World Artists and their Story, 36 - Galitta Tassa

World Artists and their Story, 36 – Galitta Tassa
I speak Galitta Tassa, singer, voice artist and storyteller, in Lil Amsterdam, the Amstelpassage, in Amsterdam Central Station. While the lounge is playing music, she tells her story about the Happy Goddessa Guide and the Queen of Sheba.
Galitta, The Happy Goddessa, helps people on their journey to self-discovery and expression. She does that by letting people discover their inner voice. She wants to put people on a new track with a lot of inspiration. Soon she will publish a book entitled ‘The Princess who went looking for the moon’. It is part of the Queen Sheba Project 2019 with a book, a theater show, and a music album.

The Queen of Sheba
The voice and finding balance are central to this. “I teach people happiness, healing and peace through their voice. It is about balancing the God / dessa in you.” Why is the voice so important?
Galitta: “I believe that the voice is the best way to connect with your soul, with your own self-knowledge and to express your own unique self. That is the feminine and the masculine within ourselves. It is a unique way to go to the inner world. When you discover your subconscious world, you can then bring it out in any form. “
The Queen of Sheba, Queen Sheba, plays an important role in her own quest. Her encounter with Queen Sheba began 21 years ago. Galitta comes from an Israeli family of Yemeni origin and Queen Sheba also came from Yemen. Her kingdom extended to present Ethiopia. She went from Yemen to Jerusalem because she was impressed by Solomon, his wealth and, above all, his wisdom. Salomon, the founder of the Temple in Jerusalem, fell in love with her.

In the bible is her story and also in the Koran. Galitta, whose family settled in Israel in 1948, comes from the Salomon line. “He is my ancestor. He comes from the tribe of Judah, which my family is also a part of. I was born in Jerusalem, not so far from where the temple was.
Sheba gave Solomon a riddle. “He is the wisest king who ever lived. He understood the creation and how life was put together. She challenged his wisdom, and he loved that. He was a very gentle person. King Salomon is at the same time an energy with which you can make a spiritual connection. He let me go 21 years ago, when I had a crisis, so that I could be guided by the divine feminine power. “

One woman show
How did she end up in that crisis? Galitta: “I was born in a village in the mountains of Jerusalem, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. My village was built by Yemeni people, including my grandfather and grandmother. It had a lot of pomegranate trees, and many fig trees and lots of grapes. The soil was so fertile, it is a paradise. “
She was in a school with 12 pupils. Since her ninth she was asked to perform, for the village. She took special lessons for it. “I went to ballet classes, the western classical ballet. I was the only girl with a chubby physique and my Russian ballet teacher did not like that. I did that for four years. It changed my life. I went to Jerusalem twice a week, nobody in my village did that. “
And she also took drawing, painting and singing lessons. And jazz ballet with other dancers. “When I went to secondary school, I went to a special secondary school where, besides the normal subjects, I did an art part: graphic design. For three years I had lessons in painting, drawing and graphic art, I still do that. I have illustrated my book ‘How Sheba became Queen’ myself. “

She also did theater, and, like everyone else in Israel, had to go to the army. “I was in the agricultural part of the army.” And when she came out of the army she went to work in entertainment performances, with dance, song and music theater. However, there was tragedy in the family, which was so painful for her that she saw only one way out: away, going abroad. It was Amsterdam. She was 21. She thought she was gone for three months and then back to Israel.
She stayed longer than expected in Amsterdam. She fell in love with the man she is still with, 28 years later. She continued on the path of the music performance. “In Amsterdam I wrote my first one-woman show, I wrote the story, the script, chose the music, different jazz songs, and did the performance, together with a pianist, in Amsterdam in theater De Suikerhof.”

Knight on the horse
Because it was difficult to get into the ‘theater circus’ – for that she did not have enough control over the Dutch language – she changed her format. “Instead of theater, I made a lounge act, where I sang the same songs. I added more musicians, then two singers and then I made a whole show. In a few years we had grown to a crew of 21 people. And then I collapsed. “
It took a long time before she found the balance in herself. “I had a burnout of two years, I did not see anyone, I stopped my company, I lost everything. It was a critical point for me. When I tried to understand what had happened to me, I felt that I had been broken into pieces. That had to do with everything that had happened to my family in Israel, everything that had happened to my mother, everything that had ever happened in my genetic line and everything that happened in my soul. How do I get it together, I wondered? “
An image appeared on which she saw herself riding on a horse, as a man, with a knife in her hand. “A knight. That was my male side, that was my inner king. But when I looked down from the horse I saw a rope and a queen who was dragged to the ground. She could not keep up with the horse’s pace and had fallen. It was immediately clear to me that it was me. The male part of my personality had set aside the feminine side. I understood what it meant, because when I did my last musical production I had a team of 21 people. I was in negotiation with a difficult customer. It was about a big contract, I had to make a whole show in two months. I wrote it, I produced it, I worked with the team. I was completely a knight. And the knight saw nothing, except that he had to go on. That is the male power (Yang). “

