Author: Ifayinka

Each day when I enter my sanctuary, my place of prayer, I take a moment to sit still. I still my mind, so that I can feel the spirit of divinity and embrace it as it flows through me. I feel the presence of my Egun. I feel the support of my Egbe. I feel the power of my Ori. I feel the strength of Orisa.

Then when the time is right, I speak. I call it prayer.

Spoken words have power. Spoken words carry the energy of the deepest desires of our hearts and places them in the atmosphere. Spoken words call on the universe to hear and obey. Our intentions are packaged in the words we speak.

One thing I have learned about prayer is that it helps me to bring myself to a place of acceptance of what is. Prayer changes me. I let go of the expectation of prayer changing anyone or anything else. I learned this very valuable lesson on the night of my daughter’s automobile accident. After getting the phone call that she had been seriously hurt, the very first thing I did was fall to my knees and pray. I begged God to spare her life. My daughter died that night and I stopped praying for years after.

As I now understand, a more effective prayer would have been one asking for the courage to accept what I felt in the core of me was unacceptable. It took me a while to understand that my daughter’s path had led her to the end of her natural life and mine had not. I was advised by several people not to question God. I did not grant that request. I questioned everything, especially God and I am glad that I did. In allowing myself the freedom to question, I was able to go through the painful process of grieving without guilt or fear of where it would lead me. I learned how to be comfortable with my reality and speak the truth of what was living deep within.

Little did I know at the time that I was building a firm foundation of being able to reach in and pull out the truth, regardless of what it is, without criticism. I was learning how to live through a situation in which I had no power to change and ask for and focus on what I could. It forced me to place my energy into what I could do and learn to ask for the strength and courage to do it. I had to learn to speak for what I knew I needed to heal.

Now that prayer has become a critical part of my everyday life, I am learning how to pray effectively. I am learning to speak and pray for what is necessary for me to learn, grow, thrive, survive, accept, embrace and change.

I am finding that these prayers are always heard and always accepted. Ase.

Today started off as a crappy day. I mean it was one of those days where I needed a moment before entering my shrine room to pray because I just didn’t know what to pray for. It started as one of those days where you wake up and just feel out of yourself. Nothing feels solid or concrete. It was almost like I was watching myself fumbling around carrying out my morning routine. After a minute or so, I was able to pray and I gained some clarity. There are things that are floating around in my mind, somewhere between conscious and subconscious. The kind of things/ situations that you stick on the back burner and let simmer while you tend to more pertinent things/ situations. You know all along that they are there because you can smell their brew but your hands are full with other things/ situations. There is a thin line between slow cooking and negligence. I was bordering on negligence and my inner spirit was like “Umm, sis. You had better tend to this before something is burned or ruined.”

Now, it took me a while to get there. It took some self talk. It took a petty argument with my husband over semantics. It took some tears while listening to old songs. It took a few episodes of trashy television playing in the background while I played games on my phone. Then some more self talk. Finally I grew the courage to confront me. I was ultimately the things/situations that had to be dealt with.

Sometimes when we get hurt, we automatically think of ourselves as weak and we tend to fall into weak behavior and thoughts. We forget that it takes tremendous strength to truly care for someone enough that we stand vulnerable and naked before them. Being more concerned with self righteousness than compassion is the epitome of weakness and has no legitimate place in the intimacy of our inner being and higher consciousness.

I was faced with these truths as I sat on the side of my bed in quiet reflection. I had a decision to make. I could turn towards the goodness and truth of spirit that I was guided to see. I know that love and acceptance are my strength. I gain absolutely nothing by focusing my attention on someone else being broken and hurting themselves. It is wisdom to know that people are people. We are all capable of darkness, mistakes and missteps but we are all deserving of forgiveness and love. That is my truth. That is what I must obey in my life. There is no harm in me loving another human even if our things/ situations are never spoken of or resolved. Life doesn’t always give us the time to do that. It does allow for me to want the highest of blessings for everyone because what else could I possibly want for any life if not that? This is what will truly render peace for me.

So I pulled those things/ situations from the back burner. I dumped out what needed to be dumped out from my own heart. I salvaged what I could in my own mind. I washed the pots they brewed in and I placed them somewhere clean and safe. I placed them at the feet of my Orisa. I know that there they will serve as health and nourishment for me. Ase.

There have been many times in my life where I have felt broken and shallow inside. The brokenness was usually caused by the realization that an expectation that I had put all of my hopes and dreams into had failed. It had broken. Most of the time when nursing that feeling of brokenness, I found that I had a tendency to want to find who had let me down and how their failure to be or do as I had expected was the grave error in the breaking of me.

