The Five Blessings of Ifá with Gabrielle Felder

She's shared her work through speaking engagements with UC Davis Women's Resources and Research Center and the Feminist Center for Creative Work.

Thank you so much for being here, Gabby.

I really, really enjoyed your book.

I found it very inspiring and that there was so much wisdom and knowledge to be gleaned from it.

I would just, to start off, love to know how your interest in African traditional and diasporic religions began, and how your spiritual practice has evolved.

Yeah.

Thank you for having me.

I'm really excited to be here.

Um, but yeah, I think that it was kind of a winding path to my, like, my spiritual practice and my interest in African traditional religions.

I think that since I was a kid, I was always drawn just to, like, vaguely spiritual things.

Like, I was always interested in, like, magic and fairies and all of that stuff as a very young child, and I feel like because that resonated with me so deeply, that the older I got, I ended up being more drawn towards kind of like a new age spiritual practice is where I found myself, like, in my, like, late teens, early college years.

And so I was kind of, like, dabbling at the time.

Like, it was the era of, like, Urban Outfitters was really big at the time [laughs] and so they had all their, like, little sage and crystal kits and stuff like that.

And I also went to school in Santa Barbara, which is kind of like a hippie kind of culture and community.

And so I was doing a lot of things that were related to kind of like a new age, alternative spiritual practice, and it didn't really feel grounded in any sort of particular, like, system or knowledge.

There wasn't, like, a, like, a strong, like, underlining philosophy or framework for viewing the world.

It was kind of, like, dabbling in a bunch of different things that were vaguely related to mindfulness and were kind of drawing from different traditions.

But it felt unfound, like ungrounded, I guess.

And so from there, I started doing a lot of research just generally on other spiritual practices that were rooted in something older, rooted in some sort of philosophy.

I was doing research on, like, Buddhism and Hinduism and, like, also just, like, Christianity in general to try and have a better understanding.

But I wanted something that felt more culturally, like, connected to me.

And so that's kind of where I found my way into Hoodoo, which is a African American spiritual tradition that is kind of like a collection of, like, folk practices, and there's kind of like an undercurrent of, like, a sort of Christian philosophy that kind of runs through a lot of it.

To me, Hoodoo is kind of like using the resources that you have on hand.

So you might use plants that are native to the Americas, but you might use them in a way that feels very West African, but you might incorporate a Bible verse to, like, tie it all together.

It's very much like a resourceful spiritual practice, and so that was really interesting to me.