January 14, 2026 • 40 mins
On this episode of In Service Of, Annahstasia sits down with Sage Bava to talk about her new album Tether and the way her deeply soulful sound has taken shape through years of writing, reflection, and devotion to the song.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Such an honor to talk to you today, Anastasia. I've
been such a fan of you for many years and
seeing you birth Teather into the world has been amazing.
You've played this music for many years all over the world.
Has there been surprising moments playing the music in different
spaces for different cultures that you have found surprising and
(00:31):
have learned from in your own journey?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Ah?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Yeah, I mean a few things. I think what I've
noticed is that.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
The vulnerability and spaciousness of my music, especially when I
performed solo, sometimes takes people.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
A little bit by surprise in terms.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Of maybe they were especially earlier on in my touring career,
just showing up to the places that were more so
like social clubs or coffeehouses, and like entering spaces where
people expect to be maybe entertained. But I wouldn't say
(01:14):
that my music is entertaining. I think that it is.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
An experience that you sit into.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
It's more meditative, it's more experiential. It's definitely not meant
to distract you or take you out of your body.
It's meant to bring you back into your body. So
I think across cultures, I've noticed like a different in
difference in reaction with being the one to bring that
(01:45):
challenge to people. Some people see it as a challenge
to sit with that, and some people really really welcome it,
depending on their relationship with live music and their relationship
with being like out socially and being vulnerable in public.
(02:05):
And I've seen people from all age ranges and backgrounds
show up for the shows and cry, or sit down
on the floor in a room of standing people, or
start to move their body. And I think that's the
most beautiful aspect, is that there doesn't seem to be
(02:26):
one type of person only in terms of race, creed, ethnicity,
place that they're from that.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Gravitates towards the music.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
It's it feels very universal, like it reaches what it
needs to reach at that time.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
It's so fascinating. Your music feels really tapped into this
collective conscience what we're craving right now as we go
into this disparity of tech and innovation and soul and silence,
and it fuels really connected to this lineage of artists
that worked tiresly to amplify soul. This podcast is called
(03:11):
in service of and being in service of the music,
I think is a whole task within itself, and you
are definitely an artist leading that right now, if you
were to boil down the messaging of your music, what
would you say that you're in service of.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
M I would say that I'm in service of our
shared humanity and in service of reminding people to return
to their hearts, return to their humanity.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Could you talk about finding that sound within yourself, going
back to your earlier work Summer Madness and Sacred Bowl,
to Power and minas the Is this really profound shift?
Your relationship to the acoustic guitar is so prominent. Could
you talk about when that happened for you, how that
happened for you?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, I think because of my history with the music
industry and how I became a musician, there.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Was a long part of my career.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Where I was chasing this ambiguous desire to I wasn't
even sure what I was chasing.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
It was more that everybody else outside.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Of me was like, these are the things that indicate
success in the music industry. If you have the multimillion
dollar deal, if you have the fame, if you have
the access, and the way that you get there is
by making commercial music, by writing good.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Hooks, that was like the environment that I was that
I was in.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Musically very industry for and I was finding it hard
to reconcile the person that I.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Was and the writer that I was with that world.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And I think that Summer Madness and Sacred Bull were
like those two worlds butting heads, and there wasn't for
me at least like it's cool music. I'm glad that
I made it, but it wasn't. It was there was
a dissonance in it spiritually and in my spirit.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
So in my soul, like.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Where the voice that was on that track wasn't connecting
to like the mission that I felt like I was
on as a musician. And I couldn't find words for
that dynamic in the rooms that I was in because
everybody that I was with was like.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Oh, the production is so cool.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
We should do more producer projects because that was their world,
that was their whole thing. They just loved cool sounds,
and I was searching for something like more. I was like, yeah,
I mean, we can all make cool sounds, but like
there's a there's a gravity that I'm looking for that
I don't feel like is being nurtured here. And even
(06:34):
the spaciousness for my voice. I was always struggling with
producers for them to give me more space in the
track to just perform instead of filling it with all
sorts of tricks and bits and bobs, and within the
hustle and bustle of that of that particular mission of
(06:57):
trying to like make it in the industry, trying to
find some level of success and security, just so I
could get to a place ironically where I would have
artistic control, where I would have the control to be like, Okay,
I want to be in a studio.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
With a live band and I want them to play this.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It was like I was trying to go and make produce,
producer based music to be able to get to the
place where i'd have a budget to make live music,
and everybody around me was saying like, oh, it's too
expensive to track live. We don't have the we don't
have the budget, we don't have the studio. Were we
didn't you know, we were broke kids making music on
(07:38):
a laptop in a tiny room.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Like we were doing what we.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Could what we had, and we did a lot. And
the realities of tracking live or there's just physical realities
to it. You need actual physical space, and you need
to isolate the drums, you need to there's things, And
COVID happened right at this juncture where in twenty nineteen,
(08:06):
I went on tour with Lenny Kravitz and I opened
for him in Europe with Sacred Bowl, and I brought
I was able to bring a six piece band with me,
and so I re did all of the Sacred Bull
songs live and live arrangement, and it completely changed the
(08:31):
dynamics of the record. It made me fall in love
with the record again, because before I was like, eh,
it's like I don't really love it, but let's put
it out and doing it in a live rendition. It
had room to breathe and grow and change and shift
with me as we were doing this run of shows,
and it affirmed for me that I was right. It
(08:53):
was like, Okay, now I know, no matter what I do,
I have to prioritize the humaness of a real musician
in the room playing together with me. I don't know
how I'm going to do it. I don't know where
I'm going to find the money, I don't know where
I'm going.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
To find the space.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
But I just would rather not be in studios if
I'm not doing that. So that shifted my mindset. And
when I came back to Los Angeles, I was.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Having all these meetings with all these managers, and they
were all asking me this question of like, oh, what
are you doing next? And it was like I.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Was burnt out, I was exhausted, I was in debt
from the tour. I didn't have them what's next, honestly,
And so when COVID came, it was kind of at
the right exact moment.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
It was terrifying as it was, as disruptive as it was,
as tragic as it was.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
It came at this moment where like I didn't know
where else to go. I was completely stuck anyway, and
so everything pausing was this weird blessing because there.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Was no expectations on any of us.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Everybody was just just stale and in that staying home,
you know, I'm sitting in my room, in my acoustic
guitar that's been gathering dust for the past three years
while I've been making electric Doll music is staring back
at me, and I'm like, damn, like we used to
(10:33):
be so tight, Like what happened?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
You know? I've picked up I've picked up that guitar,
like for the first time really in like five years,
and I just started reacquainting or reacquainting myself with it.
