Lifestyle

At Mindful Archery, L.A. women take aim at their exes, toxic jobs and Donald Trump

Published

2 months ago

June 30, 2026

At Mindful Archery, L.A. women take aim at their exes, toxic jobs and Donald Trump

Give a girl a bow and arrow, take her to the woods, and anything feels possible.

That’s what I was thinking as I positioned myself in front of bales of hay in an open field at the Woodley Park Archery Range in Van Nuys. Channeling my inner Katniss, I took a “power stance:” shoulders back, legs slightly bent, bow cradled in my upper body. I slid a small but fierce-looking arrow bearing orange feathers onto the bow “nock,” filled my lungs with air, then heaved the tense bowstrings back to my jaw, one eye closed and the other narrowed in concentration.

Then I did what often feels impossible for me: I let go.

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The arrow hurdled forward, unleashing an audible woosh followed by a distant thwack. I missed my target entirely, stabbing the hunk of hay more than a foot away from the bull’s-eye. But the feeling of release as the bowstrings were left vibrating in my arms was palpable, intensely satisfying.

This was Mindful Archery.

Angie Fadel, founder of Soulcare, leads Mindful Archery.

The seemingly militaristic act of archery and peaceful meditation may seem diametrically opposed. But at Angie Fadel Soulcare, they make perfect sense together. Fadel leads workshops in Mindful Archery that combine meditation, somatic practices such as breathwork, immersive nature therapy and archery instruction.

The idea, Fadel says, is for participants to gather in a healing nature setting while becoming mindful of something they want to either let go of (an unfulfilling job or toxic relationship, for example) or something they’re aiming for and want to bring into their lives. Fadel leads a short guided meditation at the start of the workshop for participants to relax and get grounded, followed by a nature walk so they can further sink into the moment and become clear on what, exactly, their targets will be for the day — what they’ll be shooting for, or at. Then participants draw their individual targets on paper with colored markers that Fadel provides.

Attendees hold up their targets during a Mindful Archery class.

One target might look like an abstract drawing representing a feeling, another might be a jumble of words and symbols such as “Love,” “$” and “Health.” Or an illustration of Donald Trump, as one past archer aimed for.

“I’ve seen everything,” Fadel says. “People have put their parents, their exes, people have put rapists — the most damaging things that have happened to them — on a target because if you can hit that thing, it feels better in your body. The same thing happens when you hit something good, it’s a hopeful mechanism in the body.”

Fadel’s archery instruction is as much about how the sport feels in the body as it is about technical precision. The slow and steady, intentional steps of deep breathing, taking aim and shooting at a carefully considered target is a powerful act, she says.

“Even if the arrow doesn’t go where you want, there’s this immediate thing that happens in your body that feels good,” Fadel says. “When you let go of that string, there’s an energy, there’s a movement — actual, physical energy moves. Something magical happens. It helps the things that are stuck in the body get unstuck. It’s somatic. Then it’s an extra bonus if you do hit your target, because the slap of the paper feels even better.”

Fadel, who lives in Portland, Ore., and calls herself “a soul-collaborator,” has a masters in spiritual companionship and spent a decade working as a pastor in a Portland church helping members find untraditional spiritual paths. She’s also been an archer for more than 15 years. She came to both practices — spiritual companionship and archery — separately before they organically entwined. Midway through pursuing her master’s in 2011 she discovered a friend was a master archer. She’d always wanted to learn archery, since she was a kid growing up in rural Washington, and she persuaded him to give her a lesson.

“It was just one lesson, but it changed my life,” Fadel says. “I was doing something that I’d always dreamed of doing. It unlocked something I didn’t realize could be unlocked.”

Targets pinned to a hay bale allow participants to take aim at what they want to bring into their lives.

Fadel found archery increasingly therapeutic. She was doing a lot of introspective Jungian journaling at the time. As life challenges came up in her journaling — the stress of school or a difficult roommate, “or just society as a whole,” she says — she’d put them on targets in the form of words. Shooting at them helped her process the conflict. She thought the beneficial side effects of archery were particular to her, however. Then she took a struggling friend out for her first archery lesson and the response was profound.

