Her hair was big. Exposed. Natural. When India.Arie graced the 2017 Black Girls Rock! Awards stage for her performance tribute to legendary singer/songwriter Roberta Flack, a coily afro accented by a yellow flower crowned her head in place of one of her signature headwraps. Rocking a simple black statement tee that read ‘WORTHY’ in bold white letters, the shirt - from India.Arie’s ‘Worthy’ apparel collection launched in support of Black Lives Matter in 2016 - was arguably also an affirmation and declaration to and about its wearer; and a reminder to viewers.
She. Us. We are WORTHY, i.e., deserving of regard and respect.
Like the title of her 2005 single proclaims, India.Arie is NOT her hair. However, she is every bit the boldness, strength, and transformative Black Girl Magic-ness that her hair implies. And like hair, embracing the fullness of who she is has been a process of continuous shedding and growth over the span of her career.
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For the last 20 years, India.Arie’s artistic mission has been, “To spread love, healing, peace, and joy through the power of words and music.” We know India.Arie as the Grammy winning, multi-Platinum selling artist and performer. But, when she speaks about the “I AM” of who she is foremost, she describes herself as a spiritual seeker, a lover of God and a student of life. Rather than being labeled by the perceptions and expectations of others, these days, India.Arie is clothed in the truth of her own self-defining.
It looks good on her.
After taking a four-year hiatus beginning in the fall of 2009, the Soulbird re-emerged in 2013 from what she thought would be her retirement with her fifth album, SongVersation. Named as one of Oprah’s inaugural SuperSoul 100 list honorees, Arie shared a ‘SongVersation’ - her meditative practice of storytelling, song, and fellowship - with the masses during a moving SuperSoul Sessions talk.
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Summer 2017 saw the release of SongVersation: Medicine, an eight song EP that expands on the original SongVersation. Consider this your 27 minute daily mantra set to music. “SongVersation: Medicine was made to be listened to in a quiet time, prayer, meditation, Yoga,” states Arie about the musical offering, “My wish is that these songs bring softness, clarity, calm, and inspiration.”
For those curious about what Arie discovered about herself during her hiatus, SongVersation: Medicine is a treasure map to healing. With this new music, a new performance paradigm, and new SongVersation: Medicine Practice Journal workbook, the self-proclaimed student of life is now ready to take other soul searchers through her lessons in worth.
I spoke with India.Arie while she was in Seattle recording new music for her forthcoming Worthy album. She’d just returned from Oprah’s Share Your Adventure Cruise, where she taught from the SongVersation: Medicine Practice Journal for the first time.
BlackDoctor.org: What does it feel like to go from being on the SuperSoul Sessions stage to being an actual teacher on the cruise?
India.Arie: “It feels like an extension of everything. Because you know first I did Super Soul Sunday. Then I did my Super Soul Session talk, which I was able to express myself even more and do what I love to do on stage, which was different from doing an interview. Then being able to take that to the cruise just felt like a natural next step.”
"I loved it. I loved the time I spent teaching on the ship because also, you know, like as a performer I spend a lot of time in rooms where I have to teach the room how to hear me. Like, if I'm at the BET Awards or something like that I have to teach them how to hear me a different way because of what the culture is; the prevailing culture. Here, I could just do what I want to do. Talk, use the spiritual terminology, hold up my booklet - there's a companion piece to this SongVersation: Medicine CD that is a workbook. It's called the SongVersation Practice Journal and I debuted it on the ship. So, I could pick it up, I could tell people what it's about. I could just talk and be free and sing my songs and that felt good, too.”
"I love the O! Magazine; the culture of O! Magazine and Super Soul. Like, that culture? It's so me. It's so me.”
BlackDoctor.org: I'm curious to know have you ever had to battle with imposter syndrome? I know for myself and a lot of my girlfriends, we know that we're doing good, we know that we're doing well in our careers, things like that, but there's still this underlying nagging feeling. This imposter feeling like ‘Am I as good as they think I am? Am I as good as I think I am?’ Do you ever feel that, especially being in those types of spaces, being in the room with the Oprah's of the world? If you do, how do you overcome that?