And at first I was playing some folk standards Cinnerman,
nine hundred miles, Oh Dear, what can the matter be?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Just the classics and singing along to them. And I
remember this dream that I had when I started making music.
It's like I just wanted to make a folk record,
Like at eighteen when I first signed my recording deal
or seventeen, I wanted to make a folk record. But
at the time, there wasn't much room for black girls
(11:26):
and folk in the genre of folk.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
If you can believe that, it.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Was just very if you're black, you do R and B,
like even in twenty what year was that? Twenty thirteen
wasn't that long ago, But so much as has shifted,
thankfully for the better, where people realize that genre is
made up and a lot of it is racially categorized.
(11:55):
So I couldn't make that record at that time with
the label that I was.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
With, and.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I had this stimulus check I had all this time,
and I was getting back into my musicianship, and I
was like, well.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I mean we might all die. We don't know if
this is a bolo. We don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
We didn't know anything about COVID at the time. We
didn't know how bad it really was going to be
and if we were all going to just die in
a supervirus. So the feeling of like I got to
do what I'm here to do now, like this is
a make or break we might not be here tomorrow,
and energy. I was like, I'm making this folk record,
(12:37):
and you know, we got in the studio, I'm messed
up in track that in tract Revival, And it's called
revival because it was me returning to music in the
way that I was originally drawn too music back when
I started writing at sixteen fifteen. It was just me
(12:58):
in a room with a bunch of people who I
love to play with, and I teaching them the songs
that I've written and us discussing arrangements together and tracking
it one take at a time, and I found joy again.
And I also found spaciousness and humanness within the music.
(13:22):
And it felt like, finally, like the clouds breaking and
the sun peeking through, like the voice that I've been
given in this life had a chance to be heard
in the right context, and it was a context that
I made for myself, which felt very affirming after like
(13:43):
such a long time of people telling me what to.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Do with this voice that I'd been given.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, so that's how I got to this arena of music.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
It's kind of like a return to self. Really. The
rest of it was a very big diversion.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Yeah, what a remarkable story. And thank you for doing
that work, because I think there's something so necessary about
the artists doing that work and others being able to
benefit from that work too. Whenever I listen to you,
I feel more connected to a deeper sense of my
(14:23):
own self through the work that you did for your music.
So it's really a gift that you give everyone, especially
when it feels like you're speaking the language that I
am desiring to speak. You know, it's deeper than language.
It's deeper than like you said, genres made up. Language
(14:46):
is made up. One of my mantras is we are nature,
and the more we sever ourselves, the more we harm.
And I love a lot of the things that you
talk about. I heard this quote the songs come to
me expressed. I believe like spirit, and also I meet
every song like a wild animal. I don't try detainment
or polish it too much, encapsulating this feeling that I have.
(15:10):
Could you talk about how that manifests, how you meet
that wild animal and capture it, because it's such a
difficult process to meet the song and then have it
be captured.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yeah, it is. Actually there's a lot of.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Skill that you start to hone in that window. It
feels like there's it's like trying to trying to get
water from one side to the other with just your
hands sometimes And I'd say that because I'm actually in
(15:53):
the other side of that process now in terms of
the ricarity of being a song writer, Like there are
windows of time when when the stories come through so
easily and your only job is to remain childlike and
(16:14):
to remain open enough to not judge what is coming
through and to welcome it like a stranger in your
home and in that sense, have the best the best
case scenario in your head in that interaction, Like there's
(16:34):
a lot of trust there between you and what's been
delivered from wherever songs come from, and you are the
one who is delivered to and it's your job to
to try and interpret that story well. So your performance
(16:54):
or intonation to the development of the of the melody,
and so you're kind of in this negotiation, but there's
a playfulness and there's a joy, and there's also no
expectation that it stays the same, that it shifts. It's
like you've just been given this raw ball of energy
(17:17):
and it's like so precious and new. It's before it's
even become life yet, and it's your job to mold
it into a form that's a little bit more stable
so that it can last in this world for some time.
That's how I see music, because it's not physical in
their sense. It's just it's sounds, so it's not like
(17:38):
you're seeing it, but you are wielding energy, and the
only way to wield energy is to have a place
in your mind where you can sculpt it with something
less material than hands. So it's like, what's more material
(18:10):
than hand?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
It is your.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Intention, it's it's it's the messages and the frequencies that
you are living within. So it's like sometimes when when
tragic things happen, the things that come to you creatively
are if the tragic things happen, but your mindset is
(18:32):
that everything is going to be Okay. Then the thing
that's happening in your mind is you're filtering all of
your tragedy through this mindset of where's the beauty in
this tragedy? Yeah, So you're wielding energy with with your
intention and you're filtering it through whatever hope you're holding
(18:55):
and whatever outcome you want to see.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
And while I was.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Working on tether, there's a lot of lessons being learned
and lessons.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Being learned the hard way.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
So I was in a lot of pain, emotionally and
physically sick all the time.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
And I was filtering a lot of life through this.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Lens of like why why is happening to me in
this way? But I was kind of removed from it,
as if I was like a scientist, Like what am
I trying? What am I meant to learn here? Like
all of this pain is happening, there's like wave after
wave after wave after wave, and it keeps running into
(19:49):
myself and these and these patterns. But underneath all of it,
I felt this like frequency or just it was like
a palpable. It's like sun on your skin, this feeling
of love, like a universal type of love that's just
(20:12):
like everything will be okay.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Because everything is love.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Love is everything, as Pharaoh Cender's perfectly some, love is everything.
