Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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Hello, Sounds True friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is gina Breedlove. Let me tell you a little bit about gina. gina is a sound healer, an award-winning vocalist, composer, grief doula, actor and author from Brooklyn, New York. She created the program Vibration of Grace: Healing Through Sound, helping thousands of people worldwide rediscover and deepen their power. gina’s performance credits include The Lion King stage musical. As a recording artist, she’s created three original albums, and also tours performing her own work. With Sounds True, gina Breedlove is the author of a new book. It’s called The Vibration of Grace: Sound Healing Rituals for Liberation. gina, welcome.
gina Breedlove: Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s so good to see you, Tami.
TS: It’s so good to have a voice-meet-voice, as well as a fellow lover of the true sound of a human voice that’s in tune with itself and in tune with the world. Tell me, how did you become a sound healer? Tell me about that journey.
gB: Well, thank you. Thank you for the invitation. I began doing this work on my own body when I was very young. I didn’t think of it as sound healing. I just thought of it as my thing, something that I did to bring ease and to calm my spirit. In my home, there was so much grief, and it was a constantly unstable atmosphere. And I remember my first conscious memory of sounding into my body just to calm my breath, slow my heart rate, I was five years old. And it was an intrinsic knowing, I think, looking back. But also, I was guided by a being, a spirit, a presence that I have come to think of as Grace. And so sounding, humming, toning, singing to myself, holding my body while I did it, I think, I know is the reason why I’m sitting in front of you today, feeling whole and complete and able.
TS: Now, you mentioned this being called Grace. Is it fair to say, is Grace your spirit guide? Or how would you describe this presence you call Grace?
gB: My feelings about Grace, my idea of who Grace is has shifted somewhat over the years. From this present moment, I’ve come to think of Grace as something that is available as a spirit, a presence that is available to everyone. The presence of Grace, the possibility of Grace, of accessing Grace. But when I was a little girl, I thought of Grace as my personal guide, absolutely. Really, Tami, I didn’t distinguish Grace from the sound of my own voice, except that Grace’s voice was an instruction or guidance, was always very calm and clear, and sometimes full of technologies that I would not have a language for at 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years old.
And so that’s how I would distinguish, but it wasn’t something separate from me, the energetic. In my home, there was so much neglect going on. So also, that meant that no one was telling me that, “Hey, you’re crazy to be having conversations with this being.” Or “Oh, what you think you’re hearing is not real.” And so it afforded me this opportunity to have this relationship, this ongoing relationship with this presence that would bring rituals to me, around humming, around toning. And later on, as I got older, soul retrieval, pulling—these technologies that I would not know if it were not for Grace, because I didn’t have another teacher. Yes.
And so I started on my own body, and I was a musician. I am a musician, but chiefly, I was singing and I was writing songs, and I was touring with other artists. And I thought of my sound work as something that was very separate, and just for me. And as Grace would have it, I got the opportunity to offer to work on someone one evening who was in my home after a dinner party. And I’m a mama. My daughter was in bed, this was about 20 years ago. And this person was having what appeared to be an emotional breakdown.
And I heard very clearly, “gina, you can help her.” And so I asked her permission, and I started to sound into her body, and I laid hands on her body. And I toned in her body, and I allowed myself to be guided. And she slowly came to quiet. And I thought, “Oh, great. It’s wonderful to share this practice of mine.” And she told people. And so people started to call me, “I hear you do this thing.” And so that’s how it began. That’s how I began to call myself a sound healer and a grief doula, years in.
And then I noticed that my voice, when I was singing at concerts, folk would always move grief. And if I was singing a happy song, there were happy tears. And if it was a sad song, it just seemed to be that that’s what my sound was for. So that’s the very long answer to that question.
TS: Now there’s a lot I want to talk to you about, gina, but right here at the beginning, for somebody who perhaps has never experimented with their own sound being a resource for them in some way, especially at this time, when so many people find themselves anxious or destabilized by this or that, things that are happening in the world, how could someone begin to experiment with their own sound making?
gB: I think that humming is a lovely point of entry, if you are just beginning to experiment with leaning into the sound of your own voice to elicit calm. And also, it can help folk to move grief out of the body, humming a low hum, a soft hum. And I often guide folk to soften or close their eyes. And just humming into the body, placing a hand on your body. Everything is according to your access needs, of course. But if you are able to place a hand on your throat or on your face, and feel the vibration of your own sound on your chest. And humming is a beautiful point of entry to begin to explore by using the sound of your voice to bring you to place.
TS: Can you make some humming sounds for me, and just show me what you mean? Let’s do some humming.
gB: Yes, absolutely. Would you like me to guide you?
TS: I want you to demonstrate.
gB: You want me to? OK. And so, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. First, orienting breath, right? Inhaling and drawing your awareness to your body as you are able, maybe starting with your shoulders and moving down the front body. And then up the back body, past your calves and your thighs, and the lower back and your spine, vertebra by vertebra, ascending to the back of your skull.
