I went to a comedy club this weekend.

I laughed so hard my stomach hurt — the kind of laughing that takes over your whole body, where you lose your breath a little and your eyes water and you stop caring what you look like. It felt incredible. It wasn't until the next morning, turning the night over in my head, that the quieter realization landed:

I couldn't remember the last time I'd laughed like that.

Not chuckled. Not smiled at something on my phone. Laughed — from the belly, up through the chest, all the way into my head. That loose, free, nothing-held-back kind of laughter. When was the last time? I genuinely couldn't tell you. Weeks? Longer?

And once I noticed it, I couldn't un-notice the other thing: how much tightness I'd been carrying around without ever naming it. It had just become my baseline. A low, quiet clench I'd stopped feeling — because it never let up.

I don't fully know where it came from. Maybe it's the state of the world right now; there's a lot to hold, and most of us are holding it whether we admit it or not. Maybe it's my own stuff — the move, the changes, the small fears that move in when life is in flux. Probably some of both. But the point isn't the diagnosis. The point is that the joy had quietly slipped out the back door, and I hadn't even noticed it leave.

A few days later I was listening to an interview, and the person was talking about joy — about how we let other people, and the world, steal it from us. That landed hard, because it named exactly what had happened. Nobody took my joy in some dramatic way. It just got slowly crowded out — by the news, by worry, by the sheer weight of paying attention to everything. I gave it away a little at a time, without ever deciding to.

 Here's where my Chinese medicine brain kicks in, because this isn't only a feeling — it's physiology. In Chinese medicine, joy is the emotion of the Heart. The Heart is the Fire element, the warmth and light of the whole system, and joy is its natural expression — the lightness, the laughter, the spark. When the Heart is open and its fire is steady, joy comes easily. But when it gets covered over — by fear, by grief, by that chronic low-grade tightness — joy is the first thing to dim. The light's still there. It's just buried under everything we're carrying.

And laughter? Laughter is medicine, almost literally. In Chinese medicine the sound of the Fire element is laughing. A real belly laugh moves stuck qi, opens the chest, and lifts the spirit — it does in about three seconds what I'm always trying to do for people one point at a time. That's why the comedy club cracked me open the way it did. It wasn't just fun. It was my chest unlocking, my qi finally moving, my Heart remembering what it's for.

And here's the part I keep turning over, for those of us who do this work: we are so often the ones holding space for everyone else's heaviness. We absorb a lot. Which means we can be the most joy-depleted people in the room and the last to notice — too busy tending everyone else's fire to feel that our own has gone low. Sound familiar?

Our clients walk in carrying the same thing. That tightness, that flatness, that "I'm fine" that clearly isn't — it's so often a Heart asking for its joy back. And the answer was never "cheer up." It's helping the Qi move again. Opening the chest. Making room for the light to come back through.

What I'm realizing is that joy isn't something that just happens to you, and it's not something you sit around waiting to feel again. It's something you move toward on purpose. You protect it. You make room for it. You go to the comedy club. You call the friend who makes you laugh until you snort. You stop letting the world quietly help itself to the best part of you.

So that's what I'm doing now — actually paying attention to my own joy-meter for once, and guarding it a little more fiercely. And when I sit with a client (or with you), I'm watching for that same dimming, because I've come to think it's one of the most overlooked things we treat.

If you want a small place to start — for yourself, or for the client who walks in carrying that tightness — try a point called KI27. It sits in the little hollow where your collarbone meets the sternum, just under the inner edge of the collarbone. I love it here for a reason worth knowing: KI27 is the very last point of the Kidney channel, which begins all the way down at the sole of the foot — so this point is your roots arriving at your chest to support the Heart. It opens the chest, eases that tightness, and helps you take a fuller breath.

Pair it with wild orange (or sweet orange — I use wild, some use sweet). Wild orange is like sunshine in a bottle — I dare you to be in a bad mood when you use it. It's bright and lifting; it moves the stuck, stagnant feeling and makes a little room for the light.

But honestly? The first prescription is simpler than that.

Go laugh. The real kind. From the belly. It's been too long.