Teyana Taylor has so much to celebrate. Not only did her new project The Album just drop generating positive reviews, but she’s also expecting her second daughter with husband Iman Shumpert. Even in the midst of so much good news, the artist, like all of us, is tasked with staying positive these days.
Taylor recently appeared on Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, revealing that the social unrest sparked by the deaths of police brutality victims like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor has put an emotional strain on her. She’s using meditation as a way to stay calm and avoid passing the negative energy to her unborn baby.
“The pandemic was ok because I was able to lock in and perfectly sequence out my album,” said Taylor. “It was everything else that started happening to our people is when shit got really really rough for me. Everything that was going on and me being pregnant was very tough because that rage and hurt that we felt, I felt that times twenty. As a pregnant woman being super emotional, I couldn’t even stomach more than half the things I was watching. It was a lot for me.”
She goes on to say that meditation as been her saving grace during this pregnancy. “[I’ve been] recentering myself and praying for my Black child, my Black husband, my Black people…the families that are losing family members…I created a whole meditation area on my balcony. Even Junie comes out and says, ‘mom, are we meditating today?'”
When asked what she tells her four-year-old daughter Junie about the racial tension in America right now, Taylor says she tries to preserve her child’s innocence while also being transparent. “I’m teaching her what’s love and what’s hate rather than who’s black and who’s white, because racism is taught. But she needs to know not to be naive as well. She needs to know that [she is] a brown girl. She has curly, coily hair, and [she will] embrace that.”
Taylor announced her pregnancy last week in the video for “Wake Up Love” featuring Shumpert. She says her due date is October 3rd, and she’s prepared to keep working and shooting videos up until her delivery.
Watch Teyana Taylor’s full Breakfast Club interview below: