Black Creative Healing

Natasha and Adenike take a crucial moment to pause together and reflect on the past Season of Black Creative Healing, which - thanks to our new, shorter episodes model - has now spanned 15 episodes!

We are excited to share the conclusion of our healing justice in music therapy conversation that was held March 30th, 2023 between your hosts (Natasha & Adenike), Marisol Norris and Nsamu Moonga, Black music therapists. We deepen the exploration from previous excerpts of this conversation on healing happening in community to look specifically into the profession of music therapy. Marisol kicks us off by diving directly into this discussion of dissonance, and the profession of music therapy's difficulty with that construct. Listeners are invited to consider how you hold dissonance, how you hold conflict in your body, how you view it in your mind, and how it comes out in your actions and choices, whether or not you're part of the music therapy community!

In this third excerpt of our March 30th conversation on Healing Justice in Music Therapy, we expand on the idea of Healing in the now, as mentioned in the last episode, and dive deeper into the idea of healing forward, and healing as something that is done in community. Nsamu and Marisol share critical questions for us to consider, including what we allow into our bodies, how we hold it, and for what purposes, in order to help us distinguish between numbing and intentional healing. This excerpt from our discussion on Music Therapy closes with an emphasis on the role of community in healing, and how everyday rituals can help ground us in our bodies and our sense of place and wellbeing.

People and concepts mentioned in this episode:

Hello and welcome to the continuation of our Healing Justice in music therapy conversation featuring Nsamu Moonga and Marisol Norris! In this continuation of the conversation, we're gonna dive deeper into uncovering what some of the impact of White Supremacy is on our bodies, and why it matters to sit with those memories and sensations. CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains surface level discussion of white supremacist violence. You will hear a brief moment of us naming a particular type of violence, then inviting folks to sit with the realities of that naming for a moment of silence in our bodies. This section of the episode lasts no longer than 30 seconds.

Later in the episode, we hear Nsamu and Adenike in particular talk about the value of doing that kind of work and really just sitting with the complexities, then in future excerpts from this conversation we'll dive further into some of the dreaming and the sort of wonderful things that can come after you sit with those complexities.

We are excited to share the first excerpt from our Healing Justice in Music Therapy event, featuring music therapists Marisol Norris and Nsamu Moonga. In this excerpt, you'll hear Marisol, Adenike & Natasha spend some time discussing the role of fugitivity in the healing process. Stay tuned for future excerpts where we'll hear Nsamu and Marisol share insights on the pathologization of the Black Body, expand on the Wisdom of slowing down to feel things in our bodies, and more!

This event was hosted online March 30th of 2023. Members of our online community spaces we able to attend the event and retain access to the FULL recording, as well as opportunities for deeper dives into the many topics of discussion that were shared, only some of which will be made available for this podcast space! This episode also includes the announcement of our next major event, the Dissonance Ritual, which will build on the conversational spark ignited by the 3/30 Healing Justice event.

In this episode, Natasha reflects on the film Daughters of the Dust, by Julie Dash, relating it to recent conversations on Healing Justice in Music Therapy, and the importance of sitting with Dissonance and gathering as community/family for Ritual. The close of the episode features an original song that will be shared in our Community Spaces as an exclusive download!

We're excited to share with you the finale of our 4 part "HJ Bytes" series with Nsamu Moonga! Here, we conclude our conversation on the glorification of overwork and reliance on "mechanistic" ways of thinking about our fellow human beings, and the "tools" we use to serve them. We build on our previous discussions about imagination to center on the crucial nature of relationship building as an integral part of our work as therapists, and as community builders in general.

In this episode, Adenike takes a moment to reflect on a favorite Soca piece, Up you Mighty People! by Freetown Collective. She shares a little bit of information about Soca, the uniqueness of this piece within the genre, and provides a prompt for listeners to consider in the context of our recent conversations on white supremacy, healing justice and collective power.

Welcome to Healing Justice Byte #3, where we continue our conversation with Nsamu Moonga about the construct of Healing Justice as it relates to the profession of Music Therapy. We continue building on our concerns about "grind culture" and the way it is impacting how we teach and learn, particularly as it shows up in music therapy students in training. We critique our often obsessive relationship with our tools, and the deep necessity of just "holding space" for therapeutic relationships to develop.

We're excited to be bringing you the continuation of our conversation with Nsamu Moonga, Zambian Music Therapist, exploring the concept of healing justice. This week we talk about the constructs of work and imagination, and how the two can intersect and impact each other.

In this episode, Natasha reflects on the book Healing Justice Lineages, by Cara Page and Erica Woodland. She gives a brief overview of the content of the book, how it relates to the Healing Justice Bytes conversations we're having with Nsamu Moonga and other colleagues, and then shares some of what the book is motivating her to do, including the creation of a new playlist and related prompts for your own creative exploration of this topic!