And if you find it within yourself to be able
to navigate back through all of the other human emotions
back to love, there's always more to extract, there's always
more to grow from. And so even though all this
(20:40):
stuff was happening, it was like I had this immense
compassion for myself and also everybody else involved, and sometimes
made it very hard to create boundaries and to leave
people behind and to know how to stand out for myself.
But then on the other hand, it was what allowed
(21:01):
me to write those songs from that place. So like,
even when there's songs in Tether about heartbreak or feeling
feeling lost, feeling hurt, feeling confused, feeling betrayed, there's what
shines through is this like acknowledgment that it's all a
(21:25):
part of one larger experience of being human. And when
those songs came to me, they came to me most
of the time fully formed or mostly formed, and I
lived with them throughout time years. In this case, because
(21:48):
it's my first album, I had the luxury of like
taking as much time as I wanted.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
I really took like technically eight years to make this album.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Three and four of those years actively writing these songs,
actively living with them, actively performing them, actively wielding them
into something very refined based on my taste, based on
everything that I've studied. But now that I'm done with
that album and that process and that four year long
(22:22):
search and honing and execution phase, I'm now in this
place of gathering so much information again and feeling all
those ways of emotion and also feeling very numb.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Because of how much information that I'm taking in.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
And that's a scary place as a songwriter when you
feel numb, because when you feel numb, you don't have
anything to say. You don't have an opinion about anything,
because not thing's reaching you know, thing's touching you.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
You just set the shore watching everything go on.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And that objective place is good in moderation, but if
you stay there too long, that's where.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
You lose connection with the spirit.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I think unfortunately, her job as artist is to constantly
be in the throes of feeling what everybody's feeling. It's
our job to remind everybody that you cannot become numb,
because when you become numb, the powers that be They
(23:33):
win in getting away with the shit that they're up to,
the ship that they're doing, the ways that they want
to make it worse, make life harder, create more scarcity,
create more suffering, create more poverty, create more death, more war.
(23:54):
Those happen when we are apathetic and numb and watching
and not doing anything, and it's so easy to become distracted.
It's so easy to become numb because we're being constantly
fed so much information. But you're like, you're disciplined. I
(24:17):
guess to answer your question in the manifestation and the
intention of being a songwriter, your discipline is to have
the strength and the bravery to dive back in.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
To the emotion, to the pain, to the.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Hard things, to facing hard facts, to looking at the
crises that are upon us, and actually sitting with how
that feels in your body, and giving yourself.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
The space to.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Not only think about how it makes you feel, but
how it makes the people who are in the thick
of it feel, and the people who are at the
very top looking down.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Laughing at all of us feel.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
You're trying to capture all of that, and you're trying
to contense it all into some form of timelessness and truth.
I think that's what makes a good song is when
it's why we always return back to Nina Simone's covers.
She picked songs that have such a universal truth. Or
(25:26):
if you look back at any of James Baldwin's interviews,
they're still relevant today because he was speaking truth. Truth
doesn't have an expiration date. A truth is a truth,
and when you're able to tap into a truth as
an artist, it's a brave thing because it's something that
(25:49):
has potential consequences. It had consequences for those artists and
it has consequences for artists now because when you.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Speak truth to power power power succeeds.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Off of the narratives that they spend, and truth dissolves
those narratives. And most of the work that they do
is so that we don't all collectivize. So any time
that the narrative can be shifted, anytime there can be
(26:26):
narrative warfare on our side against that side, we get
closer to collectivizing, to become a community, to working as
a unit, because there's many more of us than there
are of them, of the rich and the powerful, and
the oligarchs, and the people who think of this planet
(26:46):
is disposable or temporary and not our universal home, not
the place that we ceeded from and will continue to
seed from.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Even after the apocalypse happens, we might.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Evolve again to do all of this all over again,
and ideally we don't have to fuck around and find out.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Ideally need evolved now.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And you know, get back into the wave of the
rest of nature, because the rest of nature is working symbiotically.
We're the only ones that are that are sitting outside
of it thinking that we're special.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
We're not special. That's very horrible.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
I hope you read a book very soon and I'll
just hear all the things. You are an amazing philosopher
as well. I love it. There's such an amazing sense
of ritual in your being, in your music, and obviously
right now we need community, we need spiritual touchstones because
(27:57):
we're getting further from it. But it almost feels like
as we get further from it, we get closer because
we realize it's so necessary for your own ritual. What
would you say that you've discovered that helped you tap
into your spiritual self and that you wish that others
(28:22):
would would have the tools and the knowledge to be
able to do that for themselves.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
For me, moving back into my body has been a
very important aspect of maintaining my spiritual connection, and the
way that I do that in particular is through dance movement.
