Julia Francis Is Here For Your Grief
She's a sound-healing practitioner and singer/songwriter with a unique understanding of women's wisdom.
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Hello Julia, and welcome to the Womancake interview! Please tell me how your day is going so far?
I am eight hours ahead of you in Ireland and I'm having quite a magical day. It's been three weeks driving around the country with my singing bowls, making sounds with the land and meeting some amazing people. I’m getting all kinds of insights about how to work with the ancestors, and how to bridge the other world with the world of the living, and how I'm being called to use sounds to help people to connect to their deeper selves into each other.
You’re a sound healing practitioner, you’re a singer-songwriter, and workshop facilitator. You have an extensive background in what I think of as the spiritual arts, and you are also the mom of a wonderful daughter. When you look out on the landscape of what’s happening with America right now, what are you most inspired by and what is most concerning to you?
I'm pretty called to be working in the grief space. I feel like particularly in our country, we have a long legacy of suffering and injustice. And I believe that true healing and reconciliation can't take place until we acknowledge and feel what has happened. So grieving, not only personally but in a communal experience, I feel is something that is desperately needed. Especially with the COVID experience, everyone is so hungry for connection, and has experienced firsthand what isolation can do. So there's a huge opportunity for healing, if we can really open to each other and also do away with the dualistic thinking that there's no place for us to meet and find common ground.
As a woman, I feel like I definitely can't help but come at my experience from that perspective. Of course, women's rights and freedoms are more endangered than ever, certainly in our lifetime. And there is so much wisdom, especially for women who are beyond childbearing years. I'm certainly approaching that stage, and I'm really excited to be embracing and sharing the wisdom that I have gained in my life. I feel like the wisdom that we have to offer the love, the compassion, the ability to hold safe and sacred space for people to be authentic, and vulnerable.
And how does wisdom manifest in your life at this time?
Relationship with self first of all. I have the ability to forgive myself, to have compassion for myself. If I can start there, then I can have compassion for others, whether it's a connection with some sort of higher power or a spirit or, or Mother Earth, whatever, you know, everyone has their own experience. Having some sort of connection that is beyond oneself, I think is really critical. And I'm grateful that I found a much deeper connection in my spiritual path during the Pandemic. I think that it's very easy in our society with social media and technology to think that every time we have an experience or a feeling that we need to immediately share it in order for it to be valid, or even exist. I'm enjoying the practice of, it's enough that I'm having the experience. I may or may not choose to share it, but it will impact others through my own actions and through my own awakening.
I think that’s excellent! The theme of our new issue is guilty pleasure. Do you have a philosophy about it, and some guilty pleasures that you'd like to share?
Wow, that's such a challenging one for me. Because I tend to think about working all the time, right? Like the opposite for me of working at this point is receiving, learning how to receive and open. Okay, this is ridiculous, but there's this skin care company that I won't mention by name, but they have a color correcting cream, a CC cream. And they have this marketing strategy where the women who use their products will post 30 to 60-second testimonials, where they put the cream on their face, and explain how it helps them and makes them feel better. And something about those videos is so delightful and calming to me. It's like this tiny window into this intimate moment with these women who are being open about the fact that you know, they have quote unquote flaws that they're trying to cover, and they explain why they have their flaws. I just feel like I understand who these people are in these tiny little commercials, and I just eat them up. Whenever I'm stressed out. I will play them and they just bring me comfort.
[Also], a delicious French buttery pastry, like a kouign amann. That's my favorite.
What is an aspect of your character that you've grown to love, and one that you still struggle with?
Well, I love that I feel like I want to share my experience with other people. Even though I've become more discerning with what I will share, I feel like that's why I'm here. I mean, we're all here for that reason, of course. But as a performer and a facilitator and someone who works in the healing arts space, I just gain so much pleasure from exchanging experience with other human beings.
I think [the struggle] is an abandonment story. Based on my own childhood experience, if something doesn't go my way, my immediate trigger is that there's nobody there, that I'm all alone in the world. And when that happens, I know I'm getting better as I get older at recognizing that voice and giving her love and comfort, and reminding her that it's not true anymore. But, you know, I feel it'll always be there. It's a part of my story. I don't expect it to go away, I just expect that my relationship to it is changing over time, right?
