This story is based on an account shared with us directly. The name Camila has been used in place of the person’s real name.
The Yawn That Wouldn’t Stop
Camila had been on camera for forty minutes straight. Not the kind of meeting where you can quietly turn your video off and let someone else carry the room. The kind where her face sat front and center the entire time, nowhere to really disappear to.
By the time the call ended, she felt fine. Tired, maybe, but the ordinary kind of tired that comes from talking for the better part of an hour. She closed her laptop, stood up, and yawned. Then she yawned again. And again. One right after another, the kind of yawning that stops feeling like ordinary tiredness and starts feeling like something your body is doing without asking you first.
Within twenty minutes, she could barely keep her eyes open. She wasn’t sleepy exactly. She felt hollowed out. It was a bone-deep exhaustion that didn’t seem to match how much she’d slept the night before or what she’d done that day.
Her Boss Noticed Before She Thought Much of It
She mentioned it to her boss during another conversation, mostly as small talk, the kind of thing you say without expecting much of a response. "I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, I can’t stop yawning," she shared.
Her boss didn’t brush past it. He had grown up around the Greek tradition, and what Camila described sounded familiar to him. Excessive yawning and sudden exhaustion are among the experiences some families traditionally associate with the mati.
“Someone had their eyes on you a little too long,” he told her. It wasn’t an accusation. As he understood the tradition, someone didn’t necessarily have to intend harm for the evil eye to occur. Hearing that Camila had spent much of the meeting on camera, with everyone’s attention directed toward her, only reinforced what he suspected. So he offered to say a prayer for her. Right there, with distance between them and a screen connecting them, he began xematiasma.
Then He Started Yawning, Too
Partway through the prayer, something happened. He yawned. A big sudden yawn that seemed to catch him off guard in the middle of what he was doing. To Camila, it was just another strange part of an already strange afternoon. To him, it meant something.
In some traditions surrounding xematiasma, yawning during the prayer may be interpreted as a sign associated with the mati. Customs and interpretations vary from family to family, but to Camila’s boss, the sudden yawn reinforced what he’d already suspected. He continued the prayer.
Over the rest of that day, Camila’s exhaustion began to ease. It wasn’t an instant or dramatic change. She simply noticed, gradually, that she was starting to feel more like herself again.
Within the tradition she had just experienced firsthand, what happened made sense: she had felt unexpectedly drained, someone familiar with the signs had recognized them, and xematiasma had been performed for her from a distance. For Camila, that was enough.
A Different Kind of Village Square
It’s easy to picture the evil eye as something belonging to another time. Village squares. Kitchen tables. Grandmothers quietly saying prayers learned from the generation before them.
Camila’s story happened somewhere very different. She was sitting in front of a laptop. The people looking at her weren’t gathered around her in a village. They were little squares on a screen. Nobody, as far as she knew, wished her harm. She had simply spent forty minutes being watched.
To her boss, who had grown up with the tradition, the setting didn’t make the experience unfamiliar. He recognized the excessive yawning and exhaustion through something he’d learned long before video meetings existed. And perhaps that’s one reason traditions like xematiasma continue to find a place in modern life.
The surroundings change. Families move. Conversations happen through phones and screens. But people still notice when someone they know suddenly doesn’t seem like themselves. Sometimes the person who notices also knows the old prayer. And sometimes they don’t.
If you believe you may be experiencing the evil eye but don’t have someone in your family or community who knows how to perform xematiasma, you can request the prayer from us. It can be performed for you from a distance, wherever you happen to be.
For Camila, the person who knew what to do happened to be on the other side of a screen.
Request a Xematiasma Prayer
