01/16/2026
Transform curiosity into sacred understanding.
Something's happening in urban America that most people are misreading.
Young people wearing Ileke beads everywhere. Rappers talking about Orisha in interviews, influencers posting about ancestral veneration. The pull toward Yoruba spirituality is spreading fast, and the question everyone's asking is whether it's real or just another trend.
Both. And neither.
When you feel drawn to these practices, when something in you responds to the beads or the rituals or the idea of connecting with ancestors, that feeling is legitimate. That's your bloodline reaching for you. The ancestors don't give up on their descendants just because we get it wrong the first time, or the second, or the tenth. That pull doesn't stop.
But feeling the call and honoring it properly are two completely different things.
Ileke aren't jewelry.
They're blessed spiritual beads charged during consecration ceremonies with herbs and DNA from fowl, markers that you've submitted to a process - your ego, your time, your comfort, your old ways of thinking. Without that process, you're wearing something beautiful that isn't doing what it's designed to do.
The tradition that survived colonization, enslavement, and systematic erasure didn't survive by being easy or accessible or convenient. It survived because it refuses to compromise. You can't skip the darkness, can't rush through initiations for status, can't monetize ceremonies for content, can't claim authority you haven't earned.
People who try end up worse off than when they started. Spiritually harmed, opening doors they don't know how to close, calling on energies without proper foundation.
Here's what surprised me learning about this over the years.
The people from the most adverse backgrounds often have the deepest reverence. Not the influencers, not the ones chasing aesthetic. The ones who've been through real darkness. Because adversity creates something privilege doesn't - when you're in survival mode, when you're facing death regularly, you become sensitive to the spiritual realm. That proximity thins the veil.
The ancestors know this. They're pulling people toward the tradition because it gives structure to what they're already doing instinctively.
Pouring out liquor for dead homies? That's libation practice. Getting tattoos of people who passed? Honoring the dead. They're already engaging in ritual, they just don't have the proper framework for it yet. The seed trying to grow even though the soil has been poisoned.
The line between instinct and appropriation is about reverence versus transaction.
When someone pours out liquor, they're responding to genuine spiritual impulse, honoring their dead with what they have available. That's ancestral memory expressing itself through disconnection.
But when someone tries to commodify sacred practices, turning ceremonies into content, selling services they're not qualified to provide, claiming to teach what they haven't mastered, that degrades the entire system. Same colonial pattern that severed us from these practices in the first place, just dressed up differently now.
If you feel that pull, if you want to answer the call properly, this is where you start:
Sit with your dead.
Build a small space in your home. Put water there. Put their pictures if you have them. Talk to them like they're listening, because they are. Tell them you feel the pull, you don't know what you're doing, but you want to learn the right way. Ask them to guide you to the right teacher, the right temple, the right path.
Then pay attention to what shows up.
The ancestors will test your sincerity before they give you access. They'll put obstacles in your way to see if you're serious. They'll make you wait, they'll humble you. If you're approaching this like a consumer, like something you can just acquire, you'll get frustrated and eventually move on to the next thing.
But if you're genuinely being called, if this is your bloodline reaching for you, you'll persist. You'll show up even when it's inconvenient, you'll be willing to be a student, to be corrected, to memorize that opening prayer even when it takes months.
The tradition will meet you where you are.
But it won't lower its standards for you.
Your ancestors are calling you home, but home requires that you rebuild yourself to be worthy of what they're offering. This technology is powerful, and power requires preparation. The kind of preparation that can't be rushed, can't be bought, can't be performed for an audience.
The next ten years will show a split. On one side, spiritual entertainment - the watered-down version that looks like the tradition but has lost the substance. Popular, accessible, profitable, and ultimately empty.
On the other side, people doing the real work. Smaller numbers, less visible, but maintaining the integrity of the practices. The tradition will survive through them, the way it always has.
Which side are you on?
Like this if you've felt that ancestral pull. Comment if you're doing the work to honor it properly 👇
