r/Isese

Sorry for putting this here, I didn't see any active Ifa groups in the search. I am African American and yesterday morning I dreamt of a black man and woman coming to me like an introduction. Though they didn't appear to speak, I heard and saw what they meant. The name Shango kept popping in my brain, I literally was looking at the man and thinking "That's Shango!"

The woman even 'told' me that accepting them and embracing them doesn't mean I forget my old parents and family. I have never dreamt of anything like this.

Also, as a side note; I have always had vibrant, elaborate dreams. I've seen everything from a murder to my own murder in my dreams. I've remembered other dreams inside my dreams. Once I even remembered a dream that I'd consciously forgotten about. I've learned to always note certain things and take my dreams seriously.

But this is my first time ever seeing a deity, especially an Orisha. Am I allowed to serve Shango? Can anyone help me get clarity on this?

Thanks!

There is a certain kind of peace that doesn’t come from life becoming easier.

It comes from clarity.

For most of my life, I asked the same questions so many of us ask.

Why is this happening to me?

Why does my life feel so different?

Why do I keep being pulled toward things I never consciously chose?

The human mind is built to search for reasons. It wants certainty. It wants explanations. Even after awakening, those questions don’t disappear entirely. We are, after all, human.

The difference is that now, I have clarity.

Not the kind of clarity that answers every question, but the kind that changes the questions altogether.

My spiritual awakening gave language to a life I had already been living. It did not erase my past or pretend that my pain wasn’t real. It illuminated it. What once looked like random moments slowly revealed themselves as connected threads. What I had called confusion became preparation. What I had called suffering began to carry meaning.

Perhaps the greatest gift wasn’t receiving answers.

It was finding the courage to accept the truth of who I am instead of clinging to the person I believed I was supposed to be.

For years, I held tightly to an identity that had been handed to me. Not because it was false, but because it was incomplete.

Like so many of us, I inherited ideas about who I should become before I ever had the chance to ask who I truly was. Family shaped me. Society shaped me. Fear shaped me. Expectations quietly settled into my bones until I mistook them for my own voice.

I did not realize how much of me belonged to the world.

Until I began the painful work of unlearning it.

Unlearning is not forgetting.

It is remembering.

It is peeling away every belief that says, “This is who you must be,” until all that remains is the quiet truth that has been waiting beneath the noise all along.

As I walked deeper into my spiritual journey, I came to understand something that changed everything.

Before I had a name…

Before I had a body…

Before I ever opened my eyes to this world…

My Ori had already chosen the life I would come here to live.

And like every soul, I arrived here and forgot.

Perhaps that forgetting is part of being human.

Perhaps that is why so many of us spend our lives searching outside ourselves for what has always been within us.

The more I remembered, the more I understood.

Not everything that happened to me made sense in the moment, but it made sense in the story.

The life I had been resisting was the very life leading me back to myself.

There were moments when remembering was painful.

Moments when the truth demanded that I let go of old identities, familiar comforts, relationships, dreams, and even versions of myself that I once fought so hard to protect.

But once I recognized the path my Ori had chosen, I could not unknow it.

So I held on.

Not because the road became easier.

Not because I suddenly understood every step.

But because some truths become impossible to abandon once they have awakened inside you.

Today, I no longer see myself as merely a human trying to survive this world.

I understand myself as a spiritual being living a human experience.

The world constantly invites us to forget that. It teaches us to measure ourselves by achievement, approval, possessions, success, failure, and fear. It asks us to become attached to things that were only ever meant to be temporary.

Yet something deeper within me refuses to forget.

So I choose to walk through this life with the knowledge of who I truly am.

Clarity has not removed the challenges.

It has transformed the way I carry them.

Because once you remember who you are, you stop asking why life keeps happening to you.

You begin asking how each moment is calling you back to yourself.

A reflection on Ogundabede: The heart of this journey is not the courage to fight the world, but the courage to remember.

This is why I think of Ogundabede. My path was never about becoming someone new, but returning to who my Ori chose me to be.

To remember is not always comfortable. Sometimes it means releasing the life you wanted to embrace the life you were called to live.

Perhaps the hardest thing we are ever asked to do is not to discover our destiny, but to accept it.

Not because Òrì(Higher self) is unclear.

But because we are human.

Human nature wants to understand everything. We analyze, question, search for proof, and try to find logic before we surrender. We want the unseen to explain itself in ways our physical minds can grasp.

Yet across spiritual traditions, there is a common understanding “the unseen shapes the seen”.

What exists beyond our physical perception often influences the reality we experience.

That is why we seek spirituality in the first place.

We pray. We meditate. We perform rituals. We seek guidance. We consult divination. We make offerings and do the spiritual work necessary to bring ourselves into alignment with something greater than our own understanding.

For those who walk the path of IFA, we seek Ìtẹ́fà, Idáfá, and the wisdom of Òrì(Higher self) because we recognize that our higher self knows something that our human mind may not yet understand.

But this is where the struggle begins…..

We trust the spiritual enough to seek its guidance, yet sometimes we struggle to trust it when it reveals something that challenges our plans, our desires, or our understanding.

There is an Ẹsẹ IFA that captures this beautifully. It speaks of Arinnoka, a person who was known for knowing everywhere.

Ask Arinnoka if he knew a place, and he would say yes.

Ask him if he had been somewhere else, and he would say yes.

There was nowhere you could mention that Arinnoka did not believe he knew. He had traveled everywhere, seen everything, and believed there was nothing beyond his understanding.

Until one day, Arinnoka was told he was going to a place where the path ends, a place of the unknown.

“Òlọ́gbọ́n ayé kan ò t’ákòkò omi létí,

Àwọn ò mọ iye pé ilé.

Adífá fún Arinnókà,

tí ń lọ síbi tí ọ̀nà ń k’ẹ́hìn”.

(An Ifá consultation was made for Arinnoka, who was going to the place where the road ends.)

Before his journey, IFA instructed him to perform ẹbọ. But Arinnoka refused. How could he need guidance? How could there be anything he did not already know?

But when he reached the place of the unknown, he found himself unable to move forward or return. His knowledge had taken him far, but it could not take him beyond what he did not understand.

The lesson of Arinnoka is not that knowledge is bad.

It is that knowledge without humility can become a limitation.

IFA was teaching the importance of listening. The importance of letting go. The importance of understanding that there are places our human mind cannot enter alone.

Many of us do not need to wait until we reach our own “place where the road ends” before we surrender. We do not need to reach a point where we can neither move forward nor backward before accepting what Òrì(Higher self) has already revealed.

Why seek alignment with Òrì(Higher self), yet fight the wisdom that comes from that alignment?

Why seek divination, guidance, rituals, and spiritual work, yet allow the need for control to override what we came seeking?

Perhaps acceptance does not mean we stop asking questions.

Perhaps it means we recognize that our questions should not become greater than our trust.

The mind wants to understand before it believes.

The spirit sometimes asks us to trust before understanding arrives.

Because in the end, the journey is not about forcing Òrì to follow our plans.

It is about remembering that Òrì(Higher self) already knows the way.