And again, I feel like it’s imperative to take a few moments to breathe and to orient yourself. And then inhaling in on the breath, exhaling, “Hum, hum, hum. Hum.” Repetitive humming. And just, it doesn’t have to be musical, it can just be “Hum, hum, hum.” The sound of the humming and your own voice. And just also then after a while, maybe sending the hum to other parts of your body. There’s a whole world of things you can do with a hum.
TS: And for those listeners who are like, “Yeah, I get it. This seems to help, but can you offer me some explanation?” And in the book, The Vibration of Grace, you talk about how this can help develop vagal tone. And I wonder if you can explain that for people who want to connect their left-brain dots to why this simple act of humming makes them feel so much more calm and centered.
gB: Yes, thank you for the question. Well, I mean, the efficacy of sound on the body is—there’s so much science to support it. My point of entry for sound has always been through spirit. And there is nerve in the body. It’s the longest nerve in the body. It’s called the vagus nerve, which is Latin for “wanderer.” And it’s called the wanderer because it touches every organ of the body, except the spleen. So it journeys around the body.
And the vagus nerve directly connects with the parasympathetic nervous system, which is, in broad strokes, your flight-or-fight response. And so a hum, a hum, and married with the breathing, with deep breathing, as deep as you have access to, will tell the vagus nerve to relax. Humming and breathing will calm the body. It drops the shoulders. And the vagus nerve will begin to soften. And it sends messages to the rest of the body, to the organs of the body. “This is a safe place, that we can rest here.”
Now the thing about humming is something that I employ, whether physically I’m in a safe space or not, because I know that it’s the quickest way to calm my body, tell my nervous system that I’m well, that all is well. And then I get access to my wisdom. So when I’m not in a safe space, which could be, I mean, I feel like we are living in these “all of a sudden” type times, where there’s a sunny day, and in a moment, there’s a flash flood. I’m from Brooklyn, right? Recently, Brooklyn has been flooding. Brooklyn has never flooded. So all of a sudden, we are in these moments where we have to very quickly access our wisdom, access our knowing.
And when the body is activated, we can’t. It’s hard to think, it’s hard to remember anything. So a hum in those moments, I have been practicing for so long that almost instantly, my body goes into, “Oh, I know what to do.” And when I’m faced with some unknown possible danger, humming, breathing, I’m like, “Oh, OK, who do I need to call? Where do I need to be? How may I be of service?” All of those things can happen once we get our bodies back.
TS: Now you mentioned, gina, in addition to being a sound healer, and I mentioned in the intro being a grief doula, and how you work with sound and rituals to help grief move through. And I was very moved in The Vibration of Grace when you wrote at one point that Grace, this figure, told you that “One day people will gather regularly,” and I’m quoting from the book now, “to engage in grief-letting rituals. That it will be as common as people sitting around a table to play cards.”
And I took special note of those sentences, because in my own perception of things, I’ve had that thought that these collective gatherings for grief and grace —for grief-letting, I didn’t have that term, “grief-letting” until encountering your work—that this would be very, very important as we move through this time that we’re in. And I think it’s because I heard from a Sounds True author just briefly here, a woman named Karla McLaren, that grief, in her book, The Language of Emotions, is an emotion that’s actually meant to be experienced with other people, and collectively. We’re not meant to just always grieve on our own.
And I was talking with her about how in general, our culture seems so illiterate about grief. And she mentioned, “Well, that’s because we don’t know how to do it together with other people. And grief is a collective emotion.” So I’d love to hear more from you about grief-letting rituals, how you understand them, and how you see them serving us collectively in this time that we’re in.
gB: Yes. And that book sounds amazing, and thank you for the question. I was graced to meet the incredibly beautiful spirit that was Sobonfu Somé. And Sobonfu Somé, as you probably know, was a grief doula. She didn’t use that language, but she traveled the world, teaching people how to grieve. And she was from Burkina Faso. And as she shared her story, the elders of her village said, “You have to go and teach folk how to do that.” And so I began to lean into and turn toward more rituals around grief after I met Sobonfu in 2013.
And then using the technologies that I was receiving from Grace, just downloading these rituals that would help folk to source, to locate, to find, and then to move it through. Sometimes I use the language of evicting, evicting this grief that has taken at residence in the body, in the organs, around the heart, to free up the space to receive joy, and to deepen knowing of our vocation. So in the book, I guide folk to having a good cry.
I talk about how gorgeous it is, and how freeing it is to honor the body’s desire to weep, to wail. And I’ve come to understand that the body doesn’t care why it’s weeping, right? And so some points of entry can be the saddest movie you’ve ever seen, right? I mean, I do encourage folk to choose a movie that has an ending where folk get what they want. Let’s leave it in an upward spiral. But if you’re watching someone’s experience on the screen and you feel grief begin to move, I encourage folks to lean in. It’s the mind that starts to categorize and check the process of grief with all kinds of narratives. Some of the narratives are, “I’m too blessed to be sad,” or “At least my life is better than what is happening around the globe.” Or all of these reasons not to allow yourself to tap in to the heaviness that you’re carrying that needs to move. This organic response to loss, to horror, to fear.
