Iyanla Vanzant: Thought Therapy

From welfare mother to New York Times best-selling author, from the Brooklyn projects to Emmy Award winner, Iyanla Vanzant is one of the country’s most celebrated writers and public speakers, and she’s among the most influential, socially engaged, and acclaimed spiritual life coaches of our time. Her award-winning show “Iyanla: Fix My Life,” is the No. 1 reality show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

An Interview with Iyanla Vanzant: Thought Therapy For Healing the Hard Stuff

Iyanla Vanzant is one of America’s most celebrated new thought spiritual teachers and inspirational public speakers, and the much-loved host and executive producer of the award-winning hit Iyanla, Fix My Life on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network.

Iyanla Vanzant joined Sandie Sedgbeer on a recent edition of What is Going Om to share the powerful insights and practical tools to help us rise from rock bottom and heal the hard stuff in our lives that she shares in her popular books, courses, events, and TV programs.

To listen to Sandie Sedgbeer’s full interview with Iyanla Vanzant, click the player below.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You’ve been incredibly honest about the harrowing ups and downs you’ve had to face in life—being raised by an extremely strict Grandmother, being raped at an appallingly young age, being a teenage mother at 16, having three children and a physically abusive husband at 21, suicide attempts and, many beatings later, leaving your husband and becoming a welfare mom. And then incredible success, followed by more downs when you lost your daughter to colon cancer. And that’s just the barest bones of the rock-bottoms that you’ve faced. Suffice to say, and there can be few people better qualified than you to show others how to rise and fix their lives, or to say boldly—not without compassion—’Get Over It. No matter what life throws at us, there is a way to heal the hard stuff,’ and that, of course, is the title of one of your recent books. Where did you find the strength and resilience to keep going?

Iyanla Vanzant: Well, you don’t find the strength; you realize you are strong. There’s a difference in seeking something outside of you and becoming aware that what you need is inside of you. So, through my experiences, I learned to become aware of and to appreciate my strength, the ability to move from one rock to the next, or from the rock to the peak, and back down to the rock and back up to the peak. So many of us think that our experiences come to crush us, when the truth is, they come to stretch us and grow us.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Yes, it takes us a long time to understand that one.

Iyanla Vanzant: It’s easy to easier to believe and see yourself as damaged, wounded, broken, helpless than it is to take responsibility for your power. At least, let me speak for myself. It was easier for me to be a victim, to be damaged, to be broken, to be wounded than it was for me to take responsibility for my power because I had been programmed and conditioned to believe that I was powerless.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So many of us are. Few books have touched me as much as your book Peace from Broken Pieces. So many appalling things happened in your life, and you’ve been so honest about learning how to put one foot in front of the other to move through them and then getting knocked back down again. Yet you kept ongoing. You kept working your way through, and your honesty and courage are, I think, what makes what you so attractive to other people because you’ve truly been there.

Iyanla Vanzant: Yes, but I think what helped me is that early on because my Grandmother was a Native American. I was raised in that experience of understanding culture, language, art, dance, and music, and I knew that my soul, the inner part of me, chose to be here at this time, in this body, in this way. So, I never got steeped in victimhood. I didn’t understand why my soul chose the things it chose, but I knew from a young age the power of choice; I knew my experiences were purposeful. It took me a while to put those two things together, but at least I did have some idea of what was going on.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You had a very disadvantaged upbringing. You were pregnant at 16 and a single mum on welfare, and then you started educating yourself and had to work hard. What was the defining moment that inspired you to change your life, to get educated and start turning things around?

Iyanla Vanzant: There’s never one defining moment. I think there are a series of moments, and if you put them all together, it brings you to a new awareness. For me, I just wanted to stop hurting. I just wanted to get out of pain. I had attempted suicide twice, so it was evident to me that I was not good at taking my own life. I had to pay attention to that. That was not working for me. I just kind of said, ‘I’ve got to be here, but I don’t want to be here in hurt.’

Then two things happened to me. One, I was in a bookstore, and a book literally fell off the shelf and hit me on my head. It was