Happy to Be Nappy

As an woman of African descent, I am working to combat the world view that we are ugly women.  I am born in America so I call myself African American.  My mother instilled in me the beauty of our darker brown skin (crazy thing is that my mother was considered very light for an African American...*chuckle*...she was black and proud, though).  She also instilled in me the beauty of our African hair. My mother sported the popular Afro of the 1960's and 70's.  She would put my hair in Afro-puffs and cornrows, which I LOVED as a girl.

But she was adventurous, too.  She would straighten our hair with the hot comb, which I hated.  And eventually, she decided we would try perms  such as the jerri-curl as well as the kind of perm that straightens curly hair.  It was at this time that all of my hair started falling out and then it became a vicious cycle of trying to get my hair back to health and growing again and it falling out. All due to the perms.

My mother eventually abandoned all of the perms though I was at a point where I made all decisions about my hair and continued to perm my hair. She went back to her  natural hair, which proved to be a good thing when she developed cancer and had to go through chemo.  She didn't lose all of her hair and attributes it to being natural.

At my graduation from Spelman College, my mother sported her  natural, which was just so beautiful and perfect because SO MANY of the professional women of Spelman College, including then president, Johnetta Cole, were sporting their naturals. I still had not felt the urge to go natural but looked at how beautiful my mother and the other women looked sporting their natural African hair.

At some point I got fed up with going to get my hair done by stylists and so decided to follow my mother's lead and go natural. That was at age 23 and I have never looked back.  I love having natural hair.

The kicker is that though we go natural, we still try to have neat looking hair.  It is like we have the same mentality we have with permed hair though it is a totally different ball of wax when you have natural hair. With perms we are very product driven and it is all to create a very nice and put together style. With natural African hair this is not going to happen.  There is always some level of "frizz" or poof waiting to happen.

After 22 years of natural hair, I am just now coming to accept the beauty of "unkempt" looking African hair. We are not always in the mood to pick out our hair or twist our locks.  When we don't deliberately style our hair it looks almost wild but I am realizing that there is a lie that has been put in the world that our hair is ugly and untamed and we have gone full out trying to tame that which may or may not want or need taming.

I love it when I see a woman of African descent who you can tell got up and just did the finger fluff with her hair. Some of the hair is sticking up and some is matted it down. It looks beautiful and fun to me.  I take the time to write this because I am excited whenever I find bias within me, especially when it is a bias against my own self.

I am dreadlocking my hair.  I have always taken time to keep my locks neat whenever I dreadlock my hair. This time I am more free than I ever have been because I don't feel that neat locks look better than locks that are freely locking and so are more wild in appearance. In the end, it all locks.  lol  This wild and free hair that I am sporting is FUN! I love not feeling  stressed.  I love looking like Medusa from Greek mythology except I call myself OYA from the Nigerian spiritual pantheon of goddesses.

I have been  happy to be nappy from the beginning of going back natural but I have felt fear of being judged for having super short natural hair or having dreadlocks. I hear from other women of African descent how they have to get a perm to get rid of all the naps and think...dang! What is this person saying about our hair because I have a head full of naps? LOL   It has been somewhat frustrating and not fun.

As I continue to embrace the truth of who I am on all levels, I get to reject the lies.  African hair is BEAUTIFUL in all of its various patterns:  zig zag, curly, afro-eruo curly.  I embrace its wildness because people can't even pay enough money to get the  kind of hair that I have but I can get a hot comb and have hair that is as straight as some Euro hair.  I hope and pray that more of us with African hair will reject the lie that our hair is ugly.  I hope that more with African hair will embrace a new way of relating to our hair that doesn't require it to be neat all of the time like the world says it should be.  I pray that those of us with African hair will make our own choices and decision about what we think about our hair.  Doing so will lead us to more happiness and freedom to do other things and make other contributions to the world.

