India.Arie – The Soulbird – Exclusive Interview
I was probably 22 at that time and I’ve just worked towards a relationship with Spirit and that’s where my music comes from, that’s why I see the world like I do, that’s why I make the kind of statements I’m making in my music. I guess that the inspiration just comes from life itself.
Dirk: When I watch you perform ‘Break the shell’ for Oprah or during the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam with Raul Midon, I can feel your emotions so clearly and beautifully. How has your spiritual journey affected those emotions in you?
India.Arie: I used to be really controlled by my emotions. When I felt something, I could be completely immersed in my emotions and just as I mature spiritually, I understand that there’s more of a message and less of the reason for life. It helps you to understand how you feel, where you are and what kind of changes you need to make. I’ve read things like that in the different spiritual books and I understood it intellectually but to me it was like “What do you mean, how you feel is how you feel, there’s no way to get over how you feel”. But then I began to understand that my own journey has taught me that your feelings are a guide, they’re not the destination.
About 4 years ago I took a hiatus and I had set a lot of intentions, but the main thing was that I wanted to have a baseline feeling of wellbeing because I always felt like I was under the bar and I would peak up some times and then just go back down to this place of feeling low. It was always something — I was always hurt about something or struggling with something and I decided to have a closer look at my life. My main goal for the hiatus was to just look at myself and tell myself the hard truth, because other people can do that for you but they don’t really know you. That’s why I wanted to really look at myself and the most beautiful thing that came out of it was that once I was willing to look at myself I knew that I didn’t want the way I was acting. I was like what people call ‘being the witness’ and now I was willing to look at how bad it hurt and how much pain I was in.