After a while when finding no one else to blame for my brokenness, I started trying to find ways to soothe and mask the pain of what was going on inside of me. One of the many ways I attempted this was to fix or sharpen every material aspect of my life. I made sure to put my energy into earning enough finances so that I could afford to have the best outward appearance. I wanted to look in the mirror and see someone who was well put together despite all of the brokenness inside. I wanted to make sure I had the best hair, clothes, shoes, home, electronics, food, smile (even practicing it at times) I made sure to perfect my manners, my voice, how to show that I was listening attentively when someone was speaking, clean and organize everything around me except for the spirit within me. I chose instead to feed and nurture “Miss Material”. I had created the false sense of security in believing that this was me taking control of my situation and bettering myself.

I don’t remember the moment that I realized that this was not working. Maybe it was all of the hours I lay in bed awake at night with my inner thoughts, left alone with myself. I was forced to re-play every situation, event, moment that played a hand in the hurt and brokenness I felt. In that process, I decided to take an honest look at me. I put my spirit in the mirror. I took a look at my thought patterns. I investigated my spiritual face and all of the spiritual make-up I had invested in to hide my true self. I felt the suffocation of my spirit from being pushed in a box to make room for what I wanted to appear to be on the outside. I saw the broken limbs and bruises of my being from all of the times I had beaten myself for not accepting my choices and thought it better to punish myself while blaming others. I was exhausted. I realized the more I relied on Miss Material to soothe my outer being, my inner being was getting sicker.

I knew I had to start working towards a healthy and balanced me. I had to make sure that I placed as much attention and focus on who I was inside as I did on who I wanted to appear to be on the outside.

This was very difficult work. The first task was to get rid of the trash. I had to get rid of the comfort of blaming others. I had to get rid of self hatred and self doubt. I had to learn to accept my choices regardless of the consequence they brought. I had to let go of self righteousness and my own self serving indulgences. I had to embrace humility and learn to listen. I had to learn how to feel things that were not pleasant to feel and learn not to dismiss them for not stroking my ego.I had to learn how to appreciate every single blessing, down to what seemed the smallest of things.  It felt like an every moment type of workout but I was determined. It seemed the more I worked on being a better me the more work there was to do but I continued. I continue to this very day. It isn’t always easy but is not hard anymore. It is just the way I am choosing to live. I am choosing to put the same energy into taking good care of my inner self as I do in taking care of the outer.

I have lived in the way of believing in religion void of spirit.

I have lived in the way of believing that spirit does not need religion.

I have come to find out that both must coexist inside of me for harmony, peace and balance.

I remember oh so well my younger sister and I. We must have been about the ages of two and three, we would have the most meaningful conversations with each other there in the dark, in the safety of our grandmother’s bed. We often spoke of being together before coming to “This place”. We had the idea that I came first to see if it was safe and I then went back to get her and she came. That is how I got to be the older sister, so we thought and believed until we were taught otherwise. I often wonder about those memories we seemed to share long before our minds were tainted by the understanding of others. My forty year old mind tries hard to remember the details of those days. I remember the dark. I remember feeling safe. I remember feeling like my sister was the only person who knew about the place we were before we came to what we later understood to be our earthly existence. My sister Roberta and I, grew to have such a deep understanding of each other that most often we only needed one word or a certain glance of the eye to communicate. We knew how to speak to each other without using words. We were able to tell what the other was thinking and how the other was feeling. As we grew, we learned that not all of the people in our lives shared this connection with the two of us. Whatever we were told we filtered through each other. The older we became the further we drifted from this way of relating to each other but the connection was so strong that it lasted through her natural death.