Welcome to another episode of Black Creative Healing! A space for radical conversation, mindful collaboration, & holistic visioning centering Black Communities.

This week, Adenike & Natasha start a new short series titled "Healing Justice Bytes," featuring conversations with colleagues relating to the construct of Healing Justice in the context of the Music Therapy profession, as well as our world at large. We welcome back Episode 104 guest Nsamu Moonga, who provides a brief assessment of "what's up in the world" in relation to the construct of healing, the concept of "slowing down time," and what the process of embracing that which is "within the reach of every human soul" could bring to our world.

Welcome welcome welcome to the conclusion of our conversation at the joint conference between the American and Canadian Academies of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry! We're excited to share with you our third episode of February 2023 (and our third in this new experiment of dropping weekly content)!

We began in Part 1 with an arts-based grounding meditation, and last episode (Part 2) you got to hear us process a little bit more of what it means to be creative, even if you don't necessarily consider yourself a creative!

Welcome listeners to part two of our conversation at the joint conference between the American and Canadian Academies of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry! You're getting a new episode every week now from Black Creative Healing, and we're excited to share with you this week, the continuation of our conversation that was started last week with an arts-based grounding meditation.

We are beyond excited to share 2023's first episode of the BCH Podcast, which we've titled Black Creative Healing Live!

This episode was recorded at the joint conferences of the American and Canadian Academies of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and will be getting released weekly throughout the month of February.

In this episode we continue the recap of the June 2022 BCH Retreat. Shout out to kei slaughter (@keislaughter on Insta,@kei_slaughter on Twitter), Zelda Lockhart (@zelda.lockhart on Insta, @zeldalockhart on Twitter), and Hakeem Leonard (@musicallman across platforms), our retreat team for joining us for this conversation, and to Ben Great (@bengreat513 across platforms) for the remastering of our theme song!

This time, we go deeper into each retreat session, and share about our experiences with the amazing facilitators we had working with us! We close with what we will carry with us from this time together and what we hope to build in the future. If you've ever been curious about the nitty gritties of planning a retreat, or are looking for Black Creatives to work with and learn from, this little series is for you!

To follow and learn more about/from our amazing retreat facilitators, check out their Instagram handles below!

@itsjianjones

@zelda.lockhart

@wendimooreoneal

@keislaughter

@musicallman

@thegentlemanboss

@therealjoebaileyjr

In this episode we do a recap of the June 2022 BCH Retreat as part of documenting our process, both just for our own reflection and processing, as well as to help paint a general picture of what the retreat was, and the space that is still being held for our Black Community going forward! Shout out to kei slaughter, Zelda Lockhart, and Hakeem Leonard, our retreat team for joining us for this conversation, and to Ben Great for the remastering of our themesong! 

Stay tuned for part 2, where we go deeper into each retreat session, and share a little more about the amazing facilitators we had working with us! If you've ever been curious about the nitty gritties of planning a retreat, or are looking for Black Creatives to work with and learn from, this little series is for you!

Natasha & Adenike sit down with BCH Students Kalysta Bryant and Breanah Williams to reflect on a previously recorded conversation with our Retreat Planning Team members: kei slaughter, Zelda Lockhart and Hakeem Leonard. We share the Date for the retreat (June 3-5, 2022!) as well as other details around our process and progress.

Past Collaborators have already been invited to see inside the Sutra Space that we discuss here, but coming soon our general Black Community will also have an opportunity to see inside the space we’ll be using for our retreat, thanks to grant funds from the Pollination Project!

Ultimately our purpose with this episode is to provide insight into our progress and process, particularly the setting of intentions and the sacredness with which we are holding the space. These are elements we believe are valuable for anyone interested in cultivating care centered spaces!

This episode features your co-hosts as the guests! Adenike and Natasha take time to reflect on what drew them to creating and producing this podcast, and they share ideas for the vision of Black Creative Healing in general. They talk about their values, their work, lives and loves, and take a moment to discuss the importance of addressing grief and community from the center of their most precious relationships. The arts-based collaboration is one that you’ll become quite familiar with, as it is a rewrite of the theme song!

This episode invites listeners to join Natasha and Adenike in honoring and reflecting on the past two seasons as well as welcoming the possibilities that can manifest for season three. We hope you enjoy this collab as much as we did!

Welcome to Episode 204! This episode marks almost exactly 1 year since Black Creative Healing began as a podcast, and we’re marking that occasion by closing our 2ndseason with another multi-guest collaboration.