“I realized, you know what? This works. I can take you from never touching a bow to your leaving with your nervous system relaxed. I thought: I have to figure out how to give this to other people.”

Now with Soulcare, Fadel conducts multiple types of archery workshops in Portland and around the country, including in Colorado, Texas and throughout California. She comes to Los Angeles to lead workshops several times a year. One workshop is a Mindful Archery class, not to be confused with her other course Meditative Archery, which involves Jungian journaling; and there’s a one-on-one archery session with spiritual guidance.

Empowering women and minorities, Fadel says, is a key part of her archery workshops.

“An archery range can be a very white, male-dominated space,” she says. “And the stance, with a bow and arrow in your hand, shooting — it’s very male. And [men] don’t have any problem, most of the time, taking up space. So it is a practice to remind ourselves, as a queer woman, a trans person, nonbinary person, anybody that’s kind of othered in our society, to be able to take up space. To adopt a power stance and be, like, I’m allowed to be here.”

Inside the Mindful Archery workshop

Our workshop began with gentle stretching in an open field. It was a cool, overcast day and as the wind rustled the tree leaves, a baby coyote raced across the lawn in the distance. During introductions, attendees shared why they were here.

Archery is about "letting go" and here, a student lets her arrow fly.

“I’m actually a very anxious person,” said Rachel Clipper, 26, “so I’m always looking for something to help me feel more grounded and promote mind-body connection.”

Kati Lee, 29, said that as a “‘Hunger Games’ girlie,” she’d always thought archery was cool. “But what drew me to keep coming back was the mindful part of it,” she said. “My favorite part is that we make our own targets.”

During the nature walk, we ambled down a tangle of dirt trails as Fadel pointed out wild rose bushes, Aspen trees and elderberry, giving a recipe for syrup. When we came to a body of water in a clearing — the Woodley Park Wetlands — we watched as a majestic-looking cormorant stretched its wings in the distance.

“Think about what would feel good to either annihilate,” Fadel said as we returned to the range. “Or bring in, or let go of, or make peace with. You can put all of it on your target.”

And so we did. We hunkered down at a picnic table by the archery range for crafting and snacks that Fadel provided, every one of us falling into silent sketching and scribbling as we munched on peanuts and granola bars. It felt like summer camp.

Lee set her markers down. “Done,” she said, contemplating her target. It was adorned with words such as “Health,” “Love,” “Family” and “Friends” inside concentric hearts.

Yvonne Golomb, 70, said she’d done archery as a high school student in gym class. She was shy back then, but archery had made her feel bold. Now that she’s retired, she’s craving that feeling again and is returning to the sport for sustenance.

“It’s this nice memory, it made me feel strong, it was freeing,” she said. “Now that I’m retired I’m exploring it. I wanted to bring back those memories.”

When it was time for our archery lesson, Fadel conducted one last somatic exercise to loosen us up. She had us tap up and down our body parts, from our feet to our ears, before shaking out any remaining stress.

Then she coached us, individually, as we took aim at our targets in sets of three.

“Breathe, zero in on your target, OK, now smooth …,” she said, hovering over one attendee.

May Claire La Plante, 31, said she was doing archery today, in an “adaptive stance” Fadel had taught her, to build up her arm strength after a surgery.

Kati Lee, right, and Tristan Gonzales affix their targets during a Mindful Archery class.

“I was feeling very frustrated that I couldn’t get it at the beginning,” La Plante said. “I didn’t even finish my arrows. But getting back up and the act of trying again — despite the injury and all the baggage that comes with it — is really empowering.”

“Bull’s-eye!” Clipper cheered nearby, her anxiety seemingly dissipated. She’d hit her target, dead center. What was on it? A labyrinth-like spiral of words with “Peace,” “Love” and “Creative Control” at the epicenter.

I wasn’t having as much luck and was missing my target repeatedly.

“Try loosening your grip,” Fadel coached. She adjusted my stance. “Now breathe.”