And it's not like genre. Dance is not hip hop
(28:55):
dance or any particular ballet or any tular style. It's
literally just like you don't even need sound for it.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
It's just closing your eyes and moving your limbs around
and feeling that, feeling your energy and your nerves extend,
and your brain telling your body to do those things,
and zeroing in.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
In in into the minutia of it what it is
to be in a human body and experience being alive.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
I find that there's two ways to rage spirit. You
can either go infinitely up and out, or you can
go infinitely in. Everything is fractal, so you can go
either direction. As individuals and the perception of individual the
(29:56):
closest way you can get to the one is it
through the going in. It's the easiest thing for us
to conceptualize. I think, so the farther.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
In you go, the more you realize that your energy
and you're just containing it.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
You're contemporarily contained in this in this meat suit, and you're.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Walking around this field of energy.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Walking around that field of energy is only a sheet
of atoms separated from the air or this table, and
the reality of that you exist within, that you can touch,
and that you can move around, only exists because of
the opposition between the atoms in my hand and atoms
(30:48):
and the glass and the atoms in the wood. The
only reason I can't go through this is because of
such a tiny, minuscule interaction on a quantum level between
two atoms or obviously millions and billions of atoms, but
(31:08):
all the way down just one, but at that level,
if you were to be able to zoom in at
that level and look at all of those atoms moving around,
having their different energy states buzzing around, none of them
are doing anything differently really than the rest of them.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
And that's where you get back to the one. But
for some reason, for me coming into my I'm not
somebody that could like sit and meditate.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
I always felt bad about that. I was like, why damn,
why can't I meditate that? As such a busy mind,
mine is always going and it's quieting. Thankfully with age,
I think that I'm just like worried about less things,
and as I've realized that with time that I have
the capacity to.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Handle most things that will come my way.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
And if I can't, you know, you die, and you're
you're done, So it's fine. Everything else you're gonna survive,
so you might as well just just stop worrying about it.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
But I used to have.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Very a very, very very busy mind, and so I
could never meditate, and I would sit in silence and
I would try and quiet my mind and I would
try and do all the exercises, and I just couldn't
do it.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
It was constant, like.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
The thoughts are clouds thing, that whole thing. My sky
was full of clouds and I couldn't see the sun.
So at first I just started coming and I didn't
know at that time that was actually a practice called
bee breath bramani pron I am what I learned it
(33:00):
was called later, and I would just hum to silence
the thoughts. But that didn't really get me there because
I felt like ahead floating above a body.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
And then I just naturally was like, all right, I
trying to shape this off. And then it became this
thing where I'm like okay, now moving. And there's a
form of dance that I was in a club for
a local free community club called Gaga, and it was
developed by this guy in.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Israel, Palestine who he grew up in Israel and Israel side.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Palistine and.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
He moved I think back to New York and he
was he was a dancer and he injured himself badly
and he developed this uh process called Gaga to help
rehabilitate his muscles to be able to come back to
professional dance. Because for dancers, if they get one bad injury,
(34:18):
you're you're done. But he was able to rehabilitate himself
to a place of being able to dance professionally again.
So he gained a lot of notoriety in this. But
the whole ethos of the practice is just.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Focusing in on your body enough that you can work
with what's going on with what with what's there.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
So if you if you have a sprained arm, let's
let's explore the the other ways that you can move
that arm in ways that don't harm you. What can
you do with it that's interesting? How can you use
your creativity to make this injury into a new avenue
(35:10):
for expression, or this disability for a new avenue for expression,
or if you have a differently able body, what can
you do that I can't do that that can be
creative and cool. And so what it does for you
mentally is it allows you to move through problems in
the same way, to take everything that is a mental
(35:33):
illusion and bring it into your body and.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Say, Okay, how do I move through conflict? Where? How
does that feel in my body? Oh? It feels tight
in my chest? Okay, what if I just open it?
What if I try and open my chest as much
as possible?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I mean, what if I take that thought experiment and
I see, like, what if it feel like to separate
each of my rib cages out?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
And how would I express that in movement?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
What you're doing is you're taking it out of your
mind trap and you're filtering it through the physical body,
which is the only vessel that you have to experience
this temporary reality that we exist within. So that's the
tool I think that we should be using the most to.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Remember that we have.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
We have a least control over this little corner of
our universe and that beauty that we create in our
little corner of the universe. Reverberates out into the rest
of the universe, and it creates just a more beautiful
(36:47):
world if everybody does that. And for me doing that,
the movement brings me back to spirit and brings me
back to the reminder that there's so much to be
grateful for. There's so much gratitude in the way that
we maneuver through trials and tribulations in mountains and valleys.
(37:09):
And if you look out to nature, that's the second point.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Anytime I don't know, I.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Look to nature because nature knows so much more than
we know. And I look at how did how did
that tree push through the concrete? How did that little
tiny sprout manage to grow in the middle of Los Angeles?
And and what if edible?
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Like you, I discover things I've recently discovered, Like I
was feeling so untethered and like I don't have like
a garden, I don't have any I don't I needed
to put my hands in soil.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
And I was in Los Angeles and I was walking
around and I just had have my phone, and uh,
there's this field of weeds and I just question, I
wonder what those weeds are?
Speaker 3 (38:02):
And I took my phone out and a little plant
identify our app and I took a.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Picture, and I found out the entire field was full
of marshmallow root, which is completely edible.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Every part of the plant is edible.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
And I was thinking to myself, like, in the smog,
in the disgusting grime of this city, in the absence
of human ten human tendingness, the earth has provided nutrient
bounty here for free somehow. And it's it's a little
(38:39):
ecosystem where all these bugs and animals survive and and
take from and we can take from two and it
heals us. And that's happening without any sort of intervention.
So if that's happening without any sort of intervention, then
the shit that's going on in my life, maybe the
(39:01):
answer is to just wait and see what pops through,
what weeds.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
Come up, Maybe they're useful.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
So that's my long winded answer for where I think
I find wisdom and life.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
I love that my friends would, my close friends would
be like, who am I, sage, who am I? And
they would make fun of me because I'm always like
doing this with my body. But we all need to
do that more.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
It's so necessary.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
We should just like normalize people just in the middle
of the grocery store.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
You got to get in there. Sometimes you like you're removed.
Your spirits over here, your body's over here. It's like,
come back, come on, let's dance.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Back in Well, thank you. This has been such a pleasure.
I was such a fan of you, and now i'm
even more so. Oh my goodness, thank.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
You very much for having me. It's been a lovely conversation.
