“I do like crazy things,” Cece Sanchez said. “I’m just inspired by life.”

The Napa native spoke as she stood in her west Napa home, waiting for her guests to arrive: They’d been invited over for the first meeting of the Social Laughter Club, Sanchez is hoping to launch in Napa.

The daughter of former Napa High basketball coach Herb Jotter, Sanchez, 44, has followed a serendipitous route in life. After graduating from Vintage High School, she married at 20 and found herself living in Japan. While her husband was serving in the military she began studying yoga and belly dancing. “It was my first mind-body-spirit experience,” she said. “In the early ’80s a lot of people were doing a lot of mind-body stretching ... I walked on fire in Japan.”

She also gave birth to a daughter, Camille Star.

Returning to Napa, Sanchez who “hadn’t been very academic in school,” enrolled at  Napa Valley College, where she studied art and founded the Ozone art club. She worked as art director at the multicultural afternoon enrichment program at Napa Valley Language Academy for four years. She spent another year in a yoga teacher training program in Berkeley.  Her travels took her to Thailand and New Zealand, where she studied massage therapy. “Always everywhere I went, I continued to seek different people — artists, dancers — but I kept coming back to Napa.”

“My dad said, ‘How did we have such eccentric children?’” Sanchez admitted.

Her West Napa house is a reflection of all her travels and soul searching: Indian art, paintings of angels, Thai pillows, many candles.

She had cleared one room for the meeting of her new club, which she was inspired to start after attending a workshop on laughter yoga at Harbin Hot Springs.

She said she has been interested in the power of laughter since viewing a television clip that featured Monty Python troupe veteran John Cleese, who was traveling around the world in search of laughter. In this particular spot, Cleese was in India, meeting with people who practiced the art of laughter yoga. “I knew I was going to go to India,” she said. “I am going to go to India.”

Years later, she came upon the subject of laughter yoga again, while following a series of links on a Web search. She discovered she could explore the subject a little bit closer to home than India, and she signed up for the workshop at Harbin.

Laughter, Sanchez said, turned out to be “the puzzle piece that put all my classes together,” she said. “This is the joy everyone is seeking.”

Dr. Madan Kataria, a family physician from Mumbai, India, created the Laughter Yoga method and started the first laughter club in 1995. There are now more than 5,000 Laughter Clubs in 40 countries.

Laughter is “an ancient form of healing,” Sanchez noted. To laugh, she said, releases endorphins that make you feel good. Yet, she said, the average adult laughs only 15 times a day, whereas children laugh far more often.

The five participants who showed up for the first meeting of the Napa Laughter Social Club included Sanchez’s brother and mother. Her dog, Cloe, was also an enthusiastic participant until she was relegated to a back room. Sanchez spent an hour sharing techniques she’d learned at her Harbin workshop, including greeting each other by talking gibberish, and, of course, laughing. There are four aspects to laughter yoga, she said: clapping, breathing, childlike play and gentle yoga poses.

“The mind follows the body,” she said, “Motion creates emotion.”

Although she has studied anusara yoga and dance yoga, Sanchez noted that she is not a certified yoga teacher, and has never taught before. Now, however, in addition to starting her Laughter Social Club, she is considering putting together what she describes as playshops for adults that will include dance and art.

“Now that I’m grown up what I want to do is to help people find the child inside them,” Sanchez said.

Her mother, Colette Jotter, said she was initially apprehensive about trying the laughter yoga, but “my own reaction was it was fun and strangely calming when it was over.” As for laughter, she said, she learned that if you initially “fake it, your body doesn’t know if it’s real or not.”

“I’ve never felt what that laugher feels like until tonight,” said Sanchez’s friend, Mary Bertolucci, after the class. “It takes you by the bolt!”

Sanchez said the Social Club meetings will be free to those who wish to participate. “This is rooting me home back to Napa again,” she said. Those interested in more information about the Laughter Social Club can contact Sanchez at cecegoddess@sbcglobal.net.