The other thing I gotta say that I find challenging is the competitive tape in my head. And it's usually with women, other women, right? Somebody else is doing something that I am doing or want to be doing, and the immediate thought is, “There's not enough for both of us to have it!” And then again, that's not true. That's an old story. That's an ancestral story, women are taught not to support each other. It’s a Patriarchal story.
Somebody else is doing something that I am doing or want to be doing, and the immediate thought is, “There's not enough for both of us to have it!”. That's not true. That's an old story. That's an ancestral story, women are taught not to support each other. It’s a Patriarchal story.
Will you share an event from your life that created a distinct before and after, and what kind of wisdom you gain from the after?
I had been feeling called throughout the Pandemic, as I was doing a lot of ancestor work. I know that's a large topic and means lots of things, but I was feeling called to go to Scotland. And I just found out that I had Scottish roots, which I'd never known before. So I went to Scotland and actually did a voice workshop while I was there at the Linkletter center in the Orkney Islands, and it was an amazing experience. But before I went to the workshop, I spent a week crawling in and out of 5000 year old ancient burial mounds. I'm someone who's always been very interested in the unseen world and have always felt jealous of other people who might have a very active direct connection with the unseen world that I didn't feel like I had. And while I was there, crawling around in these tombs and spending extended periods of time inside them by myself just singing, toning, just making sounds I heard voices from another dimension.
And it was like all my dreams coming true, like something I wanted all my life to feel like I had a direct connection. It certainly happened. It's hard to talk about it's a very intimate thing, to feel suddenly a connection to the ancestors and to know that because of that experience of hearing them and knowing that they heard me, feeling a calling to be a bridge between the worlds and to help people remember who we really are, and where we come from, and how we used to live and how we used to honor death as much as we honor life. So that was a huge awakening for me, feeling like some sort of veil had been, you know, taken away. And in the last few years, I've done a lot of traveling to ancient sacred sites and I experience hearing different frequencies that I had never heard before. So I think that really it's the auditory and the vibrational experience of the sensing worlds that we don't experience with our eyes necessarily. [It] set me on a completely different path that I never would have anticipated.
You know, I've been a singer songwriter for many, many years playing the guitar primarily. And the first time I ever played a singing bowl and sang with it, it was like coming home was like nothing else. There's something about the visceral experience of feeling the vibrations of my voice, meeting with the vibrations of the bowls and creating the harmonics and the overtones and feeling them right, feeling them in my body, and practically seeing the waves in the air that that really changed my perspective on why I have this voice and what I am called to do with it. It's not simply to entertain. It's to help reveal and to help others find their own voice.
Wow, so beautiful! Would you like to share anything about your perimenopause or menopause experience?
Yeah, I've had a lot of joint stiffness in the last two years in my hips, particularly a lot of tightness that I never had before. And sometimes I find myself, if I'm not paying attention, I suddenly feel like I'm walking like my grandmother or some old person, and that's terrifying. So again, having to bring another level of compassion to the experience and say, “Okay, I could be doing more yoga or activity, but also, no matter what I'm doing, there is a change happening in my body and can I be gentle and friendly with it instead of trying to push it away and pretend it's not happening?” I find Epsom salt baths at least three times a week are very helpful. Vocalizing during yoga like through the difficult movements where I feel pain. It's a lubricant, it helps me move through it, and helps to release more than I would otherwise.
Will you share a book, movie or life hack that you’re currently enjoying?
I'm reading this book right now called “The Stones of Aran Pilgrimage”, by Tim Robinson. It's a book about his many years living on the islands, and being so mesmerized and bewitched by that piece of land. The way that he writes about it, it's like the way the Georgia O'Keeffe paints, there's just so much specificity and passion and talking about the water and the stones. I am completely transfixed by that book. And it makes me want to write my own, about my relationship with the elements, and how all wisdom comes from the earth. We are nature, and the more we listen and interact with it, the more we gain.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Julia can be found via her website, and you should check out her amazing singing bowl sound treatments via her YouTube channel. She’s also a rip-roaring singer songwriter.
On the day I was preparing to interview Julia for Womancake I woke up with a weird tension in my solar plexus that seemed to drag on my breath. My usual morning meditation didn't do much to change the sitch, but over the course of talking with Julia I felt the tension dissipate, and I was able to breathe freely again. Some people are just magical, and she is one of them. Go to her website and look up her next sound healing events!