And so I do, I talk to folk about having that song on repeat that touches your heart, that opens your spirit, that allows—a movie, a song a poem. Finding the thing. For me, it’s Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the last 20 minutes of the film, when the sisters are reunited after over 30 years, and they start to move toward each other. When I am in a place, where I will sometimes get as well, where I can’t access my own grief, I will fast-forward to the last 20 minutes of The Color Purple. And then when I am sobbing, I’m able to lean into what it is I’m carrying and holding, and allow it to move.
And then I am able to, “Oh, what is queuing up for me? What is it that I’m holding that I need to have these feelings for?” So that is one ritual. Find that piece of art that will help you. I have a kitchen table grief ritual, where you can invite folk to sit with you and to be witnessed. Do the community grief-letting that the author shared about. And that’s harder, of course, particularly for those of us who are weaned on grief being anathema. Grief isn’t sexy. Grief is weak. In our country, that is the prevailing thought about grief and grieving. “Who’s got time? Keep it moving.”
And then of course, how were you shaped around grief? What were your family’s responses to grief and grieving? And were you allowed to express grief as you were growing up? There’s so many reasons and so many reasons for grief suppression that we know about, legacies of grief suppression. Me as an African-American, my father saying to me, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” was his way of trying to protect me. “You got to toughen up,” was the constant message. So we have these things to unlearn. And sometimes, it’s easier to unlearn it in private grief-letting rituals. Before we can say, “Hey, come on. Let’s sit together. Let’s witness each other, and let’s move this energy.” I will say, it is a community ritual, but I think the point of entry would be, for many, to start with your own body.
TS: You teach this practice you call “pulling.”
gB: Yes.
TS: As a way to help us move through grief. Can you share what pulling is? How we do it?
gB: Yes. As it comes through my altar, because pulling is an old ritual, some people call it cutting, and it is a literal physical act of reaching to your body as you are able. If you’re not able, you can do it in your mind, and pulling energy that gets caught, that gets stuck. I’ll use my throat as an example. And in cutting rituals, generally, folk will find or locate a heavy thought, a narrative that keeps cycling, a hard happening with someone, an apology not asked for or not given. The weight of the unsaid. All of these things that you’re carrying in your body, and you know you’re carrying it, because your mind will cycle it often, right? Even if the relationship is ended, or the person who harmed you is no longer in your life, or has gone on unto the spirit realm. And so you will work with one happening at a time.
And I mean, there’s so much more to it. You make sure that you’re comfortable, you prepare a meal for yourself, you have water nearby. You might have an accountability person where you’re like, “Listen, I’m about to do this ritual. Please check on me in about an hour and a half,” that kind of thing. And then as it comes through my altar, I use chakra science, yogic science. It’s not my lineage at all, but the chakra body is such an incredibly and exhaustively beautiful, as you know, mapping of the body. And I go from energy center to energy center of the body, beginning at the root, and I begin to think of the thing that I’m pulling of the person. And again, I’ll use my throat. And you prepare your body with some deep breathing, and making sure that you’re held and relaxed, and you feel safe.
And then you begin the ritual and you pull. And what the idea is, the images is that you’re pulling a cord from a spool of thread, so you’re seeing it unravel. So this also engages your imagination, your visioning practice. And as you pull and think about the person, I’ll use a person that you are pulling, you think about everything. You think about memories that were wonderful, and memories that were awful, terrible. And you pull, you just keep pulling, and you pull until for some people, the thread will just, there’ll be no more. It’ll unravel all the way. For some folk, they’ll know that they’re ready to evict the energy, because they’ll begin cycling through the same memory. And sometimes the rope will just go taut. While you are in this ritual, your body will know.
And then when you get to the end, instead of cutting, I think cutting, it leaves roots. That’s what I see. When I’m weeding, I pull a weed up from the root. And so it is the same concept. And then you extract what it is. Often, it can be a hook, and then you extract it. And you gather up what you have evicted from your body, and you toss it away from you. And then you quickly turn toward your body, and you put in something wonderful, right? If you love your name, put your name there. A poem that you love, language that you love, a song, something that is yours. Because that is the intention of the ritual, to evict energy that does not belong to you and place yourself there. And through that, you gain sovereignty, right? You gain possession of your body again.
In some cutting rituals as well, when you pull the cord, you’re advised to send love through the cord, especially if you’re pulling a person to the person. I advise against that. I think that it’s really powerful to stay with yourself, right? And send that love to yourself. I believe in sending love and forgiveness, those are gorgeous principles and rituals, and not before you’re ready. And I have found that often folk are not ready to do that. They do it because they’re told to do it, or this rush to being and feeling better, or creating a soft space between you and the person you’re evicting. But I think that there’s time for that. I say you first in this ritual.
