Earlier this year, Candice Wells decided to put a pause on Scream Church, her wellness practice that had gathered people since 2022 to breathe and scream their anxiety away. But after seeing last week's election results, she decided to bring it back.
“I just knew that people needed it. My community, specifically, needed it,” she said, “because of the election and because of the collective rage.”
So she spread the word and, last Sunday morning, a few dozen people were waiting for her at a Sunnyside gym.
They lay on the floor, most covered with fuzzy blankets and eye masks, as Wells directed them through about 45 minutes of heavy breathing. For a half-hour, the place filled with a chorus of sobs and moans, as people pushed their bodies and minds into vulnerable states and faced the anguish they brought in with them.
Then, Wells led them into a screaming crescendo, as her congregation held pillows to their mouths and released their fury and sorrow.
They came to sort out their feelings and fears
While former and future President Donald Trump won enough electoral college votes to quickly claim victory, the popular vote will likely be much closer. It means roughly half the nation is celebrating. But many others are reeling, especially in very blue Denver.
A few dozen have protested in the city’s streets to express their discontent. Most people we met at Scream Church said they’d eventually turn to political speech like that, but they needed to get their emotional houses in order first.
That’s what brought Kristin Schneck to Wells’ session on Sunday. She’s a yoga instructor, but she’d never tried screaming before.
“My relationship with hope and faith and trust has been quite rattled recently, especially recently. And yeah, I've mostly been in isolation for several days,” she told us. “I felt like this was a good opportunity to be in community and have an outlet and to process.”
She was hoping to vent fears about the direction Trump may take on reproductive rights, about education and a general “lack of caring for our neighbors” she said he represents.
“I am fearful,” she said. “I feel like we're going backwards.”
Stassi Costache, who’s been screaming with Wells for about a year, said she was also rattled by the results.
“It was a confirmation that I'm not safe,” she said. “Everything's on fire. Me. The world. I'm a Black woman in America. It’s weird outside. It’s been weird.”
She is considering leaving the country, she added.
The science is fuzzy, but some found relief
Wells found her way to this “holotropic breathwork” after years of trauma and addiction. She had lived through sexual assault, struggled as a teen mother, then got sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. But that community shunned her, she told us, after she turned to psychedelics to cope with a cancer diagnosis.
“I kind of lost my sober support community,” she said.
It’s one reason why breathwork was so attractive to her. It was supposed to invoke a psychedelic experience without drugs, flooding the body and brain with oxygen, “shedding off some frontal lobe function, allowing your subconscious to come to the surface.”
While she and others swear by it, the practice has not been widely studied. This heavy breathing and screaming organized more like yoga than medicine, Wells said. It’s unregulated, and instructors like her are only connected by loose associations of practitioners.
Attendees on Sunday quickly entered emotional states once Wells began the session. Some began to cry, and the room swelled with wails.
“Letting go of caring”
When it had passed, Chelsey Panchot pulled the shade from her face. Her soul felt lighter, she said.
Her meditation focused on what this political moment means for self-expression, and fears that speaking her discontent with the country’s future, and its leaders, might create schisms in her life. She reckoned with those possibilities. As her breath calmed and her mind returned to her body, she said she’d made some decisions.
“We need to show up to love people, and we need to show up to take care of people, and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to speak truth to power,” she said. “That also means upsetting people who probably don't hold the same level of value. I think a lot of the grief that you saw is letting go of caring, that people are going to leave.”
Lizzie Armstrong, who also wept during the exercise, said she was thinking about marginalized family members, who she fears will suffer in a time marked by racist and sexualized threats. She’s looking forward to doing something about it — maybe join a Women’s March or do some volunteering — but said she needed to do this internal work before she looked outward.
“When you're on a plane, and they are giving you that talk and you have to put your own oxygen mask on before you can help others, that's where I'm at right now. I need to release the anger and the despair. And after I do that, which I think I'm doing right now, then I can really be my full self to help others,” she said. “I came in with a lot of anger and despair, but I am feeling a really great sense of peace right now.”
Maybe it was the flood of oxygen that tilted her awareness, or the cathartic release at the end. Maybe it was just seeing her panic, and a need to heal, reflected in so many who gathered with her on the gym floor.
“A lot of times, we feel like we are alone in it and that we're the only one doing it,” Wells said of trauma and grief. “Just to know you're not alone: a burden shared is half the size.”
What does Trump’s re-election mean for you, whether it’s positive or negative? Email [email protected] to let us know.
