The miracle of the two Marcia’s

I had expected to be too busy to post anything this weekend, but I’ve just experienced something so fantastic that I couldn’t NOT tell you about it!!

This weekend is the annual Toastmasters Conference and International Speech Contest for my district, and it happens that my home club is hosting the contest (which is fantastic, given that we often have to travel 8 or 12 hours to areas of Canada to participate). As part of the conference, we get to participate in various educational workshops. Last year, I was honored to present an educational session at the conference (that’s where the really cool picture of me speaking with the word “Dream” behind me came from.)

Anyway, enough about me and more about the Marcias.  I met each of these two women at various Toastmasters functions over the past 5 years. I met Marcia #1 when I was a brand-new Toastmaster participating in my very first contest, and she was everything I aspired to be – calm, supportive, and very elegant.  Although I met Marcia #2 through Toastmasters, I really connected with her when I took an archery class that she taught a few years ago. She was a fantastic teacher and I looked forward to her class every week.

These two dynamic women showed up today teaching something that I never would have anticipated – “Laughter Yoga”! They took a room of 100+ Toastmasters in business suits and serious faces and led us through a series of exercises that ranged from silly to sublime.

The two Marcias - Marcia Wyman and Marcia Sprague

We spent about 20 minutes laughing…literally, just laughing. We walked around the room and greeted each other with laughter; then we laughed about having a bad hair day; then we started our imaginary lawn mowers and mowed the carpet of the conference room. We finished with five minutes of an honest-to-goodness eyes-closed Laughter Meditation. Okay – seriously, how awesome is that?!?

The reason that this conference is being hosted by our home club is because the current District Governor, Sue Francesco, is one of our members. In my five years with Toastmasters, I’ve gotten to know Sue in a variety of different situations. Never, however, have I seen anything quite as wonderful as Sue – our distinguished and honorable leader – pulling her hair band out, intentionally making her hair as messy as possible, and laughing her heart out.

I wish I had photos of all of us getting our laugh on. Fortunately, though, I was so involved in what we were doing that stopping to take photos would have been unthinkable.

Laughter Yoga is completely new to me, but you’d best believe that it’s something I want to know more about! What a miracle that the two Marcias ignored everything that a Toastmasters educational session usually is and got us down on the floor playing like kids.