Exploring Soulfulness through Mind-Body Practice

Shelly Harrell is the director of the Culture, Wisdom, and Resilience Lab, a hub for meditation, wellness, and resilience resources that are soul-centered, psychology-informed, and inspired by the wisdom of the African diaspora. Dr. Harrell created Soulfulness as an approach to healing and wellness practices, as well as an orientation to mind-body and contemplative practices that center contact with our deep, interconnected, and embodied inner aliveness as a healing resource. In the Soulfulness approach, cultural dimensions of healing are explored with particular attention to the wisdom and spirituality of Africa and the African diaspora. 

Join Dr. Harrell for a workshop exploring Soulfulness as an integrative approach to enhance and optimize your overall well-being through practices that touch and express soul. The approach and its corresponding practices are all about contacting and expressing your interconnected inner aliveness in the service of personal and collective healing, liberation, and transformative change. Through engaging with Soulfulness, participants can work to make the shift from stressed out to energized within. 

In this workshop Dr. Harrell shares and demonstrates the principles and domains of the SOUL-Centered (Soulfulness-Oriented, Unitive, Liberatory) Practice Framework (SCP). Attendees are invited to engage with Soulfulness in ways that reflect the five SCP domains of Breath and Body, Inner Awareness and Attunement, Ubuntu Practices, Collective Wisdom Practices, and Expressive-Creative practices. Dr. Harrell also describes mindfulness through the Soulfulness lens, with particular attention given to liberation, the infusion of culture, and the use of music.  

Learn of the relevance of the SOUL-Centered approach for healing racial trauma and collective-historical oppression and the 5 D’s of oppression: disconnection, dehumanization, destruction, delusion, and disempowerment. The Soulfulness approach may be particularly resonant with BIPOC populations, as well as others who experience intersectional oppression. While Soulfulness was developed centering diasporic African cultural elements and the experience of oppression, healing principles relevant to our shared humanity and human suffering are embedded in the approach.  

This workshop is appropriate for wellness practitioners and students, as well as anyone interested in expanding their own healing practices. Guided meditations and reflective inquiry prompts will be included to facilitate experiential learning.


Dr. Shelly Harrell is Full Professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology where she directs the Culture, Wisdom, and Resilience lab. Her current work focuses on cultural dimensions of healing with an emphasis on mind-body and contemplative practices such as meditation and mindfulness. Most recently, she has offered “Soulfulness” as an approach to healing and wellness practices. Dr. Harrell has a long-standing focus on the development of culturally responsive psychological interventions. This includes attention to sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of mental health, racial stress and trauma, liberation psychology, resilience-oriented interventions, collective and cultural wisdom, wellness and well-being among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), pan-African/Black psychology, and cultural competence in the training of mental health professionals. She is a practicing psychotherapist and has served as a consultant to numerous educational, social service, health care, and professional organizations on issues of culture and diversity for over 30 years.