When we first started the Sunday Morgellons Healing Sunday, every week our leader at that time, Margie, would introduce one of the qualities of resiliency. Since beating Morgellons and other skin parasites like Collembola and mites has it's ups and downs, the more resilient we are the higher our chances of achieving our goal. Humor and laughter is one of the qualities of resiliency. Norman Cousins in his book, Anatomy of An Illness, told how he got his life back from, "ankylosing spondylitis, a painful collagen illness that rendered him immobile, and at its nadir, nearly incapable of moving his jaw."

With any serious disease, life can get very serious very quickly - especially skin diseases such as Morgellons that doctors not only do not understand, but they don't even recognize it as a disease. Yet, it's important to step out of that seriousness whenever we can. I remember a poster we had in our office back in the 90's, "Don't Take Life So Serious, You'll Never Get Out of It Alive." Don't know what happened to that poster. It got lost during one of our moves over the years, but I'll never forget it.

Why does laughter make a difference? When you're laughing your brain creates hormones that help you heal - "endorphins that can relieve some physical pain. Laughter also boosts the number of antibody-producing cells and enhances the effectiveness of T-cells, leading to a stronger immune system." - that's why. When you are in gloom and despair, the hormones do not work for you, but against you - cortisol and epinephrine. These are the stress response hormones that keep you in the "flight or fight," mode - not conducive to healing.

Your homework, "should you decide to accept, Jim," is to find humorous podcasts, youtube channels, or humorous Netflix movies of your liking and make it a point to listen to them on a daily basis. And also to tune in to today's Morgellons Event of the week at 4 pm Eastern where we often unleash humor in the raw.

And, if you also find that being happy is a problem, well, it's actually a choice. You might not know that. It's like a coin has two sides. One side is "Unhappy," and the other side is "Happy." We often get stuck on the "Unhappy," side of the coin and don't realize that we can flip the coin to the "Happy," side any time we want. We don't realize it simply because we can't see that side. It's as though any happiness we ever had is totally gone. But that's not true. You have the power at any given time to flip your coin. Read one of my favorite books, How to Be Happy With Your Self Today - The Make Yourself Happy Handbook, by yours truly. Honestly, I wrote it many years ago and haven't read it lately. It should be a best seller, but then marketing has never been my forte. Nevertheless, we could make a weekly conference call just about this subject. If you read it, let me know how you got control of you coin and flipped it  whenever you wanted.