Some conversations feel like being handed a map.
Others feel like being handed water.
This one feels like both.
In this episode of LaidOPEN, I sit with Gabrielle Felder to talk about her book, The Five Blessings of Ifá, and the long journey of claiming spiritual inheritance.
Gabrielle speaks about growing up in a Baptist household and the quiet tension of feeling called elsewhere. She describes writing this book not as a performance of knowledge, but as an act of intimacy — with her ancestors, with her practice, with herself.
We wander into questions of land and memory. What changes when you stand on the soil your people once stood on? What does water remember? How does Oshun live beyond reduction? How does a language that isn’t obsessed with gender shift the way we see one another?
We also sit with the larger backdrop — activism, exhaustion, empire, the fragility of systems. Not in a sensational way. In a human way. A grounded way. A way that asks: how do we stay connected to joy and spirit when the world feels uncertain?
LaidOPEN is a space for these kinds of conversations — where the sensual and the sacred aren’t separate, where healing is relational, and where we practice staying open even when it’s uncomfortable.
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