Angelika on her new song 'Téjete de Nuevo - Weave Yourself Anew'

Question: How did witnessing your mother’s experience help you understand the ways we all meet pain and healing?

Angelika: When I created this song, my mom was not well. She was not sleeping. Her nervous system was very low. She was touching deep and ancient fears inside of her with her health condition.I was far away.  I was in France, and she was in Colorado. I couldn't fly immediately to her.  I wondered how I could best support her apart from calling her and showing her that I love her and that I care. At some point, I was looking inside of myself for a key to deeply connect with her by giving something. Music is such an amazing tool to give something very concrete in the language of the spirit. And so I sat down. And I wrote this song…This helped me very much to actively connect with her through a more deep string in myself like connecting with her inside of me, and also through singing that song to her it also brought a lot of trust inside of me, like it not only gave me the feeling that I was dedicating something to her and to help her inner peace, but also I was bringing peace to myself.  I think music is just such a powerful tool to connect in the spirit realm with your loved ones and and such a powerful tool to address pain and address suffering in such a transformative way. It's like when I do retreats, I often help women transform painful experiences in their lives through song. If they're not musicians, I have them creating something with their hands which represents that pain.  Then we make an altar on the earth and just very concretely give it back to the earth because the earth has such a power to take everything and all of ourselves as we are with all our wounds.  At times, our wounds are overwhelming for us because we don't even understand where they're coming from, and so doing concrete actions like that can be very healing and music is like that too.  Making a difficult experience into a song just gives it a very concrete form to then give it wings and liberate it.  It allows it to make a different effect on us.  When you turn a difficult, painful experience into a song or into a poem or into any beautiful thing, the effect is then healing, It's a really powerful, beautiful thing. 

Question: The lyrics feel deeply personal, yet universal. Can you share a little bit about how you wrote them?

Angelika: I tried to describe my mom in her more essential existence or being.  I tried to call to the memories I have of her in her completeness, in her fully integrated being.  I got images of this beautiful woman who builds altars in the forest, who always brings rose petals into the river, who is wild and walks barefoot, who embodies the mountain, who embodies the ocean. I looked for all these things that I know of her and sang about that.  I see her that way so that she sees herself in that way.  It reminds me of a tradition I heard of in Africa, where every child before it's born, they create a song for that particular soul to come to life.  Then it's continued to be sung as it grows in the womb and then it's sung as a celebration of its birth, and then it's sung as this baby grows. And then if this young person does something wrong, like stealing or hurting someone or disrespecting someone, they don't punish them, they put them in the middle of a circle and all the community comes and sings their song so that they remember who they are.Can you share what the phrase “weave yourself anew, but this time with threads of many colors” means?Angelika: The lyrics say, “Heal, heal yourself with the light of the sun, heal, heal yourself with the song of the river and of the sea, weave, weave yourself anew, but this time with threads of many colors.” If we go to nature when we're not okay, hug a tree or lay in the meadow, or go in the water, go under a waterfall or just listen to the waterfall.  Really connect to this essential place where we come from, the earth. It's healing.  The earth will always remind us of this being that we are beyond illness, and this is already a very healing thing.  Start from your essence, then weave yourself anew, but this time with threads of many colors. For me, it is a reminder that at every step of the way, we have a choice of how we perceive things. We have the total freedom to focus on how miserable we are or how angry we are with our bodies.  Or we can decide to put our sight in the things that bring us joy, little joys, even if in really harsh circumstances.  Maybe someone said something that makes you laugh.  Maybe you realize how loved you are.  Maybe it's raining, and you're so happy.  Even in the harshest circumstances, weave yourself anew but this time with threads of many colors.  It is always available to us at any given time.  How we see what we're going through, and how we see life, is always up to us.  Every single moment.  I like to remind myself of this.  With a song, we can sing these words together, and remind each other.Inside of each of us and in our mind's eye, we can see the world as we want to see it. That's so powerful. In my work with women,  the wounds that we carry with us are very ancient wounds.  We have been victimized by the masculine approach all these thousands of years. We have been hurt and devalued by this masculine approach, but we live in a time where it doesn’t have to be like that. We are fortunate to live in a time where we can consciously choose to be a victim or to stand up within ourselves, not even to the world. We need to, first of all, learn to stand up and be with who we are, with ourselves, as we are. And that is not such an easy thing to do, but it's entirely possible.. These lyrics are dedicated to all of us in that sense, to remind us that no matter what we're going through or what we have gone through, what traumas we have, we always have a choice of how to view what happens to us. And ultimately, even if our life seems difficult, life is so precious. We better live it, because we never know when it's our time to go.  

Question: This is the first song from your upcoming album. How does it set the tone for the next songs ?

Angelika:  I've been going deep into the work with women in different phases: developmental, biological, emotional and all the wounds we carry from our genetics and our grandmothers, our lineage as women.  I’m releasing a series of songs in alignment with that work.It's been a beautiful experience to write songs that address some of our histories as women. It was a spontaneous thing really.  A few songs that have to do with different circumstances, situations in our existence as women. I hope that with this, we convert the part that is painful in this journey as women into flower and song, so that we may choose to nurture ourselves in a way that we can grow, expand, and feel complete. We can carry our wounds, and yet be fully ourselves and see the beauty and the gift of life. It's not like we can't be happy if we're wounded. That's something we've been conditioned to believe.  But it's the other way around. If we're seeking happiness without pain, then we're not really living, and life slips away too quickly to lose time like that. So these songs encourage us to see that it is possible to convert our pain and our wounds and our losses into songs, into beauty, into altars, into poetry.  I lovingly want to dedicate these next couple of songs to women in different circumstances, painful circumstances, and just for us to walk with them with all our grace and beauty so that we realize that every thing we feel, no matter how painful it is, is to remind us that we're alive and that life is such an opportunity.

Listen to Téjete de Nuevo - Weave Yourself Anew