About Carla
Carla H. Brown is an Emotional Resiliency Coach, Grief Specialist, Laughter Yoga Teacher & Trainer, GriefYoga® Teacher, and passionate educator who helps people navigate life’s challenges while reconnecting with their capacity for resilience, connection, and joy.
For more than 17 years, Carla has brought laughter, embodied emotional practices, mindfulness, and nervous-system regulation to individuals and groups in corporations, universities, hospitals, recovery settings, retreats, schools, and communities throughout the U.S. and internationally.
Drawing from neuroscience, positive neuroplasticity, self-compassion, mindfulness, and trauma-informed practices, Carla creates welcoming spaces where people can show up exactly as they are. Her approach is experiential and practical—helping people not only understand themselves differently, but develop tools they can use in their everyday lives.
Carla is a two-time American Laughing Champion (2022 & 2023) and 2023 World Laughing Champion—and a self-described “recovering serious person.” Her work reminds us that we don’t have to wait for life to be easy to experience connection, aliveness, and joy.
Why Grief & Joy?
This work grew out of my own journey of healing and self-discovery.
I grew up with high anxiety from a young age and experienced significant health challenges as an adult, including autoimmune illness and medical crises that profoundly affected me physically and emotionally. I also spent much of my life with undiagnosed dyslexia—an experience that deepened my compassion for the parts of ourselves we may judge or misunderstand before learning what they truly need.
Laughter became an unexpected part of my healing. Through intentional laughter, breath, and movement, I discovered that I could interrupt stress, move difficult emotions through my body, and begin to feel better—not only emotionally, but physically and mentally.
Years later, when my mother and my best friend died within the same year, my deep grief brought me into another chapter of healing. Through GriefYoga®, and other grief practices I learned to give grief a place to move—to feel and metabolize difficult emotions in my body rather than push them away.
What I came to understand is that grief and joy belong together. We don’t have to abandon the grieving, wounded, or shattered parts of ourselves in order to feel joy. Those parts are asking to be welcomed, included and loved.
The richness the space I offer others: a place where all of you is welcome—where grief can be honored, difficult emotions can move, and you can reconnect with your body’s innate capacity for joy and your own internal wisdom.
The inspiration for Living From Joy comes from my own desire to live from joy instead of fear. Today, I help others find their own way back to that possibility.
In the News
Laughter World Championship
Carla H Brown 2023 Laughter World Champion Who knew that laughing was a competitive sport? And what makes a winning laugh? Carla Brown (who has been the National Laughing Champion for two years running) recently finished first against competitors from [...]
LOL: Santa Cruzan is crowned world’s official greatest laugher
Carla H Brown Featured in the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Santa Cruz Lookout Carla H. Brown, a self-professed “recovering serious person,” is the planet’s best at conjuring laughter when there’s nothing specific to laugh at. She leads an online Santa Cruz group [...]
Carla H Brown Interviewed Channel 4 LA California Live
Find Out How Laughter Yoga Can Change Your Life California Live contributor Blanche Shaheen meets up with 2023 world laughing champion to learn why laughing is so good for you and how laughter yoga can brighten your day. [...]
Carla H Brown Interview on KAZU
Hear the world's greatest laugher crack up with KAZU's Dylan Music Santa Cruz resident Carla H. Brown is a "recovering serious person." Growing up in a household of neglect, Brown never found much to laugh about. But when she was [...]
