From qigong to laughter yoga: Meet Gigi Otalvaro, aka Dr. Giggles

For Gigi Otalvaro Ph.D. ’18, associate director of Stanford Living Education, “qigong” — an ancient Chinese practice of movement, meditation and breathwork — and laughter yoga are ways to call on “embodiment.” In LIFE 121: Creative and Contemplative Movement: Intro to Qigong and LIFE 170: Laughter & Play for Wellbeing, among other courses, Otalvaro teaches exactly this, leading some students to refer to her as “Dr. Giggles.”

From designing her own undergraduate major in “hybridity and performance” to performing her first one-woman theater show at Brown University, Otalvaro said that the “throughline” in her life has been art, activism and academia.

Otalvaro spent her twenties presenting her and other artists of color’s work at university conferences before returning to academia to complete a master’s degree at the California College of the Arts.

Otalvaro came to Stanford in 2013 as a Ph.D. student in theater and performance studies. Since then, she has taught as an instructor for the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and is now an administrator for LifeWorks, a program for integrative learning under Stanford Living Education.

“Because we are at Stanford and in Silicon Valley specifically… people tend to lose a sense of their embodied awareness,” Otalvaro said. “We’re so focused on tech and our devices that people tend to kind of abandon their own bodies, their own embodied intelligence.”

To address this, LifeWorks is centered around the core pillars of contemplation, creativity and embodiment.

As an educator and as an artist herself, Otalvaro believes in the importance of encouraging students to engage in creative activities to “reconnect to their bodies,” she said.

“When you come back to your body, there’s so much relief that you can get from all of the chaos that’s happening in your head,” Otalvaro said.

“One of my ‘qigong’ instructors always says, ‘your body is your best friend,’” Otalvaro said.

Along with focusing on bodies, several of Otalvaro’s courses have included interdisciplinary angles.

For example, Otalvaro and Wendy Feng, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, formerly co-taught LIFE 116: Psychedelics and Social Justice. Otalvaro, from her discourse on socioeconomics in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district to “putting on a bright orange wig and bopping to disco, to leading the group in tai chi and theater exercises that bolster creativity and group cohesion,” was versatile in her teaching, Feng wrote in an email to The Daily.

Outside of LifeWorks courses, Otalvaro has guest lectured classes like WELLNESS 142: The Art of Grief, which is taught by Helen Hsu, the outreach director for Counseling and Psychological Services. 

In the course, Otalvaro facilitated a “laughter yoga experiential somatic class,” Hsu wrote to The Daily.

“Gigi expertly guided students and myself in small steps to build capacity and comfort — this is where I think all learning and personal growth occurs, at the edges of comfort zones,” Hsu wrote.

Otalvaro enjoys incorporating creative projects into her curriculum, she said.

In LIFE 121, Otalvaro’s introduction to qigong, some of her former students passed around a “qi ball,” a concept in traditional Chinese medicine, as their final project.

“Qi is loosely translated as energy, life force, breath,” Otalvaro said.

According to Otalvaro, ‘qi’ is always a vague concept for students at the beginning of the quarter. Throughout her course, Otavlaro demonstrates hands-on exercises for students to “activate” their qi, like making fire with their hands. Students became more “in tune” with their qi, learning how to manage their energy levels and how to be conscious of both their own and the environment’s.

“For me, the highlight is watching these final creative projects come together where [students] have really integrated the practice, whether it’s qigong or laughter yoga, with theater or dance, along with the conceptual grounding,” Otalvaro said.

“I feel that oftentimes the classes I take are focused on nourishing the mind, but rarely the soul. This class did that for me. It taught me how to cultivate some happiness in my life,” Juan Pablo Pacheco ’26, a student in LIFE 170, wrote in an email to The Daily.

Similarly, Blase Ramos ’27, who took LIFE 170 last year, noted that Otalvaro never runs out of enthusiasm about laughter. “Even if you did not plan on laughing intentionally, she will find a way to get the purest laughter out of you before you exit the class for the week,” Ramos wrote in an email to The Daily.

“We’d play with different ways of inducing [laughter], from pretending that we’re animals to stomping on an imaginary box to creating and drinking a laugher milkshake,” former student Henry Weng ’25 wrote. “I came out of every class with a positive glow and an unshakable grin that would last for hours.”

Ramos wrote that he has carried laughter with him beyond the course. “I found myself laughing things away because things really are not as serious as we think they are,” he wrote. “Just laugh it out.”

Otalvaro said she will be a student of qigong for the rest of her life. In her personal life, qigong and laughter yoga are embodied practices that have supported Otalvaro’s mental health and wellbeing, especially during the pandemic.

“One day, I’d be doing a laughter call in Uruguay. Another day, I’d be in Bahrain, and yet on another day, I’d be in Malaysia or India,” Otalvaro said. “Laughter yogis created a powerful global community during lockdown.”

In conjunction with her practice of laughter yoga, Otalvaro also likes hiking in nature. And when she has privacy — so she doesn’t scare any fellow hikers — Otalvaro loves to laugh with the trees, she said.

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