Ossa

Negative Aspect: When the heart screams, reasoning goes silent

Regent Orishas: Oya, Nanna and Egun (the Ancestors)

Keywords: Overbearing and arrogant; won’t listen to anyone and talks too much; is surrounded by false friends; suffers from female harassment and stalking; impulsive; takes all feelings to the extreme; despairs if things are not done their way; tendency to multiple relationships

Odu Ossa’s negative regency makes your blood boil at the slightest spark. With no restraint, you say what you think: your tongue is definitely a weapon, and you have a bad habit of not knowing how to use it correctly. You don’t listen to anything that is said and still try to mold the truth according to your desires. It doesn’t matter if what you believe you’ve heard has actually been said – you believe it has and now you want war! With that, Odu Ossa’s flame burns in your mouth and sets the world on fire, until eventually you realize the fire you’ve caused and try to put it out – usually too late.

In this moment, feelings are being taken to the ultimate power: when you love, you love violently; surrendering to the point of forgetting yourself and giving your heart and soul to the end. And when that end comes, so much passion automatically turns to hate and indifference, as if an internal off button has been pressed. Such intensity makes you authoritarian and dominating, not accepting anything that happens beyond what you determine and demand. When life shows you that you are not in control of the world, despair and obsession drive you to the brink of madness.

All this intensity being used in the wrong way also finds its end, and when the passion for what you are doing finishes so does the impetus to make the world go round. If at one extreme you accomplish much more and much better than everyone else, at the opposite extreme, stagnation knocks you down like a gale and prevents you from carrying out even the simplest plans. Therefore, your biggest challenge is finding the balance between intensity and inertia. Serenity of actions and thoughts: this is the key to transforming your ways!

Ossa’s Shadow Meditation: When I don’t see my wishes, demands and interests attended to in the time and in the way I expect, am I capable of accepting that life has its own time and that twinning and losing are part of the process of growing as a person while practicing resilience and resignation? Or do I let anger take over and act in fury to take what’s not been given to me? When that’s the case, what real and lasting benefit did I ever get from these selfish urges?