TS: gina, one thing that I’m curious about, because this term “eviction” is very interesting to me, evicting grief. And I think for some people this idea of, “Yes, I just want to move through this, I want this out of my body system.” But then I think of someone who perhaps has gone through some type of loss of a loved one, and is a little bit like, “But wait, I don’t want to lose the connection I have to this person that I love so much. That’s not what I’m evicting, am I?” And I wonder if you can just clarify that for a grieving person.
gB: I can. Thank you. That’s such a great question. The ritual of pulling, I would turn toward when it is energy that I absolutely want to release. Now, it doesn’t mean that you’re releasing the person. What it will do or can do or often does is create an opportunity for perspective. Sometimes the people that we’re pulling are so close that we can’t see clearly. We can’t see them. There’s no division. And so pulling allows spaciousness. It allows the person to be outside of your auric field, which, in my tradition with Grace, is where folk should be. Even, I would say, my daughter, who is my love, I need to have her where I can see her, to allow and respect her agency, and to stop meddling in her life. So that spaciousness that we need with the folk that we love or the folk that we have loved, it can be met through pulling.
And it’s complex. Sometimes the people that harmed us are the people we love the most. I certainly have had those experiences. And so in that instance, I will pull a happening. I write about my father in the book. And so I’ve done pulling rituals around things that have been between us that harmed me greatly. And it did not stop me from loving him. It helped me to have perspective about his actions, and his actions did not get to live in my body. His actions don’t get to have real estate in my body for the rest of my life. And so that’s when I would employ pulling. And I still get to love him, and I still get to work with the complexity of what our relationship has been. Does that answer the question?
TS: I think I’m still left, I’m thinking of someone I know who lost their son in a tragic accident.
gB: Yes.
TS: And I’m thinking of their grieving process. And so it wasn’t that there was a harm, it was just that there was a tragic loss. And how they might want to make sure to keep that bond, and the deep love and care—
gB: Yes.
TS: —in their life, at the same time, help grief move through.
gB: Yes, thank you for the clarity. I would not turn toward pulling for that happening. I would not turn toward pulling. I would use other rituals for grieving. And I’ve been graced to work with another client, with a person who had a very similar happening with her son. And so in that work, in our work together, there is this understanding that your life is different now forever. Your life is different forever, and this grief will be with you forever.
And so allowing yourself to have that, to be with that, to take the time that you need. To not feel rushed through it, to honor it, which is honoring the love, and it’s honoring the loss. And then so, therefore, that takes time. And I know that grief changes. The quality of it will change over years. The loss will be there. And in the space where the person is not there physically anymore, and you feel like there’s a hole in your chest, you can place memories there, right? Intentionally.
The woman that I’ve been graced to walk beside has all of these funny, wonderful memories about her child, and so she will place those there like a salve, like a balm. She has an altar for him in her home. And when she feels like “Today’s a day that I’m just going to stay in bed and care-take myself,” she does. And so I think that if I was having trouble moving grief around it, then I would move into different grief-letting so that I can access it, and allow it to move like the river that it is. And so that’s how I would hold that.
TS: That’s very helpful and clarifying about pulling being used perhaps when there’s some grievance, or the grief is somehow related to something in the past that felt like there was some kind of harm involved, or a broken relationship or something like that, if I understand correctly.
gB: Yes. No, you do. And it can be actually used for many things, not just those things that feel so weighty and so heavy. It’s the conversation you had five years ago with someone that you can’t get out of your head, right? The idea is to absolutely evict narratives. Because there’s so many other ways to use our qi, to use our energy, to use our life force. We want to clear that space for wonderful things, for beauty and for glory.
TS: Now, gina, you had a big event, a big life-altering event happened for you in 2019, if I have that correctly—
gB: Yes.
TS: —which was an unexpected, all-of-a-sudden… These are the “all of a sudden” times… An unexpected health challenge. And here you are, you’re this terrific sound healer, moving energy through your body, teaching others, and your own health challenge arrives at your doorstep. And I wonder if you can share a bit about that and the original diagnosis, and then your journey with it, if that’s OK?
gB: I absolutely can. Thank you. In 2019, I was diagnosed with chronic leukemia. And oh my goodness, Tami, the journey. First of all, I mean, I had to do so much work with my ego, just like I have been in my work, my vocation has been holding space for other folk, and doing my work as a healer for so long. And I think that I had gotten to this place where I felt like I had to be and had to appear fully well and fully ready all the time. That I couldn’t get sick.
