Ibori is performed with one's own hands on one's own head and needs nothing else. Practitioners describe the effect in practical rather than ecstatic terms — a settling, a shift from arguing with circumstances to consulting them, and specifically a reorientation toward the idea that the situation was in some sense chosen. Cool water is the primary substance, and coolness in Yoruba thought carries a large freight: tutu, coolness, is composure, blessing, the opposite of the heat of anger and disorder, and the standard word of blessing asks for a cool life. Because the practice requires no priest, no shrine, no payment and no permission, it is the one element of the tradition that survives in circumstances where everything else has been stripped away, and it is frequently the point of re-entry for people in the diaspora reconstructing practice from very little.