Yemayá in the Land of Fire & Water
A Shamanic Healing Journey
Our flight from San Francisco landed mid-afternoon at Lihue airport in Kauai after a brief change of planes in Honolulu. Although the flight from Honolulu to Kauai may have been short, it was long on worry. Traveling with a baggage-checked guitar, I always fear that something might happen to it. After disembarking from the small plane with my partner, Martin, we quickly made our way to baggage claim. I stood nervously by the carousel, biting my fingernails. The hard-shell case was easy to spot, covered in stickers collected over the years. To my horror, it arrived with signnificant damage for such a short flight. The case was bashed and torn, and when I opened it, I found that the guitar had a few minor dings and scratches but remained intact. Furious, I filled out the necessary claim forms in hopes of getting my hard shell case replaced, but the airline never followed through. So, I wrote off the loss and joined the ranks of traveling musicians with damaged goods.
As we exited the small airport, golden-skinned natives dressed in colorful Hawaiian prints welcomed us warmly. It was impossible to stay angry.
“Aloha,” a young woman greeted us with a smile. She was a kama’aina, a local girl or child of the land, while I was malihini, a strange new visitor. She looked lovingly into my eyes as she draped a lei made of frangipani and gardenia around my neck. The word “ha” in both “alo-ha” and “Ha-waii” means breath, symbolizing our connection to the spiritual breath of the universe. The salty air and scent of tropical flowers reminded me of the sweetness of my South Florida homeland. Hawaii is not only spiritually and physically beautiful but also a place with the power to heal.
I arrived in Hawaii with the intention of performing a ritual taught by Voodoo Priestess Luisa Teish. I had met Luisa in Oakland, California, during my time living in San Francisco. Luisa worked with ancestral spirits, and by following the instructions in her book “Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals,” I hoped to receive guidance and healing from Yemayá-Olokun.
Yemayá is a West African deity, and the ritual is intended to invoke her spirit. Known as the mother of the sea and dreams, she nurtures the child in the waters of the womb. Midwives call upon her for assistance during birth, which is why I felt a deep connection to this goddess. I needed her help to clarify whether Martin and I should have a child of our own. He had two children, as did I, and we both experienced significant losses in our homes and families due to our divorces. While there was a strong animal desire within me to have a child, I didn’t want my pain and loss to be the motivation for that decision. So, I would pray to Yemayá for clarity.
The ritual would take place by the ocean at sunrise. After arriving at our paradisiacal resort village in Hanalei, I dumped the bags in our room and headed for the water. There would be enough time left in the day to scout for a location to perform the ritual. Lured by the sound of waves, I approached a sheer rock cliff that dropped straight down to the water below. That would not do. I needed to be closer to the water.
Returning to the village, I petitioned the first resort employee I encountered.
“Do you know if there is a way down to the water?” I inquired of him.
“Yes, there is,” he replied, directing me toward a trailhead. “The trail will take you down to some large lava boulders, which you can walk across at low tide.”
I thanked him and wasted no time returning to the cliff’s edge in the afternoon’s fading light in search of the trailhead. As I neared the cliff’s edge, I came up behind a Black man sitting cross-legged on the ground, facing the ocean that stretched out before us. He appeared to be meditating. I hesitated for a moment. Unexplainably, a wave of fear crashed over me, and I didn’t feel safe enough to proceed alone beyond where the man sat. Confused by the emotions and paralyzed to go any further, I chose to also sit cross-legged on the ground near the cliff’s edge. Sitting slightly behind and to the left of the man, I closed my eyes and drew in a few slow, deep, calming breaths. Silently, I asked Great Spirit to show me the source of my unexplained fear.
As I sat with my eyes closed, the image of the man lingered in my mind’s eye. It was not unfamiliar for me to feel fear in the presence of a Black man, though I couldn’t explain why. I had been cared for by Alice, my parent’s African American housekeeper, whom I loved. I had also studied African drumming and dance. On the surface, my fear seemed baseless. I had never voiced this fear to anyone, actively resisting it along with my parent’s prejudiced views. I considered myself too “liberal” to label a Black man as “unsafe” solely based on the color of his skin. I had never had any negative encounters with Black men.
Focusing on my breath, I made a conscious effort to relax. I asked again to understand the source of my paralyzing fear.
Then, a voice spoke inside my head. I recognized it as the voice of an ancestral guardian spirit known in Hawaii as Aumakua. I felt directed to send my consciousness into the man’s physical form, which required intense concentration. I sought permission from his Aumakua to enter his energy field. As I began to feel a sense of oneness and well-being, I knew that permission had been granted. With each slow breath and as my body relaxed, I became aware that his heart was beating the same as mine. His eyes saw as mine did. We breathed the same air and touched the same earth. Gradually, I felt myself merging with the stranger.