Yes, you heard right, this is our Season finale! More on that later J

Our guests for this collaboration are Jaia Cooper and Breanah Williams, who have been working alongside us this past semester as work study students from Shenandoah University. Both Jaia and Breanah are students in Shenandoah’s Music Therapy program, and we share our deepest thanks to their professor (and BCH collaborator Hakeem Leonard) for recommending them to us for this term!

Jaia and Breanah have been managing our social media throughout the semester, and introduced themselves early on with their own Instagram posts – they’ve also been behind many of the quotes and quizzes you’ve seen in our Instagram stories. Our conversation leaps right from their introductions into a topic that – unbeknownst to each of us - has been burning in our bellies for a long time to discuss: Abolition. So buckle up and prepare yourselves for a deep and much needed conversation, followed by some teasers of what you can expect in BCH Season 3!

We ditch the script for this episode and start with some frank discussions about the last month’s challenges and heartbreaks. We also take some time to thank all our supporters for helping us raise funds for Volcano Relief in St. Vincent! We remain tremendously grateful for all our BCH family, whether you support monetarily or in other ways. Every like & share matters!

This episode’s guest is Cynthia Francillon. Cynthia is a 30-year-old storyteller born and raised in the city of Brooklyn, NY, and currently residing in New Orleans, LA. A descendant of Haitian parents and a self prescribed maladaptive daydreamer, Cynthia believes storytelling + love are the threads that keep us going.

Across the mediums of fiction short stories, nonfictional essays, poetry, short/TV/feature film screenplays, stage + on-camera performance, and audio podcasting... Across genres of romance, magical realism, drama, and comedy… Cynthia asks and tries to answer the questions, “Who are we when no one is watching? Do we like those parts in the shadows? Why do we run from the tenderness we cannot and shouldn’t do without?”

Her stories feature Black girls/women/femmes exploring their growth as individuals through acts of intimacy with either themselves and/or their relationships with other women, whether it be familial, platonic, or romantic. You can find Cyn on Twitter as @cynfinite.

In our collaboration for Episode 203, Cynthia, Natasha & Adenike discuss the "big things" that happen when one moves away from home for the first time, the magic of places like New Orleans (which we discovered we'd all lived in before!) and how ancestral stories may serve - unbeknownst to us at the time - as the sparks that spur us onward in our lives.

This episode includes some exciting announcements as we look ahead towards the end of Season 2 in just a few months. So stay tuned for this episode (and those announcements) to drop soon!

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance.

Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016); and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017).

A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, she is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University. As an artist-scholar she coined the phrase, “choreography for the page,” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.

Nationwide and abroad she curates post-performance reflexive dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos, and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse.

Our guest's decades of experience are shared with Adenike and Natasha in an intimate conversation about the creative process, and the way racism pulls at the time and energy of Black people, particularly women/femmes. We also discuss embodiment, self-concept and more! Our collaboration culminates in a visceral vocal improvisation that we can't wait for y'all to hear! Check the BCH Study Room link in our bio for more on Brenda, with easy access to additional links from previous episodes!

Just in time for the end of Black History Month, our Newest Episode of #BlackCreativeHealing is NOW LIVE! #BCH201 Marisol Norris, Ph.D., is a board-certified music therapist, educator, consultant, and founder of the Black Music Therapy Network, Inc. In our collaboration for Black Creative Healing, Marisol, Adenike & Natasha explore concepts of Refusal and Solidarity. Our conversation and collective art making weaves through personal experiences with mindfulness of Consent & the potential for Harm. 

Our episodes now include INTERACTIVE Transcripts, meaning you can click the transcript link in our show notes and just read it, or you can listen to the episode alongside the transcript with text automatically highlighted as the episode plays to follow along! We can’t wait for you all to enjoy all the new things to come this season

Episode Description:

Our guest for this episode is Nsamu Moonga. You can read more about Nsamu via the bio below. In our collaboration for Black Creative Healing, Nsamu, Adenike & Natasha discuss colonialism's impact on African Diasporic Peoples, Indigenous perspectives on creativity, and share in an intimate exploration of affirming each other through music. Nsamu's definition of music is not to be missed!

Our guest this episode is Jenni Graham, LCAT, ATR-BC, MPS. Jenni is a Nationally Registered & Board Certified Art Therapist & has been working in the mental health field since 2005. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University & Pratt Institute; where she earned her BA in Psychology & her MPS in Art Therapy & Creativity Development respectively.

Jenni co-creates compassionate & empowering spaces of healing, liberation & connection by creating space for the full scope of human emotion through a lens of restorative mental & emotional wellness. 

In our collaboration, Adenike, Natasha & Jenni discuss the generational and collective aspects of trauma, as well as the power of art to help bring to the surface and integrate aspects of the self that we may not realize have always been there.