Orisha
How can we learn self mastery through the Orisha?
One of the first things that we always have to do is to recognize that the orisha are not external energies. One of the differences in the way that Chief Yuya presents these energies from a lot of people and not necessarily from tradition, because tradition teaches it this way, but it has gotten confused across the waters. It has gotten confused across the waters because we have an amalgamation of so many different religions, and more specifically Catholicism. It has crept into our traditional systems and it has created this master slave concept, or this master slave reality that people are now conjuring.
When we are dealing with self mastery, we're dealing with first understanding and knowing all of the components of self. The “self” goes beyond how you feel, or what you think of yourself. For instance, people will say things like “I'm happy" but, the reality is that you're not happy, your body is simply feeling the effects or the electrical impulses that we define as happiness. Self mastery deals with knowing that, and more specifically being able to step outside of your physical self or your known self and look at yourself as the observer.
Once you do that you'll start to see that there are different components to you; sometimes I can be aggressive; sometimes I can be loving; sometimes I can be unpredictable; sometimes I can be bossy; sometimes I can go into a meditative state. These different dimensions of your character or as if we were talking about the supreme being we would say angles of God which is later turned into angels of God. These were all just dimensions of one energy that we could access that energy through. For instance, if you wanted to get to know me one of the things that you could do is invoke my warrior energy, and you'd get to know the aggressive side of me. You could also invoke my loving energy to get to know that side of me. These different expressions of the root part of our soul are all the different things that we have to understand and master in order to understand our full self shape.