Our first introduction to words like God, heaven, hell, sin…etc was through church. We were raised to believe the doctrine of christianity. I remember it took us a while to understand all of the rules of who was who and what was what but plenty of Sunday school and children’s bible story books helped to get us there. We would talk in our safe place about God and what He had the power to do. We were too young to distinguish God from the man who was preaching about God in the pulpit. I remember we referred to that man as God until our grandmother discovered that is who we were referring to and quickly set us straight. I guess we were learning religion. I learned that God wanted you to be good. God wanted you to listen to the grown- ups. God wanted you to go to church and sing and listen to the long boring messages and if you did all of these things, then you would go to this wonderful place called heaven. Simple enough? Well not so much in what became my complicated life. Here was the thing, no matter how much I did these things, there was this sadness I felt deep inside because I was separated from my parents. I was far too young to understand why. I remember when one of my parents would leave my grandmother’s house from visiting with me and my sister, I would scream, cry, fall out on the floor and kick. I would do this until exhaustion. My grandmother, out of her own frustration over the situation would spank me which forced me to suppress the emotional trauma I was experiencing. Then one time when I was at church, there was a visiting evangelist. She spoke about prayer in a way I had not understood prayer before. My grandmother taught me to say “The Lord’s Prayer” before going to bed but this woman spoke of asking God for what you wanted and God making it happen for you. I remember going to that alter and begging God to give me my mom and my dad. I cried, I pleaded and the only person I told about that prayer was my sister. God sent my mother home to us for a few weeks after that but she didn’t stick around. I overheard my mother talking to my aunt, she was expressing her desire to leave and I responded by setting her closet on fire. Thank goodness no one was hurt. Setting the fire did not solve anything. My mother left us again. What could God do for me now?

I learned religion well but it was empty of spiritual belief. I went to church because I had to go to church. I prayed. I shouted. I learned Bible verses. I sang on the choir. Inside, I was numb. There was no connection for me with the things that were happening in my young life and church. I could not find God there. God had let me down. God was allowing terrible things to happen to me. This was a child’s way of thinking and I was a child. There were people who tried to reach me but they did not realize that I had sunken deep into my resentment of church, God and all things holy long before they even noticed that something might be wrong. I made friends in church. I enjoyed singing and the feeling of praising but nothing in my life reflected that type of joy. I was a miserable child who was getting molested, who hated school because my intelligence was not appreciated. In school I was just another black girl and expected to act like one, whatever that was. There were too many adults in my house who were involved heavily in their own lives to cater to my cares. My grandmother whom I adored was overwhelmed and emotionally unavailable for me. God, well, God just wasn’t real for me anymore. I dare not say I didn’t believe in God but that was only because of my fear of hell but, I did not believe in God. Even when my mother returned to our lives and made a positive change to rehabilitate from heroin addiction and a life prostitution to raise us. Even when finally I was allowed to spend quality time with my father who only fed me truth positivity. Even when the man who was sexually assaulting me on a regular basis went to prison. I just did not believe.

At the age of fourteen, I found God again. This time God came in the form of a new religion, Islam. This time God answered my prayers and responded to them. God taught me to forgive. God taught me to value myself. God taught me to take care of everything I was blessed with. God healed my brokenness. My prayers were no longer empty. My tears were no longer tears of entrapment and hurt. My tears flowed because I was blessed. I fell in love with God. I wanted nothing more than to walk with God. I prayed and I asked God to remove anything that was in the way of our love affair. God removed me from the religion of Islam. God removed my marriage and replaced it with showing me how to love the man who had been my partner and father to my children. God returned me to my own father. My father taught me about spirit. My father taught me that God is Divine Love and Divine Wisdom and that there is no such thing as one absent of the other. My father taught me that The Divine is life. My father taught me that I live what I believe. My father taught me that I am responsible for every choice I make in my life. He taught me that the natural experience of me is a reflection of my true life, which is of spirit. My father showed me how to continue to love and honor God.

This is the religion or path that I have chosen to follow. This is the way that makes sense to me. Everything is right for me in the universe when I love and honor Olodumare, The Divine, The Source, The Most High, The Creator, God. After years of reading and studying with my father, after going through the shock of losing my beloved daughter, I was forced to wash away everything that shackled my heart. My free heart has been led to the path of Ifa. Ifa is an African Traditional Spiritual System. A tradition of many of my own African ancestors. Ifa has been passed down over many generations orally. It is a way of understanding and living in harmony with the spirit forces in nature. For me, Ifa is an expansion of what I felt instinctively to be true, even at a very young age. Everything that I am learning as I grow in Ifa deepens my trust and understanding of my own life and how I am meant to be on this earth. At the age of forty four, I am beginning to learn how to be comfortable with being truly free. I have found peace. I have found harmony. I have found balance. May I continue to learn and grow and walk with The Divine. Ase.

There are so many reasons that compel me to write and to share. What drives me to share through this blog, is my desire to do my part in helping to heal what is broken in my community. I find that one of the most effective ways for me to do that is to share my own life experiences and thoughts with the hope that in doing so, someone will be inspired and uplifted. May spirit guide my thoughts and my words so that they can serve as a blessing to those who read. Ase.