I Followed African Spirituality For A Year, Here’s How It Changed Me

“Religion is belief in someone else’s experience. Spirituality is having your own experience.”

— Deepak Chopra

Before I made the decision to follow an indigenous African Spiritual system, I’d read plenty blogs and articles written by other black women compelled to ditch Christianity once and for all. Rarely did these tell-all’s follow up with in-depth narratives detailing how the decision to do so affected them after the fact. In 2006, I decided to make the switch from Abrahamic religion to an indigenous spiritual system, only recently did I make the decision to write about my experiences, the good and the bad, in the hopes that my journey could provide some insight to others who may be in the midst of their own. Here’s how Odinani, an indigenous African Spiritual system out of Southwest Nigeria, challenged and changed my life.

Gratitude

The main difference between religion and spirituality is that religions are based on written doctrine while spiritual systems are not bound to a written text. In other words, there are no indigenous 10 commandments to govern your day to day life. Spirituality simply calls upon a person to willingly choose goodness, solely for goodness sake, which initially sounds like a very liberating experience but can create…