Mmm mm hmm.
Such an honor to talk to you today, Anastasia. I've
been such a fan of you for many years and
seeing you birth Teather into the world has been amazing.
You've played this music for many years all over the world.
Has there been surprising moments playing the music in different
spaces for different cultures that you have found surprising and
(00:31):
have learned from in your own journey?
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Ah?
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Yeah, I mean a few things. I think what I've
noticed is that.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
The vulnerability and spaciousness of my music, especially when I
performed solo, sometimes takes people.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
A little bit by surprise in terms.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Of maybe they were especially earlier on in my touring career,
just showing up to the places that were more so
like social clubs or coffeehouses, and like entering spaces where
people expect to be maybe entertained. But I wouldn't say
(01:14):
that my music is entertaining. I think that it is.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
An experience that you sit into.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
It's more meditative, it's more experiential. It's definitely not meant
to distract you or take you out of your body.
It's meant to bring you back into your body. So
I think across cultures, I've noticed like a different in
difference in reaction with being the one to bring that
(01:45):
challenge to people. Some people see it as a challenge
to sit with that, and some people really really welcome it,
depending on their relationship with live music and their relationship
with being like out socially and being vulnerable in public.
(02:05):
And I've seen people from all age ranges and backgrounds
show up for the shows and cry, or sit down
on the floor in a room of standing people, or
start to move their body. And I think that's the
most beautiful aspect, is that there doesn't seem to be
(02:26):
one type of person only in terms of race, creed, ethnicity,
place that they're from that.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Gravitates towards the music.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
It's it feels very universal, like it reaches what it
needs to reach at that time.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
It's so fascinating. Your music feels really tapped into this
collective conscience what we're craving right now as we go
into this disparity of tech and innovation and soul and silence,
and it fuels really connected to this lineage of artists
that worked tiresly to amplify soul. This podcast is called
(03:11):
in service of and being in service of the music,
I think is a whole task within itself, and you
are definitely an artist leading that right now, if you
were to boil down the messaging of your music, what
would you say that you're in service of.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
M I would say that I'm in service of our
shared humanity and in service of reminding people to return
to their hearts, return to their humanity.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Could you talk about finding that sound within yourself, going
back to your earlier work Summer Madness and Sacred Bowl,
to Power and minas the Is this really profound shift?
Your relationship to the acoustic guitar is so prominent. Could
you talk about when that happened for you, how that
happened for you?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, I think because of my history with the music
industry and how I became a musician, there.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Was a long part of my career.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Where I was chasing this ambiguous desire to I wasn't
even sure what I was chasing.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
It was more that everybody else outside.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Of me was like, these are the things that indicate
success in the music industry. If you have the multimillion
dollar deal, if you have the fame, if you have
the access, and the way that you get there is
by making commercial music, by writing good.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Hooks, that was like the environment that I was that
I was in.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Musically very industry for and I was finding it hard
to reconcile the person that I.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Was and the writer that I was with that world.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
And I think that Summer Madness and Sacred Bull were
like those two worlds butting heads, and there wasn't for
me at least like it's cool music. I'm glad that
I made it, but it wasn't. It was there was
a dissonance in it spiritually and in my spirit.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
So in my soul, like.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Where the voice that was on that track wasn't connecting
to like the mission that I felt like I was
on as a musician. And I couldn't find words for
that dynamic in the rooms that I was in because
everybody that I was with was like.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Oh, the production is so cool.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
We should do more producer projects because that was their world,
that was their whole thing. They just loved cool sounds,
and I was searching for something like more. I was like, yeah,
I mean, we can all make cool sounds, but like
there's a there's a gravity that I'm looking for that
I don't feel like is being nurtured here. And even
(06:34):
the spaciousness for my voice. I was always struggling with
producers for them to give me more space in the
track to just perform instead of filling it with all
sorts of tricks and bits and bobs, and within the
hustle and bustle of that of that particular mission of
(06:57):
trying to like make it in the industry, trying to
find some level of success and security, just so I
could get to a place ironically where I would have
artistic control, where I would have the control to be like, Okay,
I want to be in a studio.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
With a live band and I want them to play this.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It was like I was trying to go and make produce,
producer based music to be able to get to the
place where i'd have a budget to make live music,
and everybody around me was saying like, oh, it's too
expensive to track live. We don't have the we don't
have the budget, we don't have the studio. Were we
didn't you know, we were broke kids making music on
(07:38):
a laptop in a tiny room.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Like we were doing what we.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Could what we had, and we did a lot. And
the realities of tracking live or there's just physical realities
to it. You need actual physical space, and you need
to isolate the drums, you need to there's things, And
COVID happened right at this juncture where in twenty nineteen,
(08:06):
I went on tour with Lenny Kravitz and I opened
for him in Europe with Sacred Bowl, and I brought
I was able to bring a six piece band with me,
and so I re did all of the Sacred Bull
songs live and live arrangement, and it completely changed the
(08:31):
dynamics of the record. It made me fall in love
with the record again, because before I was like, eh,
it's like I don't really love it, but let's put
it out and doing it in a live rendition. It
had room to breathe and grow and change and shift
with me as we were doing this run of shows,
and it affirmed for me that I was right. It
(08:53):
was like, Okay, now I know, no matter what I do,
I have to prioritize the humaness of a real musician
in the room playing together with me. I don't know
how I'm going to do it. I don't know where
I'm going to find the money, I don't know where
I'm going.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
To find the space.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
But I just would rather not be in studios if
I'm not doing that. So that shifted my mindset. And
when I came back to Los Angeles, I was.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Having all these meetings with all these managers, and they
were all asking me this question of like, oh, what
are you doing next? And it was like I.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Was burnt out, I was exhausted, I was in debt
from the tour. I didn't have them what's next, honestly,
And so when COVID came, it was kind of at
the right exact moment.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
It was terrifying as it was, as disruptive as it was,
as tragic as it was.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
It came at this moment where like I didn't know
where else to go. I was completely stuck anyway, and
so everything pausing was this weird blessing because there.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Was no expectations on any of us.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Everybody was just just stale and in that staying home,
you know, I'm sitting in my room, in my acoustic
guitar that's been gathering dust for the past three years
while I've been making electric Doll music is staring back
at me, and I'm like, damn, like we used to
(10:33):
be so tight, Like what happened?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
You know? I've picked up I've picked up that guitar,
like for the first time really in like five years,
and I just started reacquainting or reacquainting myself with it.
