Valerie June on Magic, Healing, AI, and Her Guided Journal

Valerie June’s work can really feel prefer it’s being beamed in from someplace each far off and unusually acquainted. That could be as a result of from a younger age, she’s been channeling knowledge from the world round her, utilizing it to tell her music, then her poetry, and now an progressive new type of guided journal.

The artist, who is understood for her spirituality-infused roots- and blues-tinted folks, has now turned lots of the steps on her personal decades-long therapeutic journey into a brand new guide referred to as “Light Beams: A Workbook For Being Your Badass Self” ($20), which was launched on Sept. 19. It’s an interactive guide crammed with spells, prompts, reflections, and ideas on discovering peace and connection in a world that may appear useless set on fostering battle and disconnection.

For June, the guide was a pure response to the world’s strife, of which, as everyone knows, there’s a lot. “We are going through so many challenges, from climate change to worrying about AI and how that’s affecting anything from writing to acting to whatever else in this new world, and a lot of wars and things of that sort,” she tells POPSUGAR. Thinking about all of it, she started asking herself, “‘What could I do to share life and to connect people with joy and positivity and kindness?'”

The product of that query, “Light Beams,” is a repository of insights, practices, and ideas that June has cultivated through the years. “A lot of the practices started from me needing to create these little pockets of motivation and joy in my life,” she says. Her journey towards songwriting and publishing hasn’t been a linear or easy one, as journeys to inventive lives not often are. “I was a cleaning lady for seven years, and toilet cleaning was where I wrote a lot of my songs,” she remembers. But as her profession has taken off, she’s discovered herself eager to replicate a few of the issues which have helped her overcome numerous struggles again out into the world.

She’s additionally properly conscious of the nihilism that characterizes so many discussions about every little thing from local weather change to AI to psychological well being and past. But at any time when she hears folks insinuate that their lives, or our collective future, could be totally doomed, she finds herself trying to the previous. “I think about the time when Harriet Tubman was living and the struggles that she faced . . . I think about how she must have had these dreams of life,” June says. “She must have had these dreams and beliefs in something beautiful; and if she could do it in those hard times, you can’t tell me that we can’t do it.”

With “Light Beams,” she additionally needed to push again towards the individualism she’s seen suffusing the fashionable wellness house. She’s been doing religious practices lengthy earlier than they had been en vogue — “I used to be the weirdo witch,” she laughs — however she notes that lots of the wellness practices within the Western world at the moment are geared toward particular person therapeutic, not collective change. “I wanted to share practices that take us deeper, and that connect us with nature, that connect us with the water, that connect us with plants, that connect us with animals, but then connect us with each other, and even to the assh*le we don’t get along with,” she says.

“Light Beams” is pretty distinctive so far as wellness- and spirituality-focused books go as a result of it mentions social points, however June sees partaking with these greater issues as a essential a part of therapeutic, too. After all, June says, we’re all collectively creating our world whether or not we all know it or not, and June desires to remind her readers that all of us have the ability to outline what we see.

When it involves the web and AI, which she discusses within the guide, she says she needed to emphasise the truth that we really nonetheless have the flexibility to form these instruments into issues we would like. “Every time we click, every time we use our phones, we have an opportunity to use them in a mindful way and in a way that is lifting others up — or we have an opportunity to pour gasoline on fires that are being lit every single time we click on something,” she says. “Right here in this time period, we actually have the power to change the rhythms and the cycles of the algorithms in the way we search for things, or in the way we give attention to certain articles and not others.”

That alternative could not final perpetually. “We have a say now, and I don’t know if we will in the future,” she says. AI, for instance, is already exhibiting an inclination to undertake racist or sexist attitudes, however June desires to remind us that this does not need to be the case.

Instead, she says, “We can write the story of what it looks like. We can write the story of a more equal and just world.” AI might really be immensely useful, she provides, taking the load off difficult work just like the cleansing she used to do. “Then I, as a cleaning lady, could spend more time painting, dancing, and writing poems,” she displays. Of course, that is contingent on a system that may enable everybody to have their primary wants met, which June additionally is aware of is feasible. “I believe that there’s enough resources for all of us to have good healthcare; our dietary needs fulfilled; and clothing, food, and shelter and things of that sort,” she says. “I believe we have that here on this planet.”

Artists have an vital function to play on this journey as properly, she says, as a result of in any case, tales form the long run. Artists can create change “just by thinking about the stories that we’re giving people through our art. We can help people imagine what would look like if a city block was covered with beautiful flowers,” she says. “What does a future look like without some of the systems that keep us down and keep us oppressed? Show it in a film. Show it in songs. Show it in whatever way that we’re creative. Because if people who haven’t turned on their creative lamps can see it in their mind’s eye, then they can start to envision it, and it starts to become real and true.”

In America particularly, “what we do creatively, as a culture, it ripples to all the other nations,” she says. No matter the place on this planet we’re, although, every little thing we do on this life crops “seeds for what is to come. You can think about afterlives if you want to, or you can just think about those that are younger than you, and how all the things that we’re doing now will affect the time period that follows us,” she says. “We are going to be the ancestors one day.”

When it involves the tales she desires to depart on this planet, June’s thoughts turns to nature as a blueprint for what might be. “I want to see regenerative healing through nature and plants and awareness and respect for them. If we can begin to respect plants and nature and shift our patterns, then that shifts the way that the climate is changing and how fast,” she muses, emphasizing the significance of “the patterns that Indigenous tribes have, which show more respect for the land. Through respecting the land, we start to respect each other in a different way.”

Plants are a central theme in “Light Beams,” and typically, June says, crops have come to her in instances of want. Once, grieving after her father’s loss of life after a present, she stumbled out into the Texas desert and wound up collapsing beneath a tree. “That’s when that tree started talking to me, and that ancient wisdom came, and it said, ‘We always have you. We can always hold you. You can lean on us any time you want to,'” she remembers. Then there was the time that she returned house to search out her ex-husband had moved out, and she discovered solace within the resilient little plant nonetheless rising within the silence. These experiences impressed a bit in “Light Beams” about tree remedy and forest bathing, a Japanese observe that has been confirmed to assist with stress and well-being.

Throughout her life, June has typically discovered herself stumbling upon historical practices organically, stumbling upon deep insights by merely sitting and speaking to the moon as a toddler or gazing on the mild shining down on her crops. These downloads, she says, come to her the identical approach songs do — like items from some place else.

For now, she’s doing her greatest to share the insights she’s been given with the world, fusing them into her most up-to-date album, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers,” and her guide of poetry, “Maps For the Modern World.” Each certainly one of these artworks is studded with seeds, desires, and spells meant to spark little bits of illumination inside whoever encounters them. June hopes that the glow she’s cultivating can preserve spreading out into the world, and “Light Beams” is her newest effort to make that occur. After all, she says, change begins inside however ripples outward, particularly when shared.

Sometimes all you want to do is step again, hearken to the silence, and take a look at the world round you to see a distinct approach ahead. “A lot of the book is about creating mental space for some of these sweet wishes to start to plant seeds and to manifest,” she says. “If we have that, and if we have it in many minds collectively, that’s what creates the systems that we see.”

“Light Beams: A Workbook For Being Your Badass Self” is on the market for buy on Amazon now.