As we sat with the waves rhythmically crashing below us and a salty breeze on our faces, the ancestor spirits transported me to another lifetime. Suddenly, I found myself on the mother continent of Africa, where drums pulsed through the earth and into my body. I observed myself lucidly, as if in a dream: a small child playing on the ground with women dancing all around me. I saw that child through the eyes of the man whose body I had entered. He watched from his vantage point on the escarpment, then shifted his gaze to the ocean below. There, he spotted a large vessel slowly floating toward the shore, its white, cloud-like sails undulating above the waves. Hidden from sight by the dense jungle, he observed the ship as it released pale-skinned men into smaller wooden boats. With sticks like insect legs that dipped in and out of the water, these men crawled toward the beach of a neighboring village. When their pale feet touched African soil, the world as we once knew it ended.
Our memories of the ocean will linger on, long after our footprints in the sand are gone. — Unknown
The pale-skinned men moved quickly. They captured women and infants as bait to lure the African men and older children into their nets. Some were roped like wild horses and thrown into cages like monkeys, while others were caught in fishing nets as they tried to flee or fight, becoming hopelessly tangled.
The white intruders dragged their terrified captives—wide-eyed and fearful—to the edge of the sea, where they tossed them into the smaller boats. These boats slowly made their way to the cloud-like ship hovering in the distance.
The man whose body I had entered could not have known what I now understood as I sat on a similar cliff’s edge by the sea. Those European boats would sail to distant lands with their human cargo: men, women, and children, who would endure lives of enslavement if they survived the harsh journey.
Triggered by the disturbing image of white men ensnaring Africans for the slave trade, a long-forgotten memory surfaced in my mind like a faded black-and-white Polaroid. In the Indian Village and zoo where I grew up, my White father and his hired Native American men captured escaped spider monkeys using large nets. The monkeys, long-limbed and adorned with shiny black coats, were terrifying when they bared their sharp white teeth. I felt traumatized by their prolonged screams and barks directed at their captors. Mom stood nearby, wringing her hands, worried for my father—it was a dangerous job.
Tears rolled down my cheeks as my chest tightened and my breathing became labored. I remained focused on the African child in my vision. The European boat was drawing closer to our village now. From his hidden post, the man who was watching sounded an alarm with the voice of his drum. The women began to scatter, and their shrieks paralyzed me with fear. I remained helpless and wailing as the chaos erupted around me. The drums beat incessantly, their rhythms swift and far-crying. They sent a warning and told a story.
After sounding the alarm, the man who kept watch ran back toward our village and scooped me into his arms. The realization dawned on me: that man had been my father in another lifetime. My African father who had seen the boat people coming. That is whose body I had entered in my vision through the guidance of the Aumakua ancestral spirits.
Tucking me tightly beneath his left arm, he held me close to his heart and with a speed that only an African man who has lived the whole of his life in the jungle can achieve. I could hear his heart beating through his chest, echoing the drums receding behind us. He never stopped running until, like a graceful leopard, he leaped over the cliff’s edge.
We clung tightly to each other, falling and spinning through empty space. Swirling through shades of blue and green, we plummeted to earth and to our death. It was his gift to me—to be free.
I jolted awake as if I had just died in my dream. Through tear-clouded vision, I looked over and found the man was gone. At such a close distance, wouldn’t I have heard him get up and leave? How long had I been sitting there? I stood up, stretched, and looked around. The man was nowhere to be seen. The sun was setting fast, casting its golden light on a small gate I hadn’t noticed before. Beyond that gate lay a path leading down to the water.
I began to descend through the gate. Halfway down the narrow path, a Black woman startled me as she made her way back up. It couldn’t be just a coincidence. I stopped and struck up a conversation with her. I needed to know if she was related to the man I had seen on the cliff.
“I think I just saw your husband waiting for you at the edge of the cliff,” I ventured, pointing back up the path toward the gate.
She responded in a friendly and calm manner, confirming that she was traveling alone with her daughter. I quickly warmed to her and, despite feeling flustered, I asked if she knew the way down to the water.
“It’s not too far, maybe five more minutes,” she said, turning slowly and pointing down the path. I thanked her, but I didn’t want our conversation to end. Since she didn’t seem in a hurry, I made some small talk.
“So, what brings you to Hawaii?” I ask boldly. She smiled in response.
“I’m on sabbatical, vacationing in Hawaii with my daughter,” she said. Her round, motherly face radiated sincerity, but her eyes held something deeper, something mystical. “What about you,” she asked.
“My partner is a doctor, and we’re on vacation as well,” I tell her. Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked, “What are you taking a sabbatical from?”