And at first I was playing some folk standards Cinnerman,
nine hundred miles, Oh Dear, what can the matter be?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Just the classics and singing along to them. And I
remember this dream that I had when I started making music.
It's like I just wanted to make a folk record,
Like at eighteen when I first signed my recording deal
or seventeen, I wanted to make a folk record. But
at the time, there wasn't much room for black girls
(11:26):
and folk in the genre of folk.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
If you can believe that, it.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Was just very if you're black, you do R and B,
like even in twenty what year was that? Twenty thirteen
wasn't that long ago, But so much as has shifted,
thankfully for the better, where people realize that genre is
made up and a lot of it is racially categorized.
(11:55):
So I couldn't make that record at that time with
the label that I was.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
With, and.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I had this stimulus check I had all this time,
and I was getting back into my musicianship, and I
was like, well.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I mean we might all die. We don't know if
this is a bolo. We don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
We didn't know anything about COVID at the time. We
didn't know how bad it really was going to be
and if we were all going to just die in
a supervirus. So the feeling of like I got to
do what I'm here to do now, like this is
a make or break we might not be here tomorrow,
and energy. I was like, I'm making this folk record,
(12:37):
and you know, we got in the studio, I'm messed
up in track that in tract Revival, And it's called
revival because it was me returning to music in the
way that I was originally drawn too music back when
I started writing at sixteen fifteen. It was just me
(12:58):
in a room with a bunch of people who I
love to play with, and I teaching them the songs
that I've written and us discussing arrangements together and tracking
it one take at a time, and I found joy again.
And I also found spaciousness and humanness within the music.
(13:22):
And it felt like, finally, like the clouds breaking and
the sun peeking through, like the voice that I've been
given in this life had a chance to be heard
in the right context, and it was a context that
I made for myself, which felt very affirming after like
(13:43):
such a long time of people telling me what to.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Do with this voice that I'd been given.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yeah, so that's how I got to this arena of music.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
It's kind of like a return to self. Really. The
rest of it was a very big diversion.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Yeah, what a remarkable story. And thank you for doing
that work, because I think there's something so necessary about
the artists doing that work and others being able to
benefit from that work too. Whenever I listen to you,
I feel more connected to a deeper sense of my
(14:23):
own self through the work that you did for your music.
So it's really a gift that you give everyone, especially
when it feels like you're speaking the language that I
am desiring to speak. You know, it's deeper than language.
It's deeper than like you said, genres made up. Language
(14:46):
is made up. One of my mantras is we are nature,
and the more we sever ourselves, the more we harm.
And I love a lot of the things that you
talk about. I heard this quote the songs come to
me expressed. I believe like spirit, and also I meet
every song like a wild animal. I don't try detainment
or polish it too much, encapsulating this feeling that I have.
(15:10):
Could you talk about how that manifests, how you meet
that wild animal and capture it, because it's such a
difficult process to meet the song and then have it
be captured.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yeah, it is. Actually there's a lot of.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Skill that you start to hone in that window. It
feels like there's it's like trying to trying to get
water from one side to the other with just your
hands sometimes And I'd say that because I'm actually in
(15:53):
the other side of that process now in terms of
the ricarity of being a song writer, Like there are
windows of time when when the stories come through so
easily and your only job is to remain childlike and
(16:14):
to remain open enough to not judge what is coming
through and to welcome it like a stranger in your
home and in that sense, have the best the best
case scenario in your head in that interaction, Like there's
(16:34):
a lot of trust there between you and what's been
delivered from wherever songs come from, and you are the
one who is delivered to and it's your job to
to try and interpret that story well. So your performance
(16:54):
or intonation to the development of the of the melody,
and so you're kind of in this negotiation, but there's
a playfulness and there's a joy, and there's also no
expectation that it stays the same, that it shifts. It's
like you've just been given this raw ball of energy
(17:17):
and it's like so precious and new. It's before it's
even become life yet, and it's your job to mold
it into a form that's a little bit more stable
so that it can last in this world for some time.
That's how I see music, because it's not physical in
their sense. It's just it's sounds, so it's not like
(17:38):
you're seeing it, but you are wielding energy, and the
only way to wield energy is to have a place
in your mind where you can sculpt it with something
less material than hands. So it's like, what's more material
(18:10):
than hand?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
It is your.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Intention, it's it's it's the messages and the frequencies that
you are living within. So it's like sometimes when when
tragic things happen, the things that come to you creatively
are if the tragic things happen, but your mindset is
(18:32):
that everything is going to be Okay. Then the thing
that's happening in your mind is you're filtering all of
your tragedy through this mindset of where's the beauty in
this tragedy? Yeah, So you're wielding energy with with your
intention and you're filtering it through whatever hope you're holding
(18:55):
and whatever outcome you want to see.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
And while I was.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Working on tether, there's a lot of lessons being learned
and lessons.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Being learned the hard way.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
So I was in a lot of pain, emotionally and
physically sick all the time.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
And I was filtering a lot of life through this.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Lens of like why why is happening to me in
this way? But I was kind of removed from it,
as if I was like a scientist, Like what am
I trying? What am I meant to learn here? Like
all of this pain is happening, there's like wave after
wave after wave after wave, and it keeps running into
(19:49):
myself and these and these patterns. But underneath all of it,
I felt this like frequency or just it was like
a palpable. It's like sun on your skin, this feeling
of love, like a universal type of love that's just
(20:12):
like everything will be okay.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Because everything is love.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Love is everything, as Pharaoh Cender's perfectly some, love is everything.