India.Arie: "That thing, the imposter syndrome, is not really a thing. But what I have battled - and people heard me talk about this in my Super Soul Session talk and my Super Soul Sunday interview - what I have battled is feeling like I wasn't able to be fully me by being coerced into the things that I didn't really want to do. Or being put in boxes that I didn't feel like I belonged in. Or being stifled; having my creativity stifled and not being able to speak up or speak my mind or speak my full truth and that stuff made me ill where I had ulcers and my adrenals were off, and my skin broke out. Like, all this crazy stuff happened. So now, I don't battle it anymore because I know my health can suffer. So I just say it, I do it - I do what I wanna do.”
“So when people used to talk to me when I was in my 20s about you know, 'when you get older you're not gonna care what people think' and I didn't understand the mechanism behind that. But I get it now because the older you get the more you've earned the right to be who you are. So after having adrenal fatigue and breakouts that were so bad they thought I had lupus all over my face, I don't care if people think my title of this album is odd, you know what I mean? But it took me, like, to face my mortality. I wasn't dying but I didn't know if I was dying. In hindsight I wasn't, but in the moment I didn't know. But it took me to face my mortality to be like I'm gonna be all me. Full me.”
“There's only today. You only have today, so I'm gonna just write the songs I wanna write and Imma sing what I wanna sing. Imma say what I wanna say. Imma write and publish essays and that's what got me on this path.”
BlackDoctor.org: How did you decide on the title Medicine for this project and what was your intention for the album?
India.Arie: I decided on Medicine because that is my intention. My mission statement for almost 20 years that I've been out in the world with my music, my mission statement has been to spread love, healing, and peace and joy through the power of words and music. But then like we just talked about, the more I develop and come into myself the more I realize that I can say what I want to say. There's a little note inside the CD...but it talks about how I wrote these songs for a person in my life who was battling cancer."
"When somebody's sick like that you always think 'Well what can I do? ' and you say, you know, ‘I'm sorry’ and ‘I hope you feel better’ and ‘speedy recovery.' We don't know what to do or say. And so, I told her I don't know what to say and she said, “Sing to me!” So I wrote these songs for her. And now with everything that's happening, just in the world and all the fear that people are carrying, for all the different reasons that we're carrying all this fear now, I wanted to offer something that would administer to the fear and the pain that a lot of people are in about different things."
"I just wanted to offer what I have. Music is what I have and it's what I do and it's always what I've done and I've always done it as an offering. But again, coming into myself I did it more boldly as an offering and I also did it with more intention as an offering because I know that I can't say what anybody's issues are but I know we all have them. But I only know that because I'm maturing."
"What I'm understanding - the way it's [SongVersation: Medicine] being received - IS like a medicine, so apparently setting that intention worked. I didn't know how people would receive it because you know a lot of people don't like to be calm. People like to be busy and they want to move..."
"I thought that some people would think it's boring - and maybe some people do - but I'm not paying attention to that. I'm paying attention to the people who are like ‘I never slow down; this music made me feel a certain way' or 'I really like this. She is speaking to my soul.' THAT is all I am focused on AND those songs are very special to me. They're like the only songs I've ever had that I always thought these are just for me. I never thought I would share some of those, but now felt like the right time and the right way."
BlackDoctor.org: "Just Let It Go" is one of my favorite songs on the album. What space were you writing that from? For your friend or from your own personal collective experiences with letting go?
India.Arie: "One, this was not one of the songs I had wrote for her. I wrote it in a different context. Two, it just so happened that there is a such thing as coincidence, which I don't believe, but it so happened that the cover story for O! Magazine this month is called 'Let It Go'. And so I sent a link of the album to Oprah before the cruise. I said, “I'll see you next week, but I saw the cover of O Magazine and I want you to hear this and pay special attention to this song."
"I write all my songs based on things I know and what I go through, but I'm learning just as the years go by and as I mature that there are human conditions that we all share. Everyone has things that they have a hard time letting go of like divorce, or a breakup or being wronged by someone.”