Her answer surprised me. She teaches Women’s History and Black History at UC San Diego. “Do you believe in the paranormal?” I inquired.
“Funny you should ask,” she replied, her eyes reflecting the fire and wisdom of a lioness. “I have experienced what some may call ‘psychic phenomenon,’ and I’ve even written some papers on it.”
“May I share something that just happened to me up on the cliff?” I asked, pointing back up the path.
“Please,” she said, giving me an encouraging nod.
Though I had never seen this woman before, there was a comfort that passed between us. I wondered if she thought I was strange, but the Lioness remained open and warm, her voice soothing and kind.
“I’ve had this unexplained fear of Black men,” I confessed, looking shamefully away from her golden-brown eyes and down at my feet. “When I saw that man on the cliff, he scared me, and I needed to understand why.”
“Go on,” she urged gently.
After I finished my story, she acknowledged and affirmed what I had seen in my vision. “Now you can be free from your fear,” she proclaimed, her smile knowing. I paused, nodded, and accepted her words.
“Perhaps you will share your story with others to help them remember who they are,” she said, tearfully as my own emotions began to surface. But what she said next captivated me.
“I was there too, in that village when the slave traders came and took us away.”
In that moment, I recognized her from that past life. As sychronicity would have it we had found each other again. She then revealed that earlier that afternoon, she had gone down to the ocean seeking guidance about her daughter from whom she had been separated. As she returned up the path, she encountered me—a White woman going down and a Black woman coming up. Both of us were seeking guidance along the same path.
The woman didn’t provide any details about the difficulties she was having with her daughter. Still, I shared that I, too, had been separated from my daughter due to a divorce. I understood that pain all too well. Then, this wise woman, with a gaze full of wonder, asked if I could have been her daughter in a past life in Africa. I looked deeply into her eyes, my heart opening wide and exposing a pain that had been lodged there for lifetimes. In that moment, we seemed to be healing one another as years of separation dissolved into the expanse of time, where ultimately, no separation exists, and everything eventually comes to completion.
The day had grown so late that we could barely see the path as we ascended to the gate. We hugged and said our goodbyes, and I never saw her again.
The following morning, I woke with the alarm before dawn and gathered my ritual supplies: pineapple, dimes, knife, candle, matches, cornmeal, and molasses. Martin wearily accompanied me to the cliff, where he would wait and hold vigil. After hugging me and sending me on my way, he sat cross-legged in the same spot where I had seen the Black man the previous afternoon. Martin understood the importance of ritual and promised to keep a candle burning until I returned.
I zipped up my windbreaker and pulled up the collar. With a flashlight in one hand and a paper bag filled with supplies in the other, I carefully made my way down the dark path. I hoped the tide would be favorable. The air felt cold in the pre-dawn hours, and the dark sky held no moon. Below me, the waves crashed, and the air carried a devilishly sulfuric smell.
I descended onto lava boulders that seemed to have been slung there by giants. The tide had receded, working in my favor and revealing cold, shiny black rocks that once flowed blood red-hot from Pele’s body. Pele, the volcano goddess, had explosively discharged her fury, leaving the earth trembling at her feet. When her molten fire met the cooling ocean water, it formed the black boulders that had smoothed over time. I found a spot to sit just above the rolling waves.
The wind blew strong off the ocean as I took the ritual instructions from my blue jeans pocket and began to follow them step by step. First, I removed the top of the pineapple with my knife. Then, I cut into the fruit to create enough room for the candle. Once I secured the candle inside the pineapple, the wind wouldn’t be able to blow it out. I wrestled with the sticky, sweet fruit and the now slippery knife in the darkness, trying not to cut myself.
Sitting in front of me was a pineapple, surrounded by a pool of molasses that I had poured around its edges. I sprinkled cornmeal over it, then placed seven dimes in a circle around the fruit to represent the full moon. Finally, I struck a match to light a dark blue candle, symbolizing Yemayá.
By that point, I had created quite a sticky mess with the pineapple and molasses—a fitting metaphor for my life. I faced the ocean and began to share my troubles with Yemayá. Becoming emotional, I started to sing along with the rhythm of the waves. As I drifted into a trance, I felt myself being carried away by the magic of the sunrise ritual, sinking deeper as though I were submerged beneath the ocean’s surface. For a moment, panic set in as I experienced a distant memory—the sinking of Atlantis. Then, as if in a surreal dream, I found myself breathing underwater.
In my vision, recalling the scuba diver I once was, I discovered a sense of comfortable familiarity. Just as the panic began to subside, a giant sea turtle approached and beckoned me to ride on its back. I cautiously climbed on, gripping the rigid rim of her shell as she began to descend. She carried me all the way down to the ocean floor. When we reached the bottom, the disturbance caused the silt to rise and swirl around us, reducing visibility. The sea turtle continued to move forward slowly, and I could feel the water growing colder—as if we had passed through a doorway.
