Soul App, a Chinese social networking platform that’s a huge hit among Gen Z, recently hosted a unique offline event called Emotional Wellness & Poetry 3.0. It was meant to send out the clear message that mental well-being is not a privilege. It’s a right and above all, it is everybody’s right.
The healing initiative, which was in its third edition, was designed to showcase that emotional nourishment can be woven into how people live, connect, and create. It was meant to highlight the fact that a clinical setting and professional intervention, while required in many cases, aren’t a must-have for everybody who seeks such healing.
It’s possible to enjoy experiences that soothe the soul in parks while being surrounded by the serenity of nature and to seek healing through music and poetry. As things currently stand, millions of young individuals across the world are struggling with mental health concerns.
They need help, but their condition isn’t considered serious or even severe enough to warrant professional therapy. The sad truth is that society at large views mental health through a binary lens. So, people are either well or unwell, completely healthy or in need of professional intervention, functioning, or in crisis.
There simply isn’t room to accommodate the various shades of grey that life is all about. This lack of middle ground leaves millions of youngsters drowning in a sea of emotional and mental troubles with no one around to throw them a rope.
Because Zoomers are Soul App’s most frequent and prolific users, it did not take long for Soul’s team to figure out the urgent need to fill this chasm that exists between wellness and illness. This gap is teeming with youngsters who desperately want reprieve from anxiety, stress, loneliness, and emotional fatigue, but they do not meet the clinical threshold for a mental illness diagnosis.
It behooves mentioning here that Emotional Wellness & Poetry was never meant to be a replacement for professional interventions. On the contrary, the event was created as a pre-professional-help initiative; an initiative that promoted the self-acceptance and validation of emotions. All along, the goal was to get people to share their mental turmoil and emotional wounds instead of letting them fester on the inside.
To this effect, it was decided to include not just poetry but also music in the latest edition of Emotional Wellness & Poetry. Soul App roped in the Shanghai Mental Health Center to help them with the emotionally intelligent design of the event.
The Shanghai Expo Cultural Park, with its lush green cover, offered the perfect environment for the event, creating a triad of potent healing resources – Nature, Poetry, and Music. In other words, Emotional Wellness & Poetry 3.0 was as far removed from the formalities and the rigid structure of traditional treatment as possible.
But why were music and poetry chosen as the healing elements for the event? Poetry has long offered a channel for expressing emotions in a subtle yet liberating manner. In fact, it is an ideal tool for both reflection and healing. As far as music is concerned, lilting melodies can trigger emotional responses quickly, offering comfort and connection in ways that feel immediate and intuitive.
Together, these two create an organic blend that gently removes an individual from troubling mental spaces and softly nudges them towards calmer and unsnarled states. But the choice wasn’t just made on the basis of the philosophical views about these two.
Soul App’s research team relied on data gathered over years of community engagement, which revealed that music is a primary coping mechanism for the platform’s predominantly young user base. This information served as the basis for combining music’s emotional immediacy with poetry’s introspective depth. The idea was to achieve a multi-sensory therapeutic environment.
This was done by dividing the event into two sections. First, visitors walked through curated installations of poetic verse nestled among the greenery of the park. This physical interaction with art, set in nature, was meant to encourage mindfulness and presence.
The next section led them into a live concert that featured artists known for their emotive and poetic musical styles. What’s more, Soul App’s team even timed the whole thing perfectly. The event was held on June 1, Children’s Day, so that it could serve as a poignant reminder to nurture one’s inner child.
In a bid to ensure that the positivity and healing experienced would not be left behind at the event venue, Soul App made Emotional Wellness & Poetry a part of a broader digital ecosystem that encourages people to give vent to their feelings instead of bottling them inside.
The platform boasts features like the “Tree Hole,” a space for emotional sharing, and themed chat parties like “Emotional Study Rooms” that offer an opportunity for communal exploration of feelings. These digital tools are both outlets and entry points because they allow users to articulate and better understand their emotional landscapes.
This hybrid model from Soul App makes people acknowledge that emotional support is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. The fact of the matter is that some users find healing through a shared song, while others might discover clarity through a poem. Still others may take comfort simply in knowing they are not alone.
The most notable aspect of Soul App’s approach is that it eliminates the need to explain or justify emotional pain. Instead, it suggests that even acknowledging and exploring emotional distress is a step towards healing and recovery. And that kind of optimism is quite frankly the need of the hour!
