Heidi Barkwell
Your Body Already Makes the Medicine. I’ll Show You How to Open the Cabinet.
giggling namasteLaugh Guard. Recovering perfectionist. Certified laughter yoga teacher and ambassador. Author. Twenty-three years old, with forty years of experience.
Alberta, CanadaLaughing since 2006Giggling namaste
Fifteen of them as a lifeguard, saving bodies from drowning. Somewhere around year fifteen I noticed I had become hard-hearted. A coworker used to swipe the anger creases between my eyes to remind me not to look so mad. I was laughing for all the wrong reasons, and then I wasn’t really laughing at all.
So I shaved my head, sold my townhouse, got rid of everything I owned, and took a year off. My family told me not to go. I went anyway.
We opened a sports bar on an island. Then a business deal went south, I got burned by a con, and I came home to sit in my mom’s basement at forty-two, wondering if there was anything left for me on this planet.
There was. It just showed up wearing face paint.
I asked how much a clown makes. She told me, and I enrolled in the course. I graduated as a therapeutic caring clown and volunteered at the children’s hospital as a bee named Humble Bee. That is where I met laughter yoga, and I knew right then that this was the thing I wanted to pay forward for the rest of my life.
It opened a valve in me that I didn’t know needed opening.
It opened a valve in me that I didn’t know needed opening. I had spent my whole life in armor: the projects in Scarborough, the bar years, the blackouts, the anger I used on the wrong people. Laughter cracked me open enough to understand it, own it, and let it go.
I have been laughing for no reason, on purpose, almost every day since. It saved my life, changed my life, and continues to maintain my life. That is why I share it.
My downtown job was picking up crack pipes, syringes, and worse. After a run-in with a boss, I was sent home with pay. I decided they were paying me to write. So I did. I outed myself on every page, and I called the book Laughing Wellness because I wanted to hand people the map.
Thanks for throwing the dirt on me. You helped me bloom.
The acronym came to me in a dream, because it was the opposite of how I used to live. It runs on your daily D.O.S.E. (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins), and the fastest way I know to open that cabinet is laughter as exercise.
Laugh yourself well. Promote yourself daily instead of waiting for someone else to.
Eat well, sleep well, and use laughter as exercise.
Activate your own medicine cabinet. Own your words and your actions.
Drop off your adult at the door and wake the fun up.
The D.O.S.E. Method is Heidi Barkwell’s daily nervous-system reset: fifteen playful minutes built around the body’s own feel-good chemistry, with laughter as exercise as its fastest lever.
Every session uses one lever to get all four moving: laughter started on purpose, breathed with, and done in a room with other people. No jokes required. It is a practice, not a pill, and it is easiest to feel in the first fifteen minutes.
The D.O.S.E. Method is an educational wellness practice, not medical care. Research on laughter-based practice is associated with lower measured stress and anxiety (a 2024 meta-analysis of 18 studies); those are group averages, not promises.
I don’t want to be your guru. The guru is inside of you. I’m the one who has done the reps, and I have the paperwork to prove it.
When I quit drinking and drugs, I had to find new people to play with. So I built a life out of communities: my laughter family around the world, my ReggaeTone fit family, my roller skating crew, and the Sistars who show up every single week. We need each other. Come get yours.
"Heidi, you couldn’t even spell author twenty years ago."
An old friend, on hearing about the book. Correct, kid. If I can do this, anybody can.
Fifteen playful minutes a day, and no journaling required. Come feel it once.
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