Casting Your Pearls Before Swine...I am awake now

It has become clear and apparent to me that I have been casting my pearls before swine. Another way of saying this is that I have been spending time with people and on things that I shouldn't have.  Not only did I spend my time with people and on things I shouldn't have, I tried to share with them the very best parts of myself. I started to  hear myself say, "Nobody listens to me" more and more.  I started wondering if my contributions made a difference because nothing seemed to change after doing so.

Once I started to get disgruntled and angry with these people and projects, I had to ask myself why am I so upset?  I tend to be pretty easy going so for me to be upset means that I need to figure out what is going on and address it.  My frustration and anger were indicators that I was in the wrong place, spending time with people who I shouldn't be spending time with and doing things that were not worth my time.

After further investigation, I realized that for some reason I had allowed myself to think that I was in the right place doing the right things with the right people though time after time it seemed that my efforts were making little to no impact.  I don't know exactly how I  didn't see what was really going on other than I needed to learn this lesson of  being selective with who and how I spend my time.  Honestly, that is why I think this has happened.  The kicker is that I have to change this habit.  I have to create a system within my consciousness that allows me to  determine when to share my gifts and talents and when it is best that I don't share them.

Though I have been frustrated at how much I have shared with people who don't seem to appreciate the full value of my gifts, I maintain that they are not bad people and have done no wrong.  Casting pearls before swine is a strong statement but really it means for me, "DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ON PEOPLE AND PROJECTS THAT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN TRULY GUIDED TO WORK WITH."  It is better for me and the world that I give where there is receptivity.

The good news from this lesson is that I am way more clear about where to put my focus and comfortable with turning my back when I see people and situations that are not for me to pour into.  Even when they are begging for my help, if I am not called to help, I won't.  Sounds mean but I have been there done that too much to know that in the end, most everyone is just fine without my help because with it, they didn't listen to me and made it some how.

Additionally, if I am called to help people, I need to realize to what extent I am to help and help that much and no more.  I am happier as a result of reclaiming my focus and attention and placing them where they should be. This is a clear indicator that I am making the right choice.  I am also more clear that some of my gifts need to be used in a different platform. I am a natural mentor, I need to turn that into a career path instead of using it so much with friends.  If people pay for my professional advice and don't take it, I am less likely to feel like I am wasting my time. But more than likely, if I am  helping within a professional capacity, a customer may be more likely to listen to me than a friend who is asking the same question and to whom I would give the same counsel for free.

I don't like feeling angry and frustrated but I do give thanks for this lesson.  I feel like I will be more free and even take more risks as I look for ways to channel my gifts.

My suggestion to anyone reading this is that if you know you are wasting your time  on people and things to stop doing so and find other places to channel your valuable attention and gifts.   It really is a waste of your time to cast the best of before people and situations that are not open to receiving and don't value them.   Choose to channel the best of you where it will be received and make a true difference.

REPOST from Awo Falokun: Perfectly explains my own initiatory process .

Agbo ato In order to continue our discussion on altered states of consciousness we need to first examine the ori and discuss why a healthy ori is the foundation for altered states of consciousness as used in Ifa and Orisa ritual. The ori is translated as head but refers to information that is known to the knower. Anything we can consciously retrieve from memory, or recognize in the moment is the content of ori. The Ori inu is our inner self. The idea of Ori inu is the idea that every conscious thought is supported by an emotional feeling tone response. The reason for this is because memory is organized not based on subject, or chronology. Memory is organized based on emotional memory chains. We create a memory chain by associated the feeling tone of a given experience. This means we have a memory bank of happy feelings, a memory bank of sad feelings, a memory bank of grief and so on. Some of these chains are long and powerful which is why some events will trigger the chain and create an overwhelming emotional reaction.

The purpose of initiation is to start a memory chain called connection to spirit. Oriki is a mnemonic device meaning it is the first link in a new memory chain that can be called upon to access a particular memory bank. An elder says an oriki during initiation, that oriki causes the elder to go into possession. The ase of the elders possession is contagious meaning it will push the initiate into an altered state. As part of the Ifa Orisa discipline we engage a very complex prayer cycle. Part of this cycle includes repeating the oriki that put us into an altered state commonly called possession every four days. By repeating this oriki on a four day cycle were are reinforcing and extending the memory chain linked with our initiation.