TS: It’s a lot of pressure. Jesus.
gB: Oh, my God, it’s so much pressure. And some of it is shaping, and some of it, frankly, is just where we live. It’s the narratives that run through our communities around what is powerful, what is power, and what is health. And what is able and who gets to win, and all of these crazy narratives. And I absolutely was at the effect of those. So with this diagnosis, oh, I just thought that I had done something wrong, or that I wasn’t doing my work well. I had to move through all of these narratives that I think folk might even call imposter syndrome, I guess. No matter how much my work was sought after or there was gratitude still, I thought I was doing something wrong.
And so it brought me to a full stop for a moment. I had to be with myself, and be generous and gentle and kind with myself. And that took some time. For a while, I just decided that I was going to ignore the diagnosis and go my own way and heal myself, and not listen even to Grace anymore. Just, my response was not a wholesome one at first, and now I know that it was because I was afraid. But after some time and making some wrong choices, I found my way after a few months back to ritual, back to my altar, back to sitting, back to meditation, back to my practice, and back to the guidance of Grace.
And also, well, Grace had said to me initially with the diagnosis that, “This is going to create more opportunity to be of service to people,” which I couldn’t see at the time. I can certainly see now. But I turned toward sounding into my own body, sounding into my blood, being with my blood in a different way. I turned toward a protocol that involved working with other healers and with doctors, so that I could make sure that I was getting and giving myself the best care. And I turned toward making it a testimony, sharing it with others. I’ve shared it from stages. I’ve shared it in rooms.
Because of the things that I discovered around my own narratives, what I was saying about cancer, about the body, if I may, the whole terminology and notion of “Fuck cancer.” I tried that on for a while. I was like, “Yeah, that’s someplace to put the anger.” But then I started to open that up a bit, because language is so powerful and so important. It’s like, “What am I saying? What am I saying about my blood? What am I saying about my body? Am I saying that my blood is wrong, or bad, or has failed me?”
And then I realized that I couldn’t separate that sentiment from my own wellbeing. So I decided that I would take that out of my lexicon. I wouldn’t use it anymore, and I would begin to work with cancer like a being. Like a being that my intention was that it was passing through. And it still has not disappeared from my blood, from my blood work, but I stay in my practice, and I love up on my blood. And I sound into my blood, and I do this ritual daily around knowing that I’m well. My word is “resplendent.”
And if this is something that I will continue to live with, well, this is how I’m going to live with it. And in that way, it has been a gift. And it has given me the opportunity to speak to other folk that I get the opportunity to work with, the grace to work with, about their own relationship to cancer in their body, and how to turn toward your body, and love that part of your body that has a tumor, that has a growth. For me, it is in my blood. To love on my blood and not be unkind to myself.
TS: Can I ask you more specifically, when you say sounding into your blood or loving into your blood, can you be more specific? What are you doing?
gB: In ritual, in my visioning with my imagination, what it can sometimes look like is in my morning sit. I will sit, I will prepare my body with breathwork and anchoring, and then I will begin to vision blood moving through my body in a clockwise motion. I will begin to see it flowing through the highways and byways of veins. And I will imagine that when I’m sounding that the sound is penetrating my skin, penetrating the vessels, moving into my blood, and carrying whatever I wish. Sometimes it’s light. I’ll imagine the sun. Sometimes, Tami, it’s the laughter of my grandson. It’s a sound that evokes joy in my body. And so I’ll draw on that joy, and I’ll send that energy through my body, because I can. We can. It’s my body. It’s practice. But I’ve become very practiced at being able to do that. And seeing it move about, and then move through my lungs, give that deep breath, move around my heart, and then take the journey again. That’s what I do.
TS: OK, so this is a little bit of a subtlety, but I want to make sure I understand it. I get how saying, “Fuck cancer” or “This is a war on cancer” or whatever, how that wouldn’t quite feel right to something that’s living inside of you. I get that, and I also get the idea that this could be a visitor. “Hi, you’re a visitor. You’re passing through.” But how do you have a, “Hi, you’re a visitor. Could you please leave now?” And have a positive tone at the same time? Or maybe it’s not a positive tone, it’s neutral? I’m just trying to understand that. I’m trying to imagine a guest that I want to have leave. How do I do that exactly?
gB: Well, I mean, for me, my point of entry, I got angry first.
TS: That part, I can understand.
gB: Yes, I was pissed, as we say in Brooklyn. And I was allowed, and I have rituals for moving that. I didn’t let it sit in my belly or in my body. I have these wonderful rituals for moving anger.
TS: I think you have to share that with us.
gB: Yes, yes, yes.
TS: Because one of my favorite parts of the book is your anger-releasing ritual. I’ve never done it, but after hearing you write about it, reading, I’m like, “I’m ready to go.” But anyway, go ahead. Describe that.
gB: I take plates, old plates. I’ll go to Goodwill, and I’ll buy 50-cent plates in patterns I would never put on my table, which is important. And then I’ll get a couple of old sheets. And I’ll fill the sheets with the plates, probably about five of them. And then I’ll knot the sheets, get a hammer. I have a house where I’ll go in the backyard, and I’ll start hammering away. I talked to folk about finding a place. When I lived in Brooklyn, I would go to Prospect Park, and find a private place. And taking the hammer, being very, very careful, of course, not to harm your own body, and not to harm your own body with the swing.
