Iyanla Vanzant: Thought Therapy
Sandie Sedgbeer: Tell us what led to the publication of your first book. How did you break into that market?
Iyanla Vanzant: I was a criminal defense attorney practicing law in Philadelphia. One day, I had clear inner guidance to leave that law office and never come back, so I did. So, coming off welfare, with three kids, to become an attorney and then walk away from being an attorney to do God only knows what, was a monumental step. Within a matter of months, I was asked to teach women on welfare how to create an action plan to get off welfare, to teach them life skills. So, I taught them the things I had learned and that I could do, and I created this little workbook called Tapping the Power Within. It expanded and grew and became the first publication that I self-published. Somehow, it got around in distant communities and bookstores, and one day I got a call from an agent who said ‘Somebody gave me a copy of your book Tapping the Power Within, and I’d like to know if you’d like to have it published.’
The thing I learned from that is when you are on purpose, and when you are faith-filled when you are prayerful, and when you permit yourself to have a vision beyond where you are and what you know, the Universe will step in and support you. It just will. When we’re trying to make it happen or worrying if it didn’t or doesn’t happen, when we’re in that energy, we shut down.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Did you know that then, or did you just think, wow, I got lucky?
Iyanla Vanzant: Because I was prayerful, I kind of wondered if that was the result of the prayer, but the other part of me, the human, ego-driven part, said: ‘Wow, imagine that I’m lucky.’ It took a while for those two pieces to be introduced to each other.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You talk about having this incredible success and kind of believing it because it’s happening, but at the same time, there’s this underlying Do I deserve this? That began to fight with that.
Iyanla Vanzant: It happened in my relationship with my now dear friend, always dear sister-woman, Oprah Winfrey. At that point, I think I had authored 13 or 14 books, and I was on her show every week as a part of her Change Your Life Faculty, and still, a part of me doubted if I deserved this. And that part of me that didn’t believe that I could sustain it blew it up. Naturally, by something that I said or did. I think it’s important for us to understand that no matter how much we learn, there’s always more to learn. No matter how much we know, there’s always more we can know. In all of that, the enemy is in me. The enemy to our success, to our peace, to our joy, to our healing, the enemy is in me. It’s not outside. Now, the experience may show up out, but the enemy is in me, and it took me 11 years to find and neutralize that enemy. Notice I didn’t say destroy it, because it’s part of me. Neutralize, meaning identify the behaviors, the thoughts, and beliefs, and all that makes that enemy alive in me. And the way I did that was through awareness, conscious soul-searching, and forgiveness.
Sandie Sedgbeer: It takes courage to stand up and tell the world: ‘Wow, I had the backing of Oprah, and I blew it.’
Iyanla Vanzant: Yes, but you know courage is needed. A woman of my age, it takes courage to stand in front of the mirror naked.
Sandie Sedgbeer: And with your honesty with Oprah, you were able to mend that relationship.
Iyanla Vanzant: Yes, because I had to do the work first. It wasn’t about Oprah throwing me off her show, and us not speaking. We’ve always got to begin within. So, once I was able to do the work, and I was clear and had no agenda and understood, things just opened up. I hadn’t spoken to her in 11 years, and she invited me to her final season. Instead of doing one show, we did two. After that, I did a series of life classes with her. As a result of that, she said to me, ‘You need your show.’ And I said ‘No, I don’t need my show. I’m good.’ She said, ‘No, you need your show.’ I had to be aware that that part of me saying no, was still that part of me that didn’t think that I was worthy. You know, putting up resistance. But because I had done my work, I was able to identify that and say, OK, wait a minute, yes. If Oprah Winfrey, who owns a television network, wants to give me a show, then I need a show. Give it to me.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Tell us the inspiration behind your book, Get Over It – Thought Therapy for Healing the Hard Stuff.
Iyanla Vanzant: One of the things I’ve learned by doing my own work and healing is that we can re-infect ourselves or re-impress ourselves with the original trauma of an experience every time we tell the story. So, we tell it one year, and we tell it the next, and we constantly re-traumatize ourselves. Then I realized, in my own life, it had got to a point where it really wasn’t even about the trauma; it was about the excitement of telling the story because the story had grown and shape-shifted, and more characters had been added. It had become like a mini-drama. So, I had to ask myself, why am I still holding onto this experience, and what is it that I need to do? What is it that I want? I really want to get over it. I want to get over the attachment to the story, and I want to get over the energy that the story creates in my body. I want to get over the woundedness of the experience. So, I began to look at various spiritual practices, tools, and technologies that would help me get over it, so I didn’t even have the desire to tell a story about it anymore.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Lots of books give people advice, information, and exercises, but Get Over It is much easier because EMDR is very easy to implement, and you can get an instant result with it. Tell me about the tools and the processes because one of the things that you highlight is the dominion over our most powerful asset—our mind.
Iyanla Vanzant: Get Over It is really thought therapy. Therapy is a way to break something down, to dissect it into small pieces until it becomes something else. Get Over It gives us technologies and tools for breaking down those stories so that we can rewire and reset the brain, so we use everything in the head.
Number one, breath, of course, we use our nose and our lungs. Another is a modality called tapping, which I think of as needle-less acupuncture, where you go to certain energy spots while you’re thinking a certain thought or saying a sure thing. You move the energy in those places because all thoughts create energy, and energy creates an experience.
The other thing is eye movements because as you move your eyes in a certain way, a certain rotation, and a certain sequence, you are stimulating the brain. If you stimulate the brain while saying certain things, you will rewire it. Of course, I give you prayers, because that’s my major tool, but they are affirmative prayers, not begging, pleading prayers. They affirm, decreeing, and declaring what it is you want as you desensitize the energy in your body with the tapping and rewire the brain with the eye movements. It is just an elegant sequence of activities.
The thing about an affirmation is the feeling. People mouth or mimic affirmations from the mind or the thought but don’t have the feeling. Get Over It offers something that will stimulate a feeling or an energetic movement. So, whether you’re saying the affirmation while you’re tapping, which is going to give you a feeling or move energy, or whether you’re saying them while you’re doing the eye movements, which is going to create stimuli in the brain, it’s going to give the affirmation a different foundation, some sort of feeling or sensation, which will then anchor the words you’re speaking into the body.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Iyanla Vanzant
