Obara

Negative Aspect: If you insist on your price, people will forget your value

Regent Orishas: Oshossi, Logunede and Shango

Keywords: Lacks initiative; uncompromising; proud; talks too much and doesn’t listen to people; naïve; trusts too much; tendency to lie and fantasize; tendency to depression, especially due to childhood trauma

The influence of Odu Obara in its negative aspect brings out the most puerile nuances of your personality, reinforcing your stubbornness, naivety and – sometimes – tyranny when your wishes are not met. All of this, in fact, can be defined in a single word: anxiety. By denying your feelings, you delude yourself into expecting the people around you to keep up. When they’re not able to understand your feelings and actions, you get frustrated and flirt with paranoia and depression.

As a child in the body of an adult, you tend to hold others accountable for your actions and always expect someone to come to the rescue and solve the problems around you – especially those you caused yourself. Life is good and should be lived well, but it is necessary to accept that sometimes the demands of adult life will overcome your dreams and desires, and it’s time to pay attention to those demands so you can get back on track.

As an Odu linked to wealth and abundance of resources, its negative influence indicates a lack of control over your finances, often bordering on uncontrollable consumerism. Like any energy source, prosperity can go through times of ebb and flow, and if you don’t prepare you’ll end up repeatedly mired in bureaucratic problems, legal disputes and debts.

You can and should dream bigger and bigger, but you must also accept reality and understand that each thing has its time – and usually that’s not going to come as fast as you want. Here’s the biggest challenge for your inner revolution: to put aside the fantasy and take, once and for all, responsibility for your actions and decisions – including when you decide not to make any! For everything in life there is a price to be paid, the reward for taking your life into your own hands is full freedom, and the pleasure of being truly free is far greater than the setbacks fate may bring.

Obara’s Shadow Meditation:

Considering all life’s goals and relationships I’m living now, do I understand the difference between the cost and the value of all the things I do, have and pursue? And based on the way I present myself to the world, do I offer my price or my value to others?