On a breezy evening at the North Avenue Beach, a small group gathered for an unusual Sunday night ritual: screaming toward the lake.
The new weekly event, dubbed Scream Club Chicago, was created by Manny Hernandez, who recently moved to the city from Los Angeles.
Hernandez is a breath work practitioner and men’s transformational coach, and he said the idea for a Sunday night scream session came from his own experience with breath work and the emotional release he has witnessed with clients.
“In my breath work practice, we started doing screaming during the breath work, and that’s where a lot of people had their transformative experiences from that,” he said. “So that’s always kind of been a thing in my life, and it’s helped me a lot.”
Alexander Ruvalcaba, 31, a musician and Lincoln Park resident, has been coming to the event consistently. “I’ve made it to the past three weeks. I missed the first one because I didn’t know it was a thing yet,” he said.
“Ever since I came here, there was a good amount of people who showed up, and so that actually makes me feel more comfortable to actually scream out loud in front of people too.”
“If I do it alone, I might scare some of my neighbors,” he added.
He even shared the experience with his mother.
“I brought my mom on Saturday. She knows I do this breath work. And we were having an emotional talk about Ozzy Osbourne and his retirement. And so every time I come to this I always think of music. The music I listen to is scream oriented, and it makes me more comfortable with getting it out of my system, and it helped my mom get it out of her system.”
In the early 1970s, ex-Beatle John Lennon and other celebrities underwent primal scream therapy under the direction of Los Angeles psychologist Arthur Janov, who theorized that repressed childhood pain led to neurosis and blocked creativity. Janov taught that unlocking the pain required release, including through screaming.
For Elena Soboleva, 35, a Lincoln Park resident and personal branding consultant for entrepreneurs, there was initial hesitation at the idea of screaming by the lake. Soboleva is Hernandez’s partner.
“I had so much built up in myself that I couldn’t express. And Manny said, ‘Hey, I know you need to release, do you want to scream?’ I felt so uncomfortable at first because there were people around,” she said.
Soboleva said the screaming has not only helped her to release bottled up emotions, but it also gave her the confidence “to just do it.”
“Being in a city you’re bombarded with something every day: stress, traffic noise. Being by the water with this calm presence is very special,” Soboleva said.
Hernandez said the idea for the scream sessions began when he and Soboleva “were just having a real bad week.”
They were walking near the lake, and he asked her if she wanted to scream into the lake, and she said yes. The couple then found others on Instagram and through the meet-up app Pie who wanted to join them.
“We screamed into the lake, there were some tears, and that’s when I knew this was something I wanted to start,” Hernandez said.
Participants are given biodegradable paper and pens to jot down their frustrations to toss into the water prior to screaming.
“All the stresses, anything that’s bothered you through the week, any anger that you’ve had, we’re gonna write it down. Before we scream, we’re going to throw [the paper] into the lake just as a good way to say we’re letting this go,” Hernandez told the group.
Next comes a series of guided breaths: “We’re going to do five breaths of breathing in through the nose for four seconds and exhaling for four seconds. We’re going to do that five times and then we’re gonna let it rip.”
The group threw their worries into the water and then engaged in a series of three big screams, the last one the loudest.
Before the event wrapped up, Hernandez thanked the group and offered a promise of continued connection, with plans to hangout after the scream session for some quiet time and reflection.
