Opera singer Bryan Garcia and tattoo artist SaraEmma Regalado have something rare in common. Both use their creative skills to foster self-healing in the recovery community. Coming from harsh beginnings and troubled histories of substance abuse, they are each bursting with enthusiasm as they ramp up their efforts to share the healing power and joy of artistic self-expression.
Garcia, an addiction counselor at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Center City, MN, uses a diverse musical toolkit, ranging from operatic arias to drum circles, to help patients surface and express clogged emotions. His hope is to build music therapy into more treatment settings.
Regalado sees her tattoo work, one of her many art forms, as a way to honor people’s stories with body markings that reflect landmark moments in recovery or other changes in their life. On social media, she’s become a hit with videos she makes of herself creating art, offering viewers a quirky kind of high-speed meditation experience. Regalado recently joined with other artists, many in recovery, to form Unified Theory Collective, which opened its doors in June in Uptown in Minneapolis. Artists and others in the community can come there to experience art making, with little or no cost.
Looking good while feeling bad
Garcia wasn’t born into a classical music world. He grew up on the poor side of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in a family just scraping by after his father walked out on them. Though a whiz in school, “I always felt kind of awkward,” he says. “Nerdy, like I wasn’t enough.” Once in high school, he had plans for how to feel better.
“I remember walking into high school and saying to myself, ‘OK, I know that there’s alcohol, drugs, sex, and I’m going to find it all,’” he says. “And that was really what I did.”
Stripped naked and in a cell alone for a day, he came to consider for the first time that he might be an alcoholic.With an easy talent for music, Garcia was already in a band in fourth grade. That talent, plus his knack for getting his hands on booze―stolen at times, made him the guy other kids wanted to be around. He also aced his academics and did well in choir and band.
“A really good cover,” he calls it.
At age 15, he got his first addictive buzz.
“The first time that I took a drink and the first time that I smoked weed,” he says, “I just felt all this tension―you know, like, my dad wasn’t there, and we don’t have enough money and I’m not cool enough ―I just felt it all relax, and it just all made sense. So, I chased that.”
Pursuing drugs, sex, and money continued in college and also in graduate school, where he pursued operatic singing. When his substance use led to run-ins with the law, he skated through the experience cleverly, using “alcoholic math”―carefully timing his drinking episodes between urine tests while on probation.
He was aware, however, that his drug use was ruining his singing voice. After failing at a major, juried vocal presentation in his grad program, he was at risk for getting kicked out.
His path to sobriety began after blacking out at a party and landing in jail on the suicide watch. Stripped naked and in a cell alone for a day, he came to consider for the first time that he might be an alcoholic. Then, after being released into the general prisoner population, he experienced a fortunate loss.
A loss that was a win
“I was playing chess with this guy,” Garcia says, “and just kind of as a joke, he says, ‘OK, if I win, you’ve got to bail me out.’ And he beats me up and down.” After Garcia was released, sitting at home alone with his thoughts, he decided he had to do something useful. He called a cab and headed to the jail to post bail for the chess winner. He started telling the cab driver his plans, and his whole story poured out of him.
“And then I say these magic words,” recalls Garcia. “You know, I think I’m an alcoholic and I need to get sober. And he kind of perks up, and he says, ‘You’re an alcoholic? Well, I’m an alcoholic.’ And he says, ‘If you want, I know a place that can help get you sober. I’ll take you there and I won’t even charge you.’” The driver gave Garcia his card. Two days later, in June 2015, the cabbie drove Garcia to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, introducing him to the world of recovery.
“I’m also someone who lives with mental illness along with addiction,” he says, and plenty of therapy was needed. He began experiencing his music as more of a mindfulness practice, “having to play something a thousand times just to try to get it right, but being OK if it’s not,” he says.
Music makes its patient debut
After completing his graduate music studies, Garcia also earned a graduate degree in addiction counseling. Two years ago, he came to Hazelden to begin his counseling work. A patient who spotted Garcia’s music degree certificate on his office wall asked about his music background. Word quickly spread among patients that he was a classically trained opera singer. They wanted to hear him sing. He wondered, too, if music might help his patients in some way, so occasionally he would open a group session with an operatic aria. He noticed that the music was opening up emotional vistas for patients, and soon he was running drum circles to start group time. Before long, he became so excited about how the patients were benefiting that he plunged into exploring music therapy models, and he is now making plans to pursue formal studies in music therapy. Recently he started offering Saturday music workshops as an extra benefit for patients.
In the drum circles, the patients check in by giving their name and an emotion they are feeling, then give that feeling a sound on the drum. From there, starting with simple rhythms, the group moves into playing on the drums together, filling the room with a kind of group heartbeat that captures everyone’s attention and connects them as only music can. That kind of connection is at the heart of recovery, he says.
Garcia emphasizes both this connection and mindfulness by asking them, “OK, while we were playing drums, did anybody care about anybody else’s religious preference? What about their politics? Did anybody care? You know, did anybody worry about anyone’s sexual identity, gender identity, anything like that? We were all just here, playing drums and connected.”
