ON-STAGE Gina Stahl-Haven headlines the Best of the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition: St. Valentine’s Day Mascara in February.

Comedian Gina Stahl-Haven gets heckled a lot, but not so much at the comedy clubs as in her college classroom. She laughs, “My students are hecklers and I have to respond to them.”

It turns out, working as a professor prepared the new comedian for standup more than she expected.

“I’m literally standing in front of 30 people in the classroom doing a bit,” she says. “It’s got my lecture in there but there are jokes and I’m responding to the group and that’s my job, so in a way, I have been professionally performing for the past 15 years.”

The rising star’s straight-talking humor reminds you of your funniest girlfriend, and she gives motherhood and relationships her signature treatment—sarcastic but not self-deprecating, celebrating the experience of being a woman but acknowledging the laugh-so-you-don’t-cry moments.

Stahl-Haven, a Novato native and instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College, won the exclusive San Francisco Comedy Competition last year when no one had heard of her, but was later told there was an error, and she’d actually won second place.

“I still have a lot of questions about what happened,” she says.

Stahl-Haven moved on from that disappointment, but it reinforced her feelings about women in comedy.

“I think women are funny, and we should open the space for more diverse types of comedy,” she says. “There’s a lot of misogyny in comedy, even though there’s a lot of people who are trying to change that in the scene.”

Stahl-Haven began performing improv in college at San Francisco State University, where she took her first comedy class.

“I really loved it and thought I was good at it, but it was just so scary,” she says.

She continued improv but kept standup comedy on the back burner. Meanwhile, she became a professor of rhetoric at the University of San Francisco, also teaching at College of Marin and Santa Rosa Junior College, while living in Novato with her husband and two kids.

“Then all of a sudden I’m 37 years old and I’m like, ‘Being afraid to do comedy is not a good reason to not do comedy,’ and I opened my mind to the possibility of doing it without a direct path,” she says.

She looked for opportunities, even though it was still scary—maybe even scarier—than before and soon had gigs throughout the Bay Area. After about a year, she entered the San Francisco Comedy Competition as a long shot. But she did get in, and winning/not winning was life-changing.

“That experience built a lot of opportunity, and helped me build some confidence and see my place in the scene,” she says.

With a young family and an existing career, it’s not always easy.

“It’s hard to balance it all—there are festivals I want to apply to and I’m just like, ‘What? Do I miss a week of work? Do I take the kids with me?'” she says. “There’s a challenge with it—we just went to Seattle and I took everyone with me and we made it a vacation. Every night I’d leave for a show, and even though everyone knew that was why we were going, it was, ‘No, mama—have dinner with us.’ I’d leave for the shows feeling so guilty—one night I was getting into the Lyft and my son was lying on the concrete screaming, ‘Mama, no go!'”

The upside is that there is a lot of comedic material when you’re a mom. Her authentic humor resonates—especially with women.

“I hear people say, ‘I’m not against women in comedy, I just don’t find it funny,’ and that’s a much bigger discussion about social issues, which is, ‘Why is the experience of women so foreign that you don’t relate to it?’ Because comedy is about relating to things, right?”

It’s a question a rhetoric professor might ask, and a question a mother would feel is important, but the comic in Stahl-Haven would say it’s her direct experience. People come up after the show, and actually express surprise that they liked her.

“They’ll say, ‘You were so hilarious, and my husband does not like women comics, but he liked you.’ Like women, in general, aren’t funny.”

But maybe it’s that women comics just aren’t in the scene. A study done by producer and comedian Meredith Katchel revealed that venues book male comics more frequently than female comics, and it’s even more true of less-frequent performers (a 70 percent male-29 percent female ratio).

Questioning biases is important to inclusivity.

“I would just say to people: what you think is comedy, might not be the only comedy,” Stahl-Haven says. “When somebody has this kind of response, and they don’t question ‘Why do I feel uncomfortable?’ then they continue having that implicit bias.”

No woman has ever won the San Francisco comedy competition. But Stahl-Haven is in good company anyway. The last woman to win second place? Ellen Degeneres, 34 years ago.

During the wintertime when everyone around us is getting sick, it’s natural to begin asking ourselves “How can I stay healthy and well?”

But health and wellness is more than just a lack of disease. It’s an overall balance; something to strive for in every season. Movement, alternative therapies and common sense remedies can be very effective for achieving overall health and wellness.

“Wellness is having the right relationship between the internal and external environments,” says Sean Fannin, a practitioner of Chinese medicine since 1992.

Specializing in Chinese herbalism and Medical Qigong at The Center for Traditional Health Arts in Petaluma, Fannin has observed that achieving one’s health goals goes hand in hand with keeping them simple.

“People often make wellness goals too complicated,” Fannin says. “When you make goals, it’s good to go back to really fundamental things. For example, with diet: stick to local, whole foods, eat what’s in season, eat regularly, not have too many processed foods, and that’s basically it.”

Movement

Movement is more important to our overall health than we may realize. It turns out that we don’t need to work out at the gym 24/7 to be healthy—incorporating simple daily movement is all we need.

