Sometimes the path ahead doesn’t look like what you expect. It might not look super smooth, safe, or pretty. However, if you feel called to a direction, I say answer it.
A few years ago I experienced a spiritual shift that changed my life. I’ll write about that someday as well although I think that story has a home in a bigger venue than here. That shift is what led to me not only embracing spirituality, it also caused me to release the need to control things. I started to experience synchronicity a lot, and see and feel the presence of my ancestors, which led to me building a strong relationship with them. My father shared with me ways to build that relationship. That looked like me learning and saying their names, honoring their birthdays, setting aside food for them—things like that. He would also say from time to time “You need to get a reading”. A reading means a spiritual reading through the process of divination, and the kind he was talking about was an IFA reading. IFA is a west African spiritual practice which deals with the various energies of nature and the ways to align with one’s destiny. The honoring of ancestors is essential in this practice (I knew NONE of this then). I heard him, however, IFA as a practice or an IFA reading never really called to me. So, no reading was done, instead I got attuned for Reiki (seemingly out of nowhere but nothing ever is).
My Reiki attunement had me super open and sensitive, which to a degree I still am. I remember being in certain places and feeling a really heavy energy and the need to leave, ASAP. This never happened prior to Reiki. One time I was around drums at Dance Africa in Brooklyn and was standing around talking to some of my martial arts brothers. I almost lifted off my feet (no exaggeration). I got out of there ASAP. There was a lot of quick exits happening in those days.
That same summer I began bumping into my father’s teacher in IFA, Bàbá Jamel as I knew him then. I first ran into him at Soul Summit out in Ft. Greene Park in Brooklyn. He was happy to see me with his large red and white beads around his neck. We talked about the absence of my father at the event and danced to the music that filled the park with joy and community. While there I also saw other members of their spiritual house or “Ile” show up. People I’d seen at events to celebrate my father or folks I met while assisting in “spiritual work”. I would grow to have much closer relationships with them in due time.
The next time I ran into Bàbá Jamel I was walking in Manhattan checking my phone when I heard a “HEY”. I looked up and there on Broadway and 27th or 28th street (what I used to call the armpit of Manhattan) was Bàbá. I would call him this without knowing what the word/title meant. He immediately said, “We keep running into each other” and I agreed. I told him my father had been saying for a quite a while that I needed to get a reading. Maybe now was the time. He agreed. We exchanged information and set up a date to do an IFA reading in about a week or so. When we met up to do the reading, it was at the home of someone I also knew through my father named, Claude. Claude was a really nice guy who I liked from the first moment I met him. I didn’t know until I showed up at his door that he was also in this tradition of IFA or that he was introduced to it through my father. We went upstairs to his apartment where Bàbá was waiting. As I sat facing Bàbá and he began speaking in a language I knew nothing about (Yorùbá), I felt very at ease somehow. As he began tossing a chain in between us and sharing the messages that came up I finally felt something call to me. It was the process itself. The repetition of his movements and the information he was accessing by just closing his eyes intrigued me and also felt familiar. In this reading I was told many things including what I needed to do to protect the openness I was experiencing. I was also told that the tradition of IFA was for me and that I was marked for priesthood. Not what I was expecting or what I went there for however, somewhere inside me it made sense. I knew I had a new path to walk, that I was feeling called to it and that this was only the beginning.