He also asks if, while they were playing, they were worried about their legal, family, or other problems, or concerned about guilt or shame. The answer is usually no. “I’ll hit home that that was a mindfulness practice. You were OK for a short period of time. You were just in the moment, and you were OK.”
Garcia makes use of a variety of music exercises with patients, all of which help them access and express what they are feeling and discovering. Patients may work together in small groups to write a song and share it, or they may be asked to describe how someone else’s musical moment affected them.
In his first Saturday workshop, one patient said he’d always wanted to perform in front of a group but would get too high or drunk to do it. That Saturday he got his wish, along with plenty of cheers and applause. Another patient had been waiting 20 years to perform an aria. The group welcomed his spontaneous, a cappella performance.
Garcia believes that music has another benefit for patients, offering lessons that also apply more broadly to recovery. Both recovery and making good music, says Garcia, “take time and practice and a willingness to see the stumbling blocks. It may be slow, or something may just click, and you’ll get it. But it always takes practice, daily practice.”
Artistic movement slows her down
As a child, SaraEmma Regalado spent tons of time making pictures. Drawing with colored pencils was a “soothing thing” for her, she says.
“I was a pretty anxious kid, and so whenever I was feeling that anxiety, I found comfort in that rhythmic movement of coloring.”
Regalado was raised by a single mother, living with her in a battered women’s shelter for a time when they first arrived in Minnesota.
Having that creative outlet really helped me to reframe a lot of my story and let out the emotions of that story that I couldn’t necessarily voice to people before.“It was really tough, because she was raising two kids on her own, trying to put herself through school and work a full-time job. She was very active in the LGBTQ space, and back then it wasn’t so accepted. I kind of fell into my own space of wanting to belong and went from zero to 60 with drugs and alcohol.
It took a long time and a bracing moment with Regalado’s own three-year-old to break from that life.
“It was really just this moment of her looking up at me and asking me why I had sad eyes,” she recalls. “I felt like she was like peering into my soul, like I was seeing myself as a child and realizing that I needed to become the mother that I needed as a kid.” The moment propelled Regalado into getting sober. She went to meetings every day, found a 12-Step sponsor, and sought out therapy and other support services that included art.
“Having that creative outlet really helped me to reframe a lot of my story and let out the emotions of that story that I couldn’t necessarily voice to people before,” she says.
Now a mother of three children and twelve years into recovery, art is still her go-to source of comfort. “It’s become like a moving meditation for me, practicing art.” Its calming effect has been a support in her recovery from drug and eating addictions, and it helped her get through the stresses of the pandemic. “I’m focusing so much on what is present that I, like, physically and mentally go there into that space,” she says.
Though she had avoided art as a career path initially, fearful of being unable to make a living. Regalado’s art making has exploded into a wide range of media uses from painting commissioned portraits to creating tattoos. For a time, she used her artistic moxie as the creative director at the non-profit Minnesota Recovery Connection.
A creative partnership with clients
She refers to tattooing as “the most challenging art form that I’ve had to learn, but it’s been really, really nice being able to help people rewrite their stories, their narratives, with art on their bodies.” Clients, says Regalado, usually come in wanting to mark something intimately meaningful on their bodies, such as an expression of their identity or a rite of passage. A person in recovery might want a tattoo of their recovery date or a clock image to represent 24 hours of recovery each day. “It can be a way to reclaim our bodies in a very creative and artful way.”
She considers it “a privilege to share such an intimate space with someone―and hear their story,” she says. “People are very vulnerable when they’re in a chair and getting a tattoo.”
“Whether someone privately commissions me or I’m doing a tattoo for somebody, it’s all about a collaboration,” she says. In her conversations with clients, she tunes in to what images and stories arise, and she works with clients to find the right creative visual interpretations to reflect these themes.
Regalado drew on her go-to art practice to work through what she describes as her own “turbulence” when coming out as bisexual. “Creating with art was a way of really sitting down and finding peace within myself,” she says, “while also being able to create more space and room for what was shame to now become something of a strength.”
Creating community and giving back
A passion for sharing with others the healing aspects of art making and also her love of collaboration prompted Regalado to get on board with another tattoo artist, Willard Malebear, Jr., who has been pulling together a group of artists to form Unified Theory Collective. These artists see the space on Hennepin Avenue as a kind of community center where art making and collaborative healing experiences are available for both personal and social change. Both amateur and professional artists are welcome.
“Our goal,” she says, “is to be able to provide free art supplies to the community and to be a main source of wellness for not just people in recovery, but those just in the area that want to have a safe and drug-free art space to use those tools and maybe learn from other professional artists.”
Anyone can drop in anytime and find a way to create and learn during its open hours on Wednesday through Saturdays. Scheduled creative events are also planned, and the space is open for use by private community events as well. Business and individual members and nonprofit partners, especially recovery organizations, help finance the operation. The artists in the collective are also available to go into organizations to create commissioned art or lead art making events.
For Regalado, it’s a place where she can give back to others what art has given to her. “It’s just so fulfilling,” she says. “It feels very full circle.”
Pat Samples, is a Twin Cities freelance writer, writing coach, and somatic coach. Her website is patsamples.com.
Last Updated on July 15, 2023