and gentle laughter shifted my perspective somehow: my crisis, which had seemed so ultimate and impossible, was suddenly placed in a larger, more Hospitable context. It was Wisdom laughing, not in derision but in love, not discounting the importance of my sadness but reminding me of the greater Love in which my pain was held. When I head Emily laugh, I knew I would get through that time, knew it would be creative for me, knew that anguish was not the last word but that a beginning was hidden in this ending.

Maybe that’s when I first began to realize the spiritual value of laughter. Laughter can heal, can shift our perspective, can provoke insight. Laughter – of the right sort -- is one of surest signs of the Divine at work. Can you recall a time when laughter proved transformative for you? Here’s what I’m wondering: what if we did a sort of SAW "collaborative inquiry," asking how laughter mediates divine Wisdom, noticing the way laughter transforms and informs our work lives? Why not pay special attention over the next month or so to the creative ways laughter transforms your work and workplace? What makes the difference between laughter that is creative and laughter that dis-empowers? If you’ll send us your thoughts, memories and/or experiences, we’ll share them in subsequent editions of Spirituality @ Work. You can email us at whitney@spiritualityatwork.com.

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