So making that, and there are these asphalt walls in Prospect Park. You place it somewhere that’s level, and you move that anger. You give the anger to the plates, and you smash them to bits. And you know that you’re angry, and you get it out of your body. For folk who are not able to work with their body in that way, I will work with folk around imagining doing it. There’s something very satisfying about sending your imagination there, and seeing it and feeling it. And I love that ritual. It works. And also, I can get to the grief that’s often just right there under the anger. And so I’ll do it ’til I start to cry, ’til I start to wail.
And so I had to do that ritual before I could get to the space of holding myself in a generous way. Now, this thing about a guest that you want to leave is, “I’m not going to feed you. I’m not going to feed you with fear. I’m not going to feed you with my imagination. Imagining the worst.” Even in these, definitely, before I found the doctor that works for me, I’ve sat with folks that have been really gloomy, telling me about statistics and terrible things. Nothing that I could embrace as possibility. And so I don’t do that. I don’t look at statistics around chronic leukemia.
I don’t even read, frankly, the effects of the medicine that I take. I know enough, I have a protocol, but I’m porous. I will create things from anything I read, like any of us can. And so I treat it like a guest that I’m not going to nurture. That, “I see you, I see you there, but this is still my body. This is my blood. And I’m going to claim that ownership of my blood, of my breasts, of my womb, of my body, daily.” And that’s how I do it, with great intention and boundaries. And I’m really, really close in my numbers to remission. So I keep holding that knowing.
TS: I think one of the things that I’m curious about is when we pass through those times in our life, when our faith gets so shook, meaning here, Grace was your touchstone, your one reliable voice, and gave you warnings about things and educated you on all of these things, and yet there was no warning about this. And how did you come back to peace, faith, and trust in that inner relationship, if you will, with The Vibration of Grace?
gB: That was something else that became a practice. I’m a big believer in daily practice. We were estranged for a bit, me and Grace, because I did. I was used to precognitive knowing. I was used to getting a flash of a thing, after all this time of working that muscle or having a dream, and there was no warning. And so just the more that I ritualized my care, the more that I was able to open the space of my spirit again to receive guidance from Grace. And that just took the time it took. I didn’t measure it. Looking back, I would say it maybe took about four or five months before I was regularly sourcing that energy again, that medicine from Grace. But I practiced, Tami, I stayed with it. I stayed with it.
And I also forgave myself. This thinking that I had done something wrong, that maybe after working with the energy that I work with—because grief is big energy—that I didn’t clean off my body well enough. All of these narratives that led to me not doing something right, I just dispelled those. I pulled those.
And also, there’s so much that I love here. There’s so much that I love. There’s people that I love here, and I wanted to stay. And so that was also something to say, “Stay in this body, stay in this realm.” And that was also something that propelled me forward. So that helped as well. Leaning into what I love is also still a constant source of support.
TS: I noticed when you said, “I’m a big believer in practice,” there was almost a slight little tone of not exactly apologizing, but “This may not be what you want to hear, friends.” Or, “OK, guys, I know this isn’t going to be popular, but I’ve got to say it like it is.” So I’m curious about that. Do you find that it’s like, “Oh, God, I have to do work every day? I have to do these rituals and scan my body?”
gB: Yes. I mean, yes. Right. It is definitely, we are living in these times. It’s a broad brush, I know. But this situation of swiping or scrolling, the immediacy of what we watch, we become. So if I could turn to some vista and suddenly I am there, it’s immediate. And practice is not immediate. There are wins, absolutely.
But I’ve come to understand that I’ll be practicing for the rest of my life, Tami. I will be practicing, and working with my mind and my thoughts, and my breath and my body. It’s the price. It’s the exchange for embodiment. And so yes, it’s not sexy to a lot of folk. They’re like, “Well, I don’t want to do that.” But healing requires rigor. It does. It requires something of you. No, every day I don’t sit and scan my blood. But through practice, I mean, sometimes I can walk, with my walking meditation around through the woods, and I can do it at the same time. That’s practice.
In my Brooklyn, we have a saying, “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.” So I stay in practice for the times where I’m working a lot. I don’t have time to sit every day for an hour. “I’m going to do this five-minute check-in with spirit, and then I got to hit the streets.” But my practice supports it. But yes, anything we do well requires practice. And so folks get there, but sometimes it can be a bit of a, “Yeah, come on,” a little coaxing. “Come on.” Practice is worthy.