As the particles of silt began to settle, an underwater city was revealed. Beams of refracted light from the surface illuminated coral rock castles adorned with precious gemstones. The sea turtle began to communicate with me telepathically about our surroundings. Graceful creatures swam by us; I spotted the largest sea horse I had ever seen, as well as manta rays with indigo wings. Some fish displayed vibrant, multicolored fins, including the brilliantly painted Clown Trigger, known in Hawaiian as humuhumunukunukuapuaa. Surrounding me was music like nothing I had heard before: pure frequencies emanating from everything, blending into an enchanting underwater symphony.
The energy required to reach that place involved tremendous effort and forced me to focus, especially on my breathing. I listened as the sea turtle revealed the secrets of that lost and hidden world. I didn’t “hear” the words exactly; instead, I had the strange sensation that the sea turtle was communicating with me through images, which I then translated into words.
As I rode on the magnificent creature’s back, she shared stories about seaweed beds that could feed the entire world. She showed me an endless power source in the ocean’s currents. Everything in her world vibrated at an incredibly high frequency. Whatever was taken or used was returned in some other form. I observed a world in harmonic resonance: the coral reef, alive and breathing, nourished the fish, and in turn, the fish provided waste that fed the coral. Nothing was wasted in that balanced and symbiotic relationship.
Waiho wale kahiko
Ancient secrets are now revealed
- Hawaiian Proverb
The sea turtle wanted me to see more, but I was reaching my limit of concentration. Sensing this, she began to maneuver back toward the surface. Her massive body rose slowly, causing every cell in my body to tingle as if waking from a long sleep.
I sat on the lava boulders for a long time, tingling with my eyes closed, aware that the sun had begun to rise. When I finally opened them, the water sparkled so brightly that it almost blinded me. It took a minute to adjust. As my inner eye opened, I perceived a new world and my place within it.
Offshore in the distance, I noticed some objects bobbing up and down, which appeared to be coconuts. Hypnotized, I watched them for some time. Beneath a pastel sky at dawn, the ocean reflected a beautiful palette of blue and green, contrasting sharply against Pele’s black lava skin. Slowly, the coconuts began moving closer. The tide must be coming in, I thought. As they approached, their numbers increased, holding my curiosity. The sun glimmered on their shiny, wet surfaces, and I studied them intently, wondering why there were so many coconuts.
The moment lingered until they came close enough for me to see their true identity. To my surprise, the approaching coconuts turned out to be a herd of sea turtles! I jumped up, raising one sticky hand to shade my eyes against the sun’s mounting glare. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both. While I was unsure of its meaning, I felt I had received an affirmative sign.
I thanked the sea turtle for taking me on my journey to the underwater world. I also thanked Yemayá and asked her to protect them, knowing their species is endangered. Human commercial development of their nesting sites poses a significant threat to their existence: eggs are taken for food and aphrodisiacs; they are killed for leather and meat; they are ground up by dredges; run over by pleasure boats; poisoned by pollution; and strangled or drowned by fishing lines and nets. I prayed with hope in my heart for these ancient creatures and the wisdom they embody. I gathered those moments protectively close, along with the ritual supplies, into their paper bag. With one last glance at the sparkling sea and bobbing turtles, I climbed back up the path to the cliff where Martin waited, holding silent vigil.
The answer I received from Yemayá regarding my desire to have a child with Martin came to me in the form of images, similar to how the sea turtle had communicated with me. These images revealed a home here on Mother Earth where we learn to harmoniously harness the power of nature, within and without, ensuring there is enough for all her children. The emptiness I felt from losing my home and custody of my kids no longer felt so vacant. Surprisingly, I realized that I didn’t need to conceive a child with Martin; we already had four beautiful children between us. There would be many others who would come into my life whom I could love. Most importantly, I learned to carry my home in my heart, much like the sea turtle carries hers on her back.
When we learn to read the guiding signs of nature and are willing to delve deeper into the truths of our lives, we will discover that these truths are never any further than a breath away. There are other worlds beneath the sea and within our minds. We create this.
Aloha dear Thea~ I am grateful to you once more.. this time for letting me ride on the sea turtles' back with you.. Mona's paintings & the song were perfect ways to carry me forward. May I also learn the grace of carrying my home with me ~ 🙏
Beautiful, powerful story, Thea! What a brave journey that was, and such amazing revelations.
I love the sea turtles and saw many in my snorkeling and kayaking days on Maui in the mid-80's. I lived there for only 7 years, but long enough to fall in love with so much and to reclaim my feminine spirit with the help of Mama Ocean. Thank you for the remembrance and for your story.