Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net



Se alaafia ni, family? I pray this message finds you each well and bright. Things are busy in a wonderful way on my end. I’m working on a few special projects that I’m really excited about, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you in upcoming posts. In the meantime, do save the date for a special symposium I’ll be hosting next April. It seems like a ways away but it’ll be here before we know it.

Remember this post where I talked about what I learned from a banana? Well, I got another delicious lesson from a food item *laugh* this time, it was instant oatmeal. As I pulled the variety pack from the shelf yesterday morning, I thought to myself “I don’t want blueberry today” as I reached my hand into the box. When I pulled my hand out, what do you think I was holding? Blueberry! Of course.

I couldn’t help but laugh because it reminded me of a lesson that I’ve been taught over and over again: don’t give energy to what you don’t want. Instead, concentrate on what you do want! Like it or not, when we think about something – whether we are thinking positively or negatively about that thing –  we are giving it ase (power/energy/force), thereby drawing that thing nearer to us. As a society, we are so conditioned to think negatively – in terms of don’t – that we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about do. And when we think about what kind of man, woman, job (or whatever) we don’t want, often we may find ourselves with that very thing. This is especially true with our children; we often “don’t” them so much that they end up doing exactly what we’d rather they didn’t.

So here’s the question: What do you want?

Spend some time thinking about it on all levels. What do you want today? Tomorrow? Next year? Five years from now? Ten years from now? What, overall, do you want for your life? The sooner we are able to answer these questions in the affirmative and give our ase to what we do want for ourselves – rather than what we don’t want – the better we are able to keep undesirable things out of our space and the more effectively we are able to bring that which is desired in.

As we can learn from the orisa Osoosi, the sacred hunter whose symbol is the bow and arrow, you don’t hit the bull’s-eye by concentrating everything around it. You hit it by focusing squarely, aiming, pulling the string and – most importantly – letting go

Let’s do it! Ase!

~ Funlayo