The Yoruba word for possession is oogun meaning medicine. Possession is medicine because Ifa teaches that alignment with Spirit is alignment with Destiny and Destiny brings a pleasing of family, abundance and long life meaning good health,

Oriki only work as a tool of invocation when the head and the heart of the initiate are in alignment. This is a subtle process that is not easily explained. Our head and our heart are in alignment when we have consciousness access of our feeling tone memory tape. In the language of Ifa this means the ori has access to the ori inu. What blocks access of the ori inu is fear based resistance to fully experiencing our emotions. If as children we experience severe trauma in the form of verbal, emotional, physical or sexual abuse we will leave our body instead of processing the emotional pain. The ability to leave our body is called oso in Yoruba.

The purpose of many Ifa/Orisa cleansing is to access unexpressed pain and to release it through grieving. The Mayans say there is no joy without grief, there is no grief without community and there is no community without trust. In the context of Ifa/Orisa this means that as preparation for initiation we need to release the emotional trauma of our childhood by experiencing it fully. This is function of the River day or the cleansing just prior to entering the sacred groove.

If the necessary grieving needed to access our full spectrum of memories does not occur a person can become stuck in the effort of avoiding painful memories. This becomes a fear based life, in which our ever action is designed to keep us in a protective shell that does not allow for the intrusion of unwanted memories. A fear based life makes it impossible to align the ori and the ori inu. When I say align the ori and ori inu I am describing the ability to access appropriate memories in any given moment. When we are in resistance to accessing certain memories the emotional content of our experience does not match what is going on in our life and we experience tension between what we think is happening and what is really going on. For example if as a man I have a really bad experience in a relationship with a women and I do not fully express the grief caused by the bad experience I run the risk of projecting that experience on to all women. I could be engaged in a positive, potentially healthy relationship, but as long as I am projecting the past on to the present I will not see, appreciate, or fully understand the person who I am with in the present moment. That is why when couples break up they tend to very quickly recreated the same problems in a new relationship.

Sometimes when we have had a long history of abusive experiences we create a very long chain of abuse memories. If those memories are suppressed, the chain becomes very long. When the chain is triggered and the person goes out of their body to avoid the pain the body itself will go into a regression. In clinical terms a regression is the act of reliving a past memory by actually believing and feeling you have returned to the moment of the abuse. Technically this is a form of possession, but instead of being possessed by Spirit we are possessed by an unexpressed part of our own consciousness or ori.

Unexpressed memories are not stored in our brain they are stored in our body. Specifically they are stored in what Eastern religions call chakra and what Ifa calls iwaju. During initiation when an elder goes into possession to read an oriki and the initiate is carrying unexpressed emotion, the oriki can trigger a regression instead of a possession. This has become so common in the Diaspora that frequently regressions are identified as possession. This is a terrible disserve to the initiate. Confusing a regression with a possession has the effect of elevating emotional illness and confusing it with spirit.

The possession I have witnessed in traditional Yoruba culture comes with suuru meaning coolness and inner peace. When a child grows up in a traditional culture and is participating in ritual on a regular basis it is very difficult to hold on to unexpressed emotion. Most folks who were raised in the West in Christian forms of religion learn to suppress their emotions so that when they are exposed to Ifa/Orisa that can be a huge emotional release. This release is not possession.

In the Yoruba language possession occurs when the ori, the ori inu and the iponri are in perfect alignment. That means possession occurs from the inside out. As someone does initiations I cannot give you something you do not already have. My job as an elder is to unlock the spirit within you. We are divine beings having a human experience. That means initiation is not being crowned with some outside force, being initiated means remembering who you really are. Sometimes remembering who we really are involves letting go of emotional abuse. As elders it is our responsibility to know the difference between release from the ori inu and connection to the iponri. If we do not recognize the difference we are doing initiations in an irresponsible manner meaning we are deifying dysfunction rather than supporting the elevation of the ori.

Ire
baba