"Since 2012 I've developed this process called The SongVersation Practice, which is what the SongVersation Practice Journal is about. And so that is a spiritual process for how you do your life's work. It is for songwriting but it's also just your life's work. It's for writers, or people who do anything. It's the process of breathing and stretching, prayer and meditation and then you go into your work."
“Just Let It Go” is what came out of the SongVersation Practice, which for me speaks to the power of the SongVersation Practice."
"I've had a chance to meet Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou which were my heroes. Those are my heroes. Two of them, but my two main heroes. And I asked both of them how do you forgive, because I was going through...
....my first heartbreak and I couldn't understand how you would ever be able to forgive a person. I wanted to but I couldn't do it. Which is [why] my album Testimony: Volume 1 has all those songs about forgiveness because I was trying. And they both gave me very sage advice, obviously. Some of that is in the SongVersation Practice Journal. But what I learned really from both of them is that it's a process and it's a little bit at a time, and you just do a little bit at a time."
"I pray for all my songs - I pray a general prayer and a specific prayer. My specific prayer was I want to write something that will help people understand how to forgive, because to me that's the hardest thing. How to forgive, how to let things go, how to forgive themselves. I wanted to be able to listen to this song and get THAT out of it."
BlackDoctor.org: What does self care mean to you and what does it look like for you?
India.Arie: "I think that self care on a deeper level is first of all, knowing who yourself is and then caring for that self. Because a lot of people, I'm being general, a lot of us in our culture we don’t really have a culture where you are impressed upon that your soul is a part of yourself that you are not always connected to. And so people move out into their lives from their mind. What other people think, what you think and what your parents think or what the world thinks about Black women or what the world thinks about Black men and we're so involved in that that we forget that there's a deeper part of ourselves that is connected to God is where we find all of our wisdom."
"And so when I think of yourself, I think of the full self. It's mental, emotional, physical and spiritual, and that spiritual piece is what a lot of us are missing.”
"For me, self care is paying attention to all those parts of yourself. It's like deciding you're going to put on your makeup but not brush your teeth that day. It doesn't make sense. There's a part of you that's stinky. You look good, but you smell weird. So for me, I feel like a lot of us on a spiritual level are not taking care of [ourselves], but I also think that there's nowhere in our culture where we're taught you need to take care of all those aspects of yourself everyday."
"For me self care is care for all parts of yourself. My great-grandmother, she was 100 when she passed away in 2011, and she used to always say “Look after your soul.””
"The only celebrity that I knew that she knew was Oprah and so she would say, “I know you're out there with Oprah and singing your music, but I want you to look after your soul.” If you listen to my album Testimony: Volume 1 you'll hear her. I recorded her one time and I put it on my album."
"She would also say, “Your soul is as real as the teeth in your head.” So even though it's something that you can't see, it's there."
"Even if a person was going to pick one, and you were like, ‘Imma have a self care day,' and you were going to pick one part of yourself that you were going to look at, for me it's your spiritual self. If getting your nails done really touches your soul like that, go get your nails done. If you're getting them done because this is the only time you have to do it, that's not what I think self care is. If walking by the beach makes you feel something in your heart, or walking through the woods makes you feel something in your heart, or talking to an old person that you love in your life, if that's what touches your heart, that to me is self care."
"Even when you're talking about Black women and the journey that we're all on where we're starting to understand that nobody is going to take care of you; it's YOU. When you realize that, I always loved the concept of going to the deepest part of you, which is not your fingernail, it's your soul. Or the deepest part you can access. So even if you're a person who never takes time to feel; you don't ever cry; maybe that's where you need to go. But the deepest part that you can access, to me, is self care. For me, it's going right to my soul."
SongVersation: Medicine is Grammy nominated for “Best New Age Album.” Tune into the 60th Grammy Awards January 28, 2018. India.Arie’s next album, Worthy, is scheduled for March 2018 release. Look for SongVersation: Medicine workshops (and the Practice Journal!) in a city near you soon.