TS: You shared this image. And what I saw, at least as you were talking, when you were talking about sovereignty inside our own body, and who gets to be there. And that you said in your model, I don’t know if you quite called it a model, but in your way of working, that you think of this as, “This is my place to inhabit only.” That this is not the place. And I’d love to hear more about that, and what you feel or see or sense as your own space of sovereignty, and how you know it’s not being occupied by anything that’s outside of your own soul’s resonance. I’m not quite sure what language to use, but what that is like for you.
gB: Thank you. That language feels really good. Some of it, Tami, I have to say, like any of us who are touched or called to a vocation, it’s my wiring. I have always been obsessed with liberation, with freedom, with ownership of my being. And I mean, from a little girl, in the book I share about abandonment, and about what being abandoned as a child will put you at risk for, where you don’t have any bodily autonomy. And so even moving through the situations, where as a little girl, I could not say no to anything, I was creating safe space inside of myself with myself. I was holding parts of myself with the sound of my voice. That was very clear to me.
And there’s instruction and a ritual in the book for that. Being able to decide, discern really, what belonged to me. My beating heart, my skin, all of my organs, my blood, everything in this being, I own this. What is a sort of, I’ll use the language of a flag for me if I’m not owning my mind, are incessant or repetitive thoughts that do not serve. That don’t bring me joy, make me feel good, that don’t lift a moment, that are harmful to other people. If I’m thinking harmful thoughts even about, let’s say, politicians that I vehemently disagree with, right? But do I want to spend my powerful energy deriding them, thinking harmful things? No, I want to disagree and then turn toward, well, what is a solution, right? Or what can I do? Or what is my position to hold? But that is one thing for me when I know that I’ve left a place of sovereignty is when I’m not choosing my own thoughts.
If I am being driven by a thought, as opposed to from my back-body wisdom, if I’m witnessing anything, there’s plenty of horror happening in the world to witness right now. I’m witnessing the horror, I’m having my grief about it, but I am deciding to not take in this imagery, because it disables me. And then using my power to be of service where I can be most useful, and also take care of myself, and stay in my body and stay in my power. And that looks like sound healing sessions with folk, working with activists and organizers. I mean, this is my vocation, this is my work. But I do believe that we all get to say what happens to and within our bodies, what we are taking in, what we’re ingesting. All of us get to make our bodies a safe haven.
And when you’ve been harmed, that’s practice. That takes time. If you are like me, someone who experienced child sexual abuse, there’s a part of your body that right away, as a baby girl, you’re told is not yours. And through years of ritual and practice, “Hell, yeah, it’s mine. I own this.” I get to own all of my body.
And what happened to me as a child does not get to run my life, like we talked about before. But I know that I am not in ownership or possession if those memories start to seep back in, which is why I know I’ll be in practice for the rest of my life. There is some harm for which you must practice forever, I believe, and that’s good news. I get to do it. But if something happens that will take me back to being five, in the ritual of soul retrieval, I will go and get my five-year-old self. I’ll go get her. Lift her up, put her on my hip, remind her that she’s safe and I got her, those kinds of things. But those are all indicators that I’m outside of my agency.
TS: Now people mean different things by soul retrieval. You have a very clear practice that you associate with soul retrieval. You were just describing it. I wonder if you can tell people exactly what you do when you find yourself in some part of the past, to retrieve that part of your soul that somehow is stuck in that past memory.
gB: Yes, thank you for the question and the invitation. And as soul retrieval, yes, there are many, many ways to do this ancient ritual, as it comes through my altar, as taught to me by Grace. It’s the literal rescuing of parts of our self caught in these contorted positions of harm. And so I’ve talked about my five-year-old self a lot. And that is because that was the first place of harm, of conscious harm that I could access and remember and see and feel. And so she was the first part of myself that I went to bring home to my body, home to the present moment, home, where life is happening.
And so in the ritual, really, in most of the rituals, it requires creating the conditions. So for me, that would look like a space where I’ll be alone for a little while, making sure that I prepare food for myself, tea for myself, water for myself, setting up my care. I also talk about medicine baths. I love to take a good medicine bath or rinse. It helps calm the energy. It helps to close what you’ve opened.
And in soul retrieval, you imagine. You imagine that one, that little one, or that one from a year ago, right? That part of you that got caught in some harm and can’t seem to move from it. Often people are able to do the soul retrieval rituals with themselves, but I do let folk know that sometimes you do need a guide, a trusted guide. And in the book as well, there’s a list of resources: folks you can call, practitioners, places to go, regional resources where you might get care and guidance, someone to walk beside you. You remember the moment, you remember the happening, and then you, in your imagination, in your visioning, in your spirit, you return as your grown self now.
Before you do that, of course, you prepare with agreements. You agree that you are observing. That the pain has already happened. It’s not going to happen again. That you are the grown person in the room, right? Your grown hands are going to rescue this younger part of yourself, and then you go and get yourself. And it depends, of course, on what it is you’re working with. But for myself and my own body, when my mother left us, left my family and my four siblings, there were five of us, I was on a doorstep, literally on a doorstep in Brooklyn. I helped her downstairs with her things, and stood on that doorstep for a really long time, waiting, watching, wondering. And so I had to go back to the doorstep and get that baby I would remember. And then I would go as myself now and see her, and then I would get down to her level, and I would ask her permission to gather her in my arms.
