CHICAGO (WLS) — A group that meets on the lakefront every weekend is hoping to make life a little easier.
You can say it’s a sort of therapy group and what they do is a little unorthodox.
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If you’re in search of tranquility, the lakeside is a favored spot… except on Sunday evenings at North Avenue Beach, where loud screams break the calm.
This unique gathering is thanks to Scream Club Chicago, created by Manny Hernandez, a men’s transformational coach and breathwork expert who recently relocated to the city from Los Angeles.
“You can’t just scream in your apartment because it might lead to a visit from the police, so I wanted to create a space where people can gather and do just that,” Hernandez explained.
Each week, more and more people join in the free activity, like Mamie Amin who brought her 5-year-old daughter.
“We’ve had a lot of change in our life lately, and my daughter has been feeling a lot of feelings, and I feel like it’s a really good thing for her to see grown ups handling all their sad, hard feelings in a healthy way,” Amin said.
Elena Soboleva is Scream Club Chicago’s co-founder, who says people can let it all out without judgment.
“It’s really a safe space, a community where you feel supported, you feel seen and a place to just be,” Soboleva said.
That’s what keeps Xander Ruvalcaba coming back each week.
“I attended one day, and it made me feel happy at the end of it, getting all that screaming out of my system,” Ruvalcaba said.
First, participants take deep breaths, then they throw into the water biodegradable pieces of paper where they’ve written what they’re frustrated about. Then they scream three times into the lake.
Hernandez says it’s not odd to see some tears.
“There’s things that happen in our everyday life that we don’t necessarily know how to deal with, and I think that we’re all just balls of energy of things that happen in our day to day lives, and we just hold on to that stuff a lot,” Hernandez said.
The group meets each Sunday at 7 p.m. near Castaways .
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