A Lesson in Lightness
Notes from an Erykah Badu concert.
Healing can get heavy before it gets light.
And when you’re on that journey, it can feel like every little sign means something important that you need to act on—and so you start to observe everything, almost obsessively, and attach weight to it:
I keep seeing the color Red… so my ancestors, God, my higher self, must be telling me to do root chakra work! Or to only wear red for a month! Or maybe…that I need to stop listening to Sexyy Red! Or maybe…that I need to put more red foods on my altar… Or maybe…
All of this thinking, especially when you are still establishing or just building connection with your guides—whether they be ancestors, spirits, elements in nature, or real-life elders—can weigh you down and make you heavier than you ever were before.
From this, the message I’ve learned along the way that I’d like to share with you is to always cultivate lightness in your life.
Find time to laugh. To do nothing, especially to not think about anything, to just be. Make space for community—not only when you’re feeling heavy and need a break from that density, but when you feel good, and want to amplify that goodness with another. Do the things that make your heart sing.
Or do the things that mean absolutely nothing, but it just felt good to your body or spirit. Now this is a message I got from Erykah Badu, six years ago.
But I only just received it last week. I was cleaning out my journals and throwing away the pages that don’t resonate with me anymore. I stumbled on this entry that I wrote after seeing Erykah Badu perform as the headliner at the 2018 AFROPUNK in Brooklyn. I had to laugh at the message, because it was right on time:
August 31, 2018: I saw Erykah Badu perform at AfroPunk last Sunday and I’m still thinking about it. She performed my song “Orange Moon” and said my line: She’s an artist and she’s sensitive about her shit. Her set was beautiful, just a lone circle, like a moon, projected onstage. At one point it was orange (for “Orange Moon”), green (for “Green Eyes”), lavender with a complementary color flooding the stage.
After every song/before the new one, she’d bring her hand to the sky and flow it down.
A cue to the band?
Praises to the Most High?
It was only later that she revealed that it meant nothing.
“Not everything has to mean something,” she said.
That is so simple and so profound: “Not everything has to mean something.”
Sometimes, you can just do some shit because you want to, not because it has some deep, heavy meaning. Maybe that’s in how you express yourself, how you recharge, how you dress, the words you choose to use when you’re feeling silly or carefree.
I believe she’s saying, don’t be afraid to be weird. And weirdness is lightness.
We need lightness —the healers, the psychics, the shamans, the empaths—we need lightness like we need water. Lightness is spiritual. Weirdness is spiritual. It helps guide us back to ourselves when we’ve lost the way.
Here’s how the rest of the beautiful summer night went:
She had us all shout our names into the full-moon night. I felt an overwhelming belief in myself. She reminded us, by way of her own realization, that everything we need is already within us, explaining that when she said she was born with $3.60 [in “On & On”], it meant she was born whole and complete.
And so are we. So am I. I left her performance very inspired and at peace.
It reminds me of a video I just watched about doing something out of the ordinary in order to timeline shift, similar to how Michelle Yeoh’s character in Everything Everywhere All at Once would do some whacky shit in order to go to another dimension.
The point is: You can bring yourself to higher timelines just by being unafraid to express something that comes straight from your spirit, whether it “means” something or not.
And just by virtue of you being you, it becomes sacred. It becomes a part of your unique expression—and then it does, in fact, come to mean something.
Do things because you want to. Do things because your intuition is telling you to. Do things because you feel it in your gut, even if it doesn’t make logical sense. That’s how you’ll find your way.
In conclusion, don’t think too hard (sometimes) when you’re on this healing journey. By continuing to tap into your heart, and get out of your head, you unlock realms of lightness and weirdness that will actually get you to where you need to go.
Be yourself, and do it with ease.