And if you find it within yourself to be able
to navigate back through all of the other human emotions
back to love, there's always more to extract, there's always
more to grow from. And so even though all this
(20:40):
stuff was happening, it was like I had this immense
compassion for myself and also everybody else involved, and sometimes
made it very hard to create boundaries and to leave
people behind and to know how to stand out for myself.
But then on the other hand, it was what allowed
(21:01):
me to write those songs from that place. So like,
even when there's songs in Tether about heartbreak or feeling
feeling lost, feeling hurt, feeling confused, feeling betrayed, there's what
shines through is this like acknowledgment that it's all a
(21:25):
part of one larger experience of being human. And when
those songs came to me, they came to me most
of the time fully formed or mostly formed, and I
lived with them throughout time years. In this case, because
(21:48):
it's my first album, I had the luxury of like
taking as much time as I wanted.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
I really took like technically eight years to make this album.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Three and four of those years actively writing these songs,
actively living with them, actively performing them, actively wielding them
into something very refined based on my taste, based on
everything that I've studied. But now that I'm done with
that album and that process and that four year long
(22:22):
search and honing and execution phase, I'm now in this
place of gathering so much information again and feeling all
those ways of emotion and also feeling very numb.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Because of how much information that I'm taking in.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
And that's a scary place as a songwriter when you
feel numb, because when you feel numb, you don't have
anything to say. You don't have an opinion about anything,
because not thing's reaching you know, thing's touching you.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
You just set the shore watching everything go on.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And that objective place is good in moderation, but if
you stay there too long, that's where.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
You lose connection with the spirit.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
I think unfortunately, her job as artist is to constantly
be in the throes of feeling what everybody's feeling. It's
our job to remind everybody that you cannot become numb,
because when you become numb, the powers that be They
(23:33):
win in getting away with the shit that they're up to,
the ship that they're doing, the ways that they want
to make it worse, make life harder, create more scarcity,
create more suffering, create more poverty, create more death, more war.
(23:54):
Those happen when we are apathetic and numb and watching
and not doing anything, and it's so easy to become distracted.
It's so easy to become numb because we're being constantly
fed so much information. But you're like, you're disciplined. I
(24:17):
guess to answer your question in the manifestation and the
intention of being a songwriter, your discipline is to have
the strength and the bravery to dive back in.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
To the emotion, to the pain, to the.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Hard things, to facing hard facts, to looking at the
crises that are upon us, and actually sitting with how
that feels in your body, and giving yourself.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
The space to.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Not only think about how it makes you feel, but
how it makes the people who are in the thick
of it feel, and the people who are at the
very top looking down.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Laughing at all of us feel.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
You're trying to capture all of that, and you're trying
to contense it all into some form of timelessness and truth.
I think that's what makes a good song is when
it's why we always return back to Nina Simone's covers.
She picked songs that have such a universal truth. Or
(25:26):
if you look back at any of James Baldwin's interviews,
they're still relevant today because he was speaking truth. Truth
doesn't have an expiration date. A truth is a truth,
and when you're able to tap into a truth as
an artist, it's a brave thing because it's something that
(25:49):
has potential consequences. It had consequences for those artists and
it has consequences for artists now because when you.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Speak truth to power power power succeeds.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Off of the narratives that they spend, and truth dissolves
those narratives. And most of the work that they do
is so that we don't all collectivize. So any time
that the narrative can be shifted, anytime there can be
(26:26):
narrative warfare on our side against that side, we get
closer to collectivizing, to become a community, to working as
a unit, because there's many more of us than there
are of them, of the rich and the powerful, and
the oligarchs, and the people who think of this planet
(26:46):
is disposable or temporary and not our universal home, not
the place that we ceeded from and will continue to
seed from.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Even after the apocalypse happens, we might.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Evolve again to do all of this all over again,
and ideally we don't have to fuck around and find out.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Ideally need evolved now.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And you know, get back into the wave of the
rest of nature, because the rest of nature is working symbiotically.
We're the only ones that are that are sitting outside
of it thinking that we're special.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
We're not special. That's very horrible.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
I hope you read a book very soon and I'll
just hear all the things. You are an amazing philosopher
as well. I love it. There's such an amazing sense
of ritual in your being, in your music, and obviously
right now we need community, we need spiritual touchstones because
(27:57):
we're getting further from it. But it almost feels like
as we get further from it, we get closer because
we realize it's so necessary for your own ritual. What
would you say that you've discovered that helped you tap
into your spiritual self and that you wish that others
(28:22):
would would have the tools and the knowledge to be
able to do that for themselves.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
For me, moving back into my body has been a
very important aspect of maintaining my spiritual connection, and the
way that I do that in particular is through dance movement.
