Vodou Culture 101: Flow and Character
In the US majority culture, there are any number of self-improvement programs from 12 step programs to weekend seminars proclaiming that if you pay a few thousand dollars, you can change your life. They have in common the idea that voluntarily changing behavior will get you the results you want—if you try hard enough.
Some of them are religious and all of them share the ideas with Abrahamic religions about winning and losing. There are winners and losers, and if you do all the things they tell you to hard enough, you’ll be a winner. Essentially, self-improvement programs teach you routines and ideas that you are required to spend the rest of your life forcing yourself to remember, enact, and enforce. They get you excited and promise you that if you just flex hard enough, for long enough, in every way, you might be successful.
The problem with this is that the character of the person does not change. The habits and routines you’re trying to replace are symptoms, not causes for your lack of success. You still have the same problems when the weekend or inpatient treatment is over, and those problems will pop right back up as soon as you relax. This is why the long term success of those sorts of programs is abysmal: they cannot treat problems, they can only try to replace symptoms, and only if you are constantly trying as hard as you can.
In vodou culture, we talk about flow for a few reasons, among them the idea that what comes out of your character is most natural to you, and expressing that character in the ways that feel natural to you (and do not tend to require permanent flexing) is preferable to spending your whole life pretending to be something you aren’t and are not prepared to be. To be in flow is to be behaving in harmony with your character, whatever your character happens to be. Trying to constantly live outside flow will fail, typically cycling into shame, resentment, anger, and self-hate until the next program comes along, promising to change your life if you just pay them enough and do their routines.
That cycle repeats every time you believe that just changing a routine changes the character. The belief that all you have to do is a few routines and it fixes everything is a lie, and the proof is in that cycle, in the long term success rates of self-improvement programs and in the misery of having to constantly try to do something you know you cannot do, be someone you know you are not. It is also a lie to believe that you can project the person you want to be seen as (i.e. a winner) and that it is how you will be seen.
Someone’s going to see through it, and in my experience, what you’re showing others is not what you think you are. They’re not seeing the carefully curated person you wish you were.
Lying to yourself and others can actually prevent you from understanding yourself and making change to your character, teaching you not to recognize yourself in favor of projecting an image you prefer to look at and ignoring feedback that would tell you people aren’t buying it. All your time and energy is invested in the lie that changing a few habits and trying harder (and harder, and harder, until you break down) can turn you into someone else. But no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t change the character by simply changing your habits.
The point here is subtle, but important: you are who you are, not who you think you are, or what you’d like to be, or what you’d like other people to think you are.
While this can sound depressing, it is not. Vodou embraces the idea that what you are now can change. Your character can elevate. One of the major goals of vodou is to give the tools to certain priests and magical workers that allow them to work with people to elevate them, and in doing so change their lives. Those tools are not democratically distributed. Only some of the tools can be shared, but they’re all effective at changing the character, and in doing so changing the behavior.
Vodou is profoundly concerned with freedom, with the freedom of the individual to act, the wisdom necessary to understand consequences and accurately understand situations, and with the eventual divinity of the soul. As a person’s character changes, the actions which flow out of the character changes. Not having to constantly try to be something and lie about it allows a person to invest their time and energy in doing something that will actually help them succeed, instead of constantly running on a metaphorical treadmill, getting nowhere but tired.