It seemed counterintuitive to slacken my grip given such a precise goal — to land a slender arrow in the epicenter of a black dot. But I did, letting the edge of the bow sit loosely, even wobbly, between my fingers. I took aim and shot. This time the arrow flew strong and straight.

One participant hit the bull's-eye, which calls for "peace" and "love," dead center.

Another round later and it landed smack on the paper target, just above my bull’s-eye.

“See?” Fadel said, elated. “Archery isn’t about doing it right, it’s about repetition. The more you can be in your body, and relaxed with the repetition, the better you are. Rarely do I have someone not hit their target at least one time.”

She squinted at my target, then turned to me.

“It’s because they’re relaxed and it’s because they trust me,” she added. “And they learn to trust themselves more.”

Lifestyle

What excites us? What scares us? Find out at ‘Camp Miasma’

Published

6 hours ago

August 14, 2026

Press Room

What excites us? What scares us? Find out at ‘Camp Miasma’

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

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The 39-year-old director Jane Schoenbrun has a wild imagination but a consistent theme: they’re fascinated by the media obsessions that shaped some of us as young people, perhaps even offering us a sense of refuge and belonging that the outside world could not. Schoenbrun’s 2021 debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was an eerie experimental horror film about a teenager caught up in an online role-playing game. Then came the 2024 drama I Saw the TV Glow, about two teens bonding over a Buffy-style TV series, which Schoenbrun, a transgender filmmaker, turned into a stealthy commentary on trans experience.

Now we have Schoenbrun’s third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It draws its title from a fictional slasher movie called Camp Miasma, which was a big hit sometime in the 1980s and, like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and countless other horror touchstones of its era, has spawned an increasingly rudderless series of sequels. Schoenbrun recaps the history of the Camp Miasma franchise in a dazzlingly witty opening-credits sequence that I want to watch again slowly, one frame at a time: it’s the work of an artist who knows how to spoof and embrace pop-cultural phenomena in astoundingly meticulous detail.

Hannah Einbinder, from the HBO Max comedy series Hacks, stars as Kris Williams, a 29-year-old independent filmmaker who’s writing and directing a Camp Miasma reboot. She’s hoping to persuade Billy Presley, who starred in the original movie, to reprise her role in the new one. Billy is something of a recluse; she lives in the Pacific Northwest, in a remote lakeside cabin on the very grounds where Camp Miasma was shot. Kris is in a nearby cinema, watching a scene from that first film, when Billy, played by Gillian Anderson with a Southern accent and a fabulous aura of Old Hollywood glamour, approaches her in the theater.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is frequently funny as a satire of contemporary filmmaking. Schoenbrun takes knowing aim at the industry’s obsession with sequels, reboots and origin stories, its overuse of trauma as a horror trope, and its often performative approach to inclusion and social justice. The original Camp Miasma, which featured a gender-fluid killer laying waste to a summer camp, has since been accused of transphobia — a criticism that Kris, who approaches cinema through a queer academic lens, wants to correct in her own project. More than once, though, the older, worldlier Billy tells Kris to stop over-intellectualizing everything, noting that in the movies, we respond to sex and horror on a pure, visceral level. True to its title, Teenage Sex and Death is fascinated by the connections between what excites us and what scares us.

It’s no surprise when Kris and Billy begin to explore their own growing feelings for each other. Their sex scenes are played for some wry humor; Anderson has been an LGBTQ+ icon for decades, since her days on The X-Files. But there’s also a genuine warmth and tenderness here that builds on the actors’ natural chemistry. Both characters, it turns out, have had their own physical and psychological hang-ups about sex, and the movie’s most bracing element is the way it lets them confront those issues together. In Kris’ case, that means exploring the voyeuristic and violent fantasies that drew her to the Camp Miasma movies in the first place. There’s a sly paradox at play here that I think more than a few horror aficionados will relate to: a boudoir slathered in blood can suddenly become the safest of spaces.