And it's not like genre. Dance is not hip hop
(28:55):
dance or any particular ballet or any tular style. It's
literally just like you don't even need sound for it.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
It's just closing your eyes and moving your limbs around
and feeling that, feeling your energy and your nerves extend,
and your brain telling your body to do those things,
and zeroing in.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
In in into the minutia of it what it is
to be in a human body and experience being alive.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
I find that there's two ways to rage spirit. You
can either go infinitely up and out, or you can
go infinitely in. Everything is fractal, so you can go
either direction. As individuals and the perception of individual the
(29:56):
closest way you can get to the one is it
through the going in. It's the easiest thing for us
to conceptualize. I think, so the farther.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
In you go, the more you realize that your energy
and you're just containing it.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
You're contemporarily contained in this in this meat suit, and you're.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Walking around this field of energy.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Walking around that field of energy is only a sheet
of atoms separated from the air or this table, and
the reality of that you exist within, that you can touch,
and that you can move around, only exists because of
the opposition between the atoms in my hand and atoms
(30:48):
and the glass and the atoms in the wood. The
only reason I can't go through this is because of
such a tiny, minuscule interaction on a quantum level between
two atoms or obviously millions and billions of atoms, but
(31:08):
all the way down just one, but at that level,
if you were to be able to zoom in at
that level and look at all of those atoms moving around,
having their different energy states buzzing around, none of them
are doing anything differently really than the rest of them.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
And that's where you get back to the one. But
for some reason, for me coming into my I'm not
somebody that could like sit and meditate.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
I always felt bad about that. I was like, why damn,
why can't I meditate that? As such a busy mind,
mine is always going and it's quieting. Thankfully with age,
I think that I'm just like worried about less things,
and as I've realized that with time that I have
the capacity to.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Handle most things that will come my way.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
And if I can't, you know, you die, and you're
you're done, So it's fine. Everything else you're gonna survive,
so you might as well just just stop worrying about it.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
But I used to have.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Very a very, very very busy mind, and so I
could never meditate, and I would sit in silence and
I would try and quiet my mind and I would
try and do all the exercises, and I just couldn't
do it.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
It was constant, like.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
The thoughts are clouds thing, that whole thing. My sky
was full of clouds and I couldn't see the sun.
So at first I just started coming and I didn't
know at that time that was actually a practice called
bee breath bramani pron I am what I learned it
(33:00):
was called later, and I would just hum to silence
the thoughts. But that didn't really get me there because
I felt like ahead floating above a body.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
And then I just naturally was like, all right, I
trying to shape this off. And then it became this
thing where I'm like okay, now moving. And there's a
form of dance that I was in a club for
a local free community club called Gaga, and it was
developed by this guy in.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Israel, Palestine who he grew up in Israel and Israel side.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
Palistine and.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
He moved I think back to New York and he
was he was a dancer and he injured himself badly
and he developed this uh process called Gaga to help
rehabilitate his muscles to be able to come back to
professional dance. Because for dancers, if they get one bad injury,
(34:18):
you're you're done. But he was able to rehabilitate himself
to a place of being able to dance professionally again.
So he gained a lot of notoriety in this. But
the whole ethos of the practice is just.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Focusing in on your body enough that you can work
with what's going on with what with what's there.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
So if you if you have a sprained arm, let's
let's explore the the other ways that you can move
that arm in ways that don't harm you. What can
you do with it that's interesting? How can you use
your creativity to make this injury into a new avenue
(35:10):
for expression, or this disability for a new avenue for expression,
or if you have a differently able body, what can
you do that I can't do that that can be
creative and cool. And so what it does for you
mentally is it allows you to move through problems in
the same way, to take everything that is a mental
(35:33):
illusion and bring it into your body and.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Say, Okay, how do I move through conflict? Where? How
does that feel in my body? Oh? It feels tight
in my chest? Okay, what if I just open it?
What if I try and open my chest as much
as possible?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I mean, what if I take that thought experiment and
I see, like, what if it feel like to separate
each of my rib cages out?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
And how would I express that in movement?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
What you're doing is you're taking it out of your
mind trap and you're filtering it through the physical body,
which is the only vessel that you have to experience
this temporary reality that we exist within. So that's the
tool I think that we should be using the most to.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Remember that we have.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
We have a least control over this little corner of
our universe and that beauty that we create in our
little corner of the universe. Reverberates out into the rest
of the universe, and it creates just a more beautiful
(36:47):
world if everybody does that. And for me doing that,
the movement brings me back to spirit and brings me
back to the reminder that there's so much to be
grateful for. There's so much gratitude in the way that
we maneuver through trials and tribulations in mountains and valleys.
(37:09):
And if you look out to nature, that's the second point.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Anytime I don't know, I.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Look to nature because nature knows so much more than
we know. And I look at how did how did
that tree push through the concrete? How did that little
tiny sprout manage to grow in the middle of Los Angeles?
And and what if edible?
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Like you, I discover things I've recently discovered, Like I
was feeling so untethered and like I don't have like
a garden, I don't have any I don't I needed
to put my hands in soil.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
And I was in Los Angeles and I was walking
around and I just had have my phone, and uh,
there's this field of weeds and I just question, I
wonder what those weeds are?
Speaker 3 (38:02):
And I took my phone out and a little plant
identify our app and I took a.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Picture, and I found out the entire field was full
of marshmallow root, which is completely edible.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Every part of the plant is edible.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
And I was thinking to myself, like, in the smog,
in the disgusting grime of this city, in the absence
of human ten human tendingness, the earth has provided nutrient
bounty here for free somehow. And it's it's a little
(38:39):
ecosystem where all these bugs and animals survive and and
take from and we can take from two and it
heals us. And that's happening without any sort of intervention.
So if that's happening without any sort of intervention, then
the shit that's going on in my life, maybe the
(39:01):
answer is to just wait and see what pops through,
what weeds.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
Come up, Maybe they're useful.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
So that's my long winded answer for where I think
I find wisdom and life.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
I love that my friends would, my close friends would
be like, who am I, sage, who am I? And
they would make fun of me because I'm always like
doing this with my body. But we all need to
do that more.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
It's so necessary.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
We should just like normalize people just in the middle
of the grocery store.
Speaker 3 (39:41):
You got to get in there. Sometimes you like you're removed.
Your spirits over here, your body's over here. It's like,
come back, come on, let's dance.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Back in Well, thank you. This has been such a pleasure.
I was such a fan of you, and now i'm
even more so. Oh my goodness, thank.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
You very much for having me. It's been a lovely conversation.
Mmm mm hmm.
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