Sometimes they say, “No.” Sometimes, right? So then I just asked her to walk with me. But the invitation is, “We’re leaving this doorstep. I’m going to take care of you. I got you.” Then my five-year-old self loved… In Brooklyn, there’s this, I don’t think they make it anymore, but… Carvel ice cream, soft-serve ice cream. So often in the ritual, I will make sure that I am melting my favorite flavor, and that when I’m done, that’s part of the offering. “We’re going to have this sweet thing. You’re going to sit on my lap. I’m going to hold you.” When I first started doing soul retrieval with my five-year-old self, she would come and she would cry. She would cry in my lap, meaning I would cry, I would imagine holding her. And I would weep, weeping those tears from that long-ago moment.
And then after a few weeks, I did it. When I first started, I would do it three times a week. In the morning, I would rise at five. My daughter was nine, and I didn’t want her to wake, obviously, and I wanted that time. But Tami, I mean, really, in a month, she wasn’t crying anymore. She just wanted that treat. That 6:00 AM ice cream treat, which was unheard of in so many. It was naughty. It was wonderful. It was for us. It created this opportunity to take care of myself.
And what I got was to the reclamation of this precocious, funny, brilliant, sweet aspect of myself that was locked inside of all of this grief. I love five-year-old gina. She’s amazing. I need her at my table. Of course, also, she’s five, so she doesn’t drive, right? So there’s so many components. There are some moving parts here. It’s all in the book. It’s very detailed. But I get to mother her in every wonderful sense of the word, and she stays at the table, and she’s brilliant. I need her.
TS: In the book, gina, as you mentioned, all of these rituals, you write about them in great detail. In many ways, The Vibration of Grace: Sound Healing Rituals for Liberation, it’s sort of a workbook, in a way. I was like, “This is kind of like everything’s laid out, step by step by step by step.” And at the same time, it has your personal stories woven throughout. So it’s like a workbook, but also with a lot of your own storytelling and examples.
And the last question I have for you, because a lot of the storytelling, as you’ve referenced here in our conversation, you talk about heavy things. I mean, there’s abandonment as one of five children, with your father drinking beer can after beer can. There’s your own memories, later in your life, of sexual abuse. There’s your cancer diagnosis. These are just three off the top of my head.
I mean, there’s this strange combination of real heaviness and then lightness, like the sound of your grandson laughing that you brought forward in this conversation that I can somehow hear in my imagination. I thought such an interesting combination of real heaviness, gravitas, going through real difficulty and grief, rituals, et cetera, and then this pure celebratory, bubbly light. And I wonder how you see that combination.
gB: Thank you for the question. And Tami, I have several missions while I’m here. One of them is to normalize grief, and one of them is to unpack our narratives. It’s life. Life is lifeing. I know so many people that are personal to me, or that I’ve got to be in circle with or that I’ve read about that have had very similar experiences. Everyone is grieving something. And so I want to shift the thought of heavy or light, if I may, to “We are living. This is existence in this body suit.” The trauma of losing suddenly a loved one, a wedding, a birth. We’re living day to day. Gosh, I mean, all the things in all the places we’re dealing with right now, right? What’s happening globally in the world community. And I can laugh and roll around the floor with my grandson. I consider that grace.
And I would say that all of us, I mean, prayerfully, most of us have that grace running through the day. Something that will make you laugh, something that you taste that will make you remember, “Ooh,” something sumptuous. I mean, all the things, all the senses that we might have access to, the ways in which we enjoy art and seek it, or the natural world. It is just living, living and giving each other permission to have the full range of our feelings, without all of the narratives around burden. Being a burden, or not being powerful, or all of the upside down, shifting the reign of the upside down. Like “No, we have to figure it out.” And I think that we are. How to be with our organic responses, and all that that might mean. And so that’s my sense of it. I’m sharing my life. I think that testimony is a powerful teacher.
You can read that book and meet me, and see that I’m wonderful. I have grief, I have grief, I have struggle. I have to work with things still from my childhood. And oh, oh, oh, how I love that first sip of morning coffee. Do you know what I mean? I love my partner. She’s amazing, right? I have so much joy in my life, and I get joy from watching other people’s joy, which I think is always possible as well. Just like I grieve watching other people’s grief. It is the human condition and the human spirit, I believe. I know. And so that’s my take. That’s my take.
TS: I’ve been speaking with gina Breedlove. Thank you so much. The author of the new book, The Vibration of Grace: Sound Healing Rituals for Liberation. Thank you, gina.
gB: Thank you.
TS: Thank you for the great gift that is The Vibration of Grace. Thank you.
gB: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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