Increase Low-Intensity Movement

“Our life and health come from movement,” Fannin says. “Walking down the street, or picking up groceries and carrying them around—those are all movement. We didn’t adapt to sitting around for eight hours, then having high-intensity movement. It was mostly moderate to low-level activity, but all the time—we really do well with that. So we need to have a high level of low-intensity movement throughout our day and then short periods of high-intensity movement.”

Walk

Walking can increase your longevity and you don’t need special equipment. Bundle up and take a relaxing walk with your partner, children (bring scooters) or a friend. It can be at a nearby park or just around the neighborhood, but get out there every day.

Try Parkour

With parkour you use your immediate environment to get from one point to another in the most efficient way. It involves climbing, jumping and all kinds of movement.

“The goal is to move as fluidly as you can within the environment,” Fannin says. “I felt comfortable in nature, but I never felt very comfortable just walking down the street. And 90 percent of the time I’m walking down the street. We should be comfortable in our environment, wherever it is.”

Rest

So simple, but so hard to achieve. In the winter, it makes sense to take even more time to rest. Many of us were trained to believe that rest is lazy—but rest is necessary to our well-being. Everyone is different with how much rest or sleep they need, so discover your own needs and don’t compare yourself to others. Below are a few simple ways to rest besides actually sleeping.

Take a Bath

Take a warm bath. All you need to do is fill the tub. Make it more special by adding bubbles, bath salts or a few lighted candles. You can even read a good book while you soak. If you don’t have a tub, the Dhyana Center in Sebastopol offers a self-care sanctuary with soaking tubs, a cold plunge and a sauna. You can even bring your book there.

Reading

Speaking of books, schedule a time to read in the evening just before bedtime. An important part of this practice, however, is reading an actual book and not your glowing mobile device which can adversely affect your ability to snooze. You’ll look forward to the activity and it will help you achieve your chosen bedtime.

Food

Of course, we know that eating healthy is a good idea, but some foods in particular can act like tonics.

Garlic

Garlic is always beneficial, especially during cold season. But you need to chop it to combine the medicinal properties of alliin and alliinase into allicin. Once it’s chopped, wait 10 minutes for the allicin to develop before adding heat. According to Jo Robinson, in her book Eating on the Wild Side, “Heat destroys the alliinase and then you can’t get the allicin, which is the medicinal benefit. Further, she says, “garlic has so many healing properties that waiting those critical 10 minutes could reduce your risk of a number of worrisome diseases.”

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are powerhouses of nutrition and medicine. They support our bodies in various ways from increasing brain health to boosting the immune system. On the Fungi Perfecti website, Paul Stamets explains that cooking mushrooms is essential to releasing their nutrients:

“Proper heat treatment denatures toxins, softens fungal tissues, and allows our natural digestive enzymes to access and utilize the inherent benefits of both culinary mushrooms and mushroom supplements: Edible mushrooms should be tenderized by heating to at least 140 F—over many hours—more preferably over 180 F, most preferably above 200 F to release their nutrients and render them digestible and safe.”

Stamets even suggests putting mushrooms in the sun to increase their vitamin D content.

Herbs

Making a cup of herbal tea can be as therapeutic as the herbs you make it with. Try lemon balm, chamomile, rose, thyme, peppermint or lemon verbena. Inhale the aromas while you’re steeping the herbs.

Alternative therapies

Western and Eastern medicine are different approaches but both serve a function and work well together. Many people see Western doctors and specialists while also seeing Chinese medical practitioners.

Traditional
Chinese Medicine

Somewhere around the 1600s Chinese medicine became what it is today, but its roots go back thousands of years.

“One of the reasons why I think Chinese medicine works so well,” Fannin says, “is because it is the oldest tradition of medicine that has a continuous written history. You have this tremendous resource of written material. And you can go back and look at the source material yourself.”

In Traditional Chinese medicine, the study of health and disease began with observing living things.

“Chinese medicine studies the movement of life,” Fannin says. “If we have the right movement then we have the right health. It’s a complete system of medicine so we work with just about anything that any medical office would work with: from people with serious diseases to cultivating health and anything in between.”

Dr. Kim Peirano, a doctor of acupuncture & Chinese medicine and a licensed acupuncturist practicing in San Rafael at Lion’s Heart Wellness, adds, “Treatments can clear out the clutter of the mind and the body so we can make space, bring the body back into alignment and really find our path again.”

And if you aren’t a meditator, acupuncture can help achieve the same effect.

“Acupuncture and meditation have been shown to help our brains actually turn off our ‘fight or flight’ system, beta brainwaves and tune in to alpha and theta brainwave states,” Peirano says. “What’s that mean? It means the hour-long acupuncture treatment is actually affecting the way our brain works so that we can access the deep brainwave patterns that allow our body to naturally rejuvenate and heal itself.”

Massage

Who doesn’t love a massage? Different forms of massage, like shiatsu, hot stone, deep tissue or Swedish can be effective in dissolving muscle pain and can even help with the source of the pain or emotional issues. Kat Lilith, holistic health practitioner and certified massage therapist at The Healing Heart, says of her massage practices in Petaluma and Dorset, Vermont, “Relieving symptoms is not the goal. Relieving the cause of the symptom is the goal.”

The wellness activities above are not only healthy, but relaxing and enjoyable, and can be incorporated long-term into your routines for maximum health. So keep it simple, and just begin.