Schoenbrun is a madly ambitious talent, deconstructing the nature of genre one moment and channeling an uneasy Lynchian mood the next. At times, they run the risk of stretching the film’s many, many ideas past the point of redundancy. And there’s one set-piece — a killing spree from Camp Miasma, ironically set to a hit ’90s song — that for many will be the movie’s gory highlight, though I checked out of it pretty early on. Perhaps I was impatient to get back to Kris and Billy, two characters that Schoenbrun and the actors clearly love to pieces. It’s the highest compliment I can pay Einbinder and Anderson that somewhere out there, their performances are already captivating a new generation of pop-culture obsessives.

Lifestyle

L.A. Affairs: My egg-freezing hormones pushed me toward a wedding I didn’t even want

Published

7 hours ago

August 14, 2026

Press Room

L.A. Affairs: My egg-freezing hormones pushed me toward a wedding I didn’t even want

In June, while prepping for an egg-freezing procedure, I was hopped up like a chicken on hormones and I was crying about everything: I wanted babies immediately, my cat got angry with me, I wanted to solve all of my boyfriend’s childhood trauma, I missed my mom …

Annie, my best friend, decided to get me out of the house. As we thrifted in Los Feliz, we found a gorgeous, ivory, vintage dress that either gave pilgrim vibes or cool courthouse wedding dress chic.

My estrogen-soaked brain latched onto the latter. Mind you, I am divorced and don’t want to get married again. But shelling out $85 cash for this perfect, pilgrim/courthouse dress was the only right decision in that moment.

“Please don’t do that to Graham,” Annie said, knowing about my boyfriend’s and my decision around marriage and clearly disapproving of the style of the dress.

But it was too late. My eyes and heart inflated with this glittery new idea, already imagining a beaded dress underneath my new courthouse fit that I would strip off for a sexy reveal right after the four-person ceremony and just before we went dancing downtown with all our friends.

“Too late,” I said grinning back, my joy as oversize as my new dress.

Afterward, I wanted to walk to Figaro Bistrot, the French restaurant down the way, for a celebratory glass of wine.

“I don’t endorse this,” Annie said, referring to my purchase and my drinking wine while on the hormone injections.

“My kids will just grow up to love wine a bit more!” I said, giddy to have a break from home and the tornado of emotions that had been haunting me all day.

Fortunately, she let me have only a couple sips. We sat and chatted about marriage, my possibly newfound feelings around it, her separation from her own husband, and dear God, how insufferable the L.A. heat wave was becoming.

We sauntered over to a sushi dinner at Roji Sushi (I was on hormone shots, not pregnant!) and ended the night shortly thereafter. A perfect girls’ afternoon.

I fell asleep that night curious about my shifting feelings around marriage. Was it just the hormones? Was it real? And if so, what would this mean to my angel boyfriend whom I deeply loved, but had mutually bonded with over not wanting marriage?

Our friends were always surprised at our distaste for nuptials. To them, it seemed like the next natural step for two people so in love, but it always made perfect sense to us.

My divorce had unfolded five years prior, and Graham was a child of divorce. Neither of us felt particularly protected by the law of marriage, and both of us had trauma around the crumbling reality of it.

I knew I’d never again want to put someone I loved in the position of having to go through an extensive legal process simply because we realized we weren’t each other’s person. I knew from experience that could take years to find out.

Graham knew that saying forever didn’t necessarily mean forever, and that the result of that promise snapping could break a family irreparably.

Neither of us were interested in bringing the law into our sacred love, which was charged with more laughter and sweetness than, I think, either of us had imagined possible for ourselves.

And yet I now had a wedding dress in my closet. What did this mean?

I slipped out of bed to peer into the brown bag holding my new undercover possession when I suddenly realized I didn’t remember bringing the bag home.

In fact, I definitely did not have it.

The only place I would have put it was in my coat closet behind my other old wedding dress that I still needed to sell, and it definitely was not there. A panic flushed through me.

Did Graham find it? Did I lose it? Maybe it was just in Annie’s car. Did I have it when we went for sushi? I didn’t remember having it there. Did I drop it on the sidewalk?

I had no idea where my precious dress was.

I started sobbing, losing my idea of a new marriage before I could even fully conjure it again.

