Ashoka
Brazil 🇧🇷
My name is Aisha, I am 21 years old and I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil.
For the past 6 years I have been part of an Umbanda Terreiro, an Afro-Brazilian religion whose main purpose is to use spirituality to help people who come to us for help, whether spiritual or not.
Our religion was born in Brazil 114 years ago, and its main element is the worship of the Orixás, African entities. Orixás are deities connected to and always represented by nature, which makes our worship services full of natural elements such as herbs, flowers, water from waterfalls and the sea, fruits for food, and everything natural. Nature for us is our main form of connection with our ancestors, with the entities we worship, and we have respect and love for it.
Besides this, the main goal of Umbanda is to spread charity regardless of belief, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or nationality, we are welcoming to those who come to us from the heart and we have many actions during our annual calendar for our social actions; the main and best known is the feast of Ibejis (entities that represent childhood, purity, joy, and sweetness), in this feast we organize actions in needy communities to take sweets, toys, and food to children and families who live in precarious situations... We often find ourselves in situations of extreme poverty, and we organize multi-rides to get donations of clothes, shoes, hygiene items, and food to help these communities. It is an effort that we have and we do it with all our hearts, because we believe that charity makes us evolve as human beings and as a spirit, we believe that our passage in this life is to be lived in a happy, positive way, and always doing what we can to help others.
Unfortunately, in Brazil the religions of African matrix in general suffer a lot of prejudice. There are many reports of Umbanda and Candomblé (also an Afro-Brazilian religion) temple groups that are attacked by intolerant people who allege that our faith worship evil, people who use a racist speech to attack us.
Regardless of the attacks, we continue strong, fighting for our rights, for visibility and for respect, always carrying the flag of Oxalá, our major father, to whom we are always devoted and grateful. Umbanda teaches me every day to value all that I have and to share it, it teaches me to be better as a person, as a woman, as a spirit, and as a consciousness. I live for Orixá and Orixá lives in me in a unique and sacred connection. Thanks to Umbanda I was able to get better from a very serious depressive condition, I have strength every day to go forward with faith, and my purpose is to take this so that other people know that God, no matter what you believe in, is mainly about love for others, without judgments, without separations. "Axé" is the greeting we use to wish the good, so, Axé to all who read this!