Female power
Her female power (Yin) was completely overrun. “The female power is a vitality in itself, there is no need for any performance whatsoever. It is a very creative vitality. I had to destroy my peace of mind and my composure to act as a knight. That did not work out well. When I saw that image, I began to understand that the balance between the feminine and the masculine was broken not only with me, but on the entire planet. Women have been marginalized for thousands of years. Now I come back to an old story, about Jerusalem, the city where I was born – Jewish people have prayed for thousands of years, every day, and in prayer they said: next year in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the place where the Temple of Salomon was. The Temple of Salomon is about the metaphysical light on the planet. It does not only apply to Jewish people, it is for the earth, the whole planet. 2,000 years ago the Temple was destroyed, and since then the female power has been captured under the place where the Temple is. “
But right now that feminine power can be done justice again, according to Galitta. “We have now arrived in the Age of Consciousness, in astrology they call it The Age of Aquarius, the Aquarian age. It is the age when Mankind begins to lift itself out of slavery and begins to awaken, and the female gets the opportunity to come back. We are now in transition, do you see what is happening in the world? The old dies and the new is born. Donald Trump is a perfect example of the world we no longer want. We do not want patriarchy, we want balance, we want harmony, we want everyone to fulfill their potential. A world that is either patriarchal or matriarchal does not work. The goal of us people as a species is to find a balance. And it starts with yourself. I was first a knight who dragged his wife on the ground and the next 21 years I processed that to come stronger out of it. The strength that I have found, of the whole female goddess, is in everything that I have been working on. In my music, in the book of Sheba that appears this year. The entire Happy Goddessa Guide, everything I teach people to find happiness, healing and peace through their voices, is about balancing the God / dessa in you. And when you are in balance yourself, your family is in balance, even if it falls apart. “

The voice
Why does she give such a big role to the voice? “I was looking for healing because my life was broken. I discovered more when I went to the subconscious, explored the subconscious and expressed it through the arts. That is really my thing. I believe that the voice is the best way to connect with your soul, with your own self-knowledge and your own unique way of expressing yourself. It is the feminine and the masculine within ourselves. It is unique to enter that inner world, to your inner kingdom, especially to the feminine part, there it is magnetic. Once you have come to know that subconscious world, you can bring it out with the masculine power: you make something, you produce things, you write a book, you express something in your own unique way. “
She has a lot to tell about the voice. “Because I am a singer, but when I was a child, I did not have a voice. While all my family members are great singers, with nice voices. I started to act anyway when I was nine, everyone wanted me to perform, but I could not sing. And I wanted to sing. I could not sing, I now know as an adult, because a person has more voices, not just the physical voice. When I tried to restore my physical voice, I discovered that it was not just my practical, physical voice, which had to do with how I breathed. I discovered that I mainly felt pain in my emotional body, because I caught the pain of my whole family, that’s why I could not breathe and did not sing. When I finally succeeded, I bubbled over with energy. I had found my strength.” She has called her method ‘Voice Medicine’. “In addition to the physical voice, there is the inner voice, the mental voice, the thoughts and the conversations in your head. Finally, the voice of your own emotion, which vibrates. In my method I focus the healing especially on the emotional voice. So when I tried to restore my physical voice, I discovered that it was not just my practical voice, but how did I breathe? I discovered that I had so much pain in my emotional body, because I caught the pain of my entire family, that I could not breathe, I could not sing. When I succeeded, I burst with energy. Finding your voice is the ultimate way to find your own strength. “

Before her crisis, she sang jazz songs and big band music songs. “When I found my own voice, I started to write my own music and my own songs. And I started writing stories and making illustrations about the Sheba book, I opened up the whole world of creativity. “
How old was she when the crisis took place? “I was 28, interesting, now I know more about the age of 28, when we are 28 we all go through a kind of transformation, I know of astrology. It is connected to your birth. Saturn is coming back. Something falls apart and something is born. “
A few years after her burnout she started giving workshops and a healing session to groups and people separately. “Instead of being a show performer, I started to sing and make music that went back to the songs of my tribe. I mixed that with electronics. I was interested in the power of sound. Sound and music could heal us and connect us to the bigger picture. “
“I developed a method of discovering who we are with the four voices that each person has at his disposal. I set up the ‘Fertile Ground Studio’ in Amsterdam East and for several years I supported this movement to raise awareness, with many beautiful pioneers. We used art and ancient healing methods such as shamanism, healing tao, yoga, Theta healing and much more. It was a fruitful time and the deep work that I started with the necessary pain and effort, but also a lot of fun about the ‘wo/menhood’, led to the birth of Happy Goddessa.”

Center of all duality
How would she describe her central theme? “I seek the center of all duality, I always look at how I can find the centered balance point between extremes, of myself, of others and of the world. This also means the balance between Eastern culture, religious, and Western culture, secular. Life in a city, but being born in a village. The balance between entrepreneur and artist. The balance between your female and your male side. The first song I started writing was ‘Woman or man’, am I a woman or a man? I am in this way like a man, and in that way like a woman. Now 15 years later, I see in all my work, everything that has to do with Happy Goddessa, the book of Queen Sheba, a search for the center. It is a spiritual reflex on the holy union between Yin and Yang, Night and Day, Sun and Moon, Heaven and Earth.”
Does she, finally, have a nice philosophical conclusion? She has. “I once had a discussion with a sculptor. He made a statue for a municipality in the Netherlands about the Yugoslav war, which was terrible. He made a statue full of metal and sharp edges. He did so because he was in pain about the war in Yugoslavia. When the statue was revealed in the neighborhood, the neighborhood was confused. They said: our children are going to play here. We do not like this sculpture, it is terrible. But the artist said: I am an artist. With this image I show my frustration and my pain about the war. His family died in the Holocaust. For him it was very personal what happened in Yugoslavia. He’s right, it’s his art. The question is, however, is it his job as an artist to duplicate the pain of the horror of the war or to give an image to the neighborhood that gives hope? In my opinion it is the task of the artists to uplift, to awaken people for the possibilities to shine themselves. Art should bring you up, even if you want to show an injustice. “

http://happygoddessa.com/
http://galitta.com/
https://www.facebook.com/HappyGoddessa/
Video: https://vimeo.com/157759436

https://ifthenisnow.eu/nl/verhalen/de-wereld-van-de-amsterdamse-kunstenaar-40-galitta-tassa