“It’s just the shots!” I told myself. “You don’t want to get married. You already decided that. You bought baby clothes the last time you froze your eggs. This is just your new iteration of that. Losing this dress is the universe telling you something. It’s time to go to sleep. You don’t want to get married.”

Shortly after my egg-freezing procedure, Graham and I went to Europe for a month. While meeting his family, while sipping wine in front of the Eiffel Tower, while feeling the bend of his body curl into mine at night, I wondered where my dress was. Was she lonely? Did someone else find her? Maybe she was meant to adorn someone else for some other occasion. Maybe she wasn’t meant to be mine.

Everyone thought Graham was going to propose in Paris. We laughed, knowing it wasn’t our goal. It wasn’t! And yet when we got back, I wondered if there was any hope of finding my dress. It had been over a month, and I couldn’t imagine someone wouldn’t steal such a beautiful piece if found. (But Annie could.)

I drove to Los Feliz intent on success. I walked from Skylight Books to Roji Sushi and the Little Knittery to Figaro. I gave the staff at each of them my sob story, lamenting over my lost wedding dress. I couldn’t even blame the hormones for making me act like this. I really wanted to find my dress.

When I got to Figaro, the last place to look on my list, I burst out crying. Did I really want to get married?

The poor server desperately dug for his life in the lost and found cabinet. Between my sobs and his sighs, the other servers tucked past, wondering what was happening but not really wanting to deal with the crazy person watching their co-worker badger-dig into the bowels of this cabinet.

There came a point where it felt like the polite thing to do was say, “Well, thank you so much for looking! It clearly isn’t here, and that’s OK. I appreciate you trying.”

But I couldn’t. I watched him dig. And dig. I sniffled. He dug. When suddenly, from the depths of this cave, he pulled out a very crumpled, brown paper bag with soft, ivory fabric peaking out between the twine handles. “It wouldn’t be this small would —”

“Oh my God, you found it!”

I leaped at the poor guy with a desperate relief deeply unwarranted for this situation. He shriveled away like my cats do when I smother them. I’m pretty sure my tears soaked his shoulder blade.

I sang along to Hilary Duff’s new album “Luck… or Something” all the way home, and carefully and lovingly, I tucked the brown bag holding my beloved dress into my coat closet, safely behind my other old wedding dress. For some reason, this felt right.

“Why were you in Los Feliz today?” Graham asked me later that afternoon. We share locations, and I told him I’d be home. Busted.

“Oh, I just lost something.” I didn’t have any story prepared.

“Oh, when? Did you find it?”

“Yeah, when I was out with Annie before Europe. Just a dress I thrifted. I left it at a cafe by accident, but they had it, thank goodness.”

“Oh, that’s lucky, baby! I’m so glad they had it.”

“Me too.”

My insides squirmed. I never lie to Graham.

“Well, that was a good thing for today!” he cheered. “Nice when things like that happen.”

He had no idea how nice!

I fell asleep much more peacefully that night, knowing I found my dress. The universe couldn’t steal my new notions. They were mine to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, from America to Europe, to ponder and to probably (necessarily) share with Graham sometime in the near future.

The author is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She’s on Instagram: @ashanoeliyer.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Lifestyle

People are struggling financially. Even on TV. : It’s Been a Minute

Published

18 hours ago

August 14, 2026

Press Room

People are struggling financially. Even on TV. : It’s Been a Minute

Welcome to the age of ‘Broke TV.’

It seems like the days of prestige TV shows about the wealthy elite have been replaced by the vocal majority: the downwardly mobile.

New Yorker TV critic, Inkoo Kang, noticed that her favorite shows so far this year all focused – in some respect – on the people whose lives have been financially squeezed beyond recognition by the very elite we used to enjoy watching.

Building resentment about the shrinking middle class, a hopeless job market, and few political pathways towards change has made our entertainment reflect a devastating reality back to us. Inkoo joins the show to break down how we got to this point and the fine line between entertainment and catharsis on screen.

You can read Inkoo’s article, ‘Welcome to the Age of Broke TV’, here.

Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.

This episode was produced by Alexis Williams. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.