Visiting Artist: Gina Breedlove

Posted by Jen Hanson in Visiting Artist

Corine Franklin’s podium for her class. Photo by Whitney Wernick.

“Sound is energy—we are energy.”

Gina Breedlove, from Brooklyn, NY, is a singer, actress, stage performer, medicine woman and sound healer. Breedlove has performed with many greats, including Phyllis Hyman, Harry Belafonte, Ani DiFranco and Sekou Sundiata. Breedlove calls her music folksoul, which is a blend of rhythm and blues, folk, soul and gospel. She was the first actor to play Sarabi in Broadway’s The Lion King, and has appeared in two Spike Lee films: Livin’ Da Dream and Chi-Raq.

Breedlove’s heritage comes from the swamplands of Florida, a place of “holy roller Baptism,” she says smiling. Back in Brooklyn, Breedlove spent seven days a week in church. Each day had a different sort of congregation—from bible study for kids to adult bible study and many services in a day, to an entirely different kind of meeting. Once during each week, 9-year-old Breedlove joined a group of women who “would sit together and wail,” she says. The women would begin by talking, which soon led to singing, and thereafter wailing. “To hear the song become a wail was fascinating to me…Then, there’d be laughter. This was my introduction to song healing, and I promise you this saved my life.” In fact, Breedlove spent a lot of time by herself singing, playing with sounds and how they made her feel.

She says, “The body stores things, intentional sound moves [those] things.”

In the first meditation Breedlove led in the Archetypal Psychology 2 Liberal Arts class at SFUAD she recently visited, she asked everyone to go around and say their names, and then provide a sound that they liked or that was a part of themselves. Some laughed, some squeaked, some pushed out a guttural, throaty sound.

Beginning of the group circle, Breedlove explains to the students what she does for a living. Photo by Whitney Wernick.

In the second meditation, Breedlove led the group through a guided meditation in which she combined storytelling with deep and enveloping chants and bursts of vocalization. Students were asked to envision a root that connected from the heart down into the ground, all the way through the earth to connect with a major root that connected all souls and persons, past and present. This grounding exercise provided the opening of the root chakra, which is sung as lam.

Chakras are another means for Breedlove in connecting healing and medicine with sound and somatic and spiritual health. “Chakra is not a part of our Brooklyn. It took a minute for [my community] to accept it,” she says. However, once Breedlove began channeling healing through sound into chakras, or parts of the body, the idea was wholeheartedly accepted.

Breedlove affirms that the point of these types of tools, like chakras, are for the purpose of healing. “What’s in your medicine wheel?” she asks. The tools that work are the tools that work, whether they be chakras, herbs, aromatherapy, polarity therapy, etc.

Teachers Shanna Marsh and Corine Franklin with sound healer and medicine woman Gina Breedlove. Photo by Whitney Wernick.

Tawanda Suessbrich-Joaquim, a music major, says, “Gina is a Mother Goddess that I’ve had the honor of meeting. Truly! I think a lot of people are skeptical of spiritual guidance in the form of strong female archetypal figures, but Gina is truly amazing. I’m a musician, so sound healing is very interesting to behold…Healing through vibration is an avenue not often discussed when it comes to medicine. But I say, the more natural, the more down to Earth, the more grounded—the better.”

Breedlove attests to the power of sound healing, even saying “you can use your own sounds to heal yourself.” For some of the students present in her session, that may be laughter, a yell, or even just humming.

“Your body is a temple holding your spirit,” says Breedlove, “[and] I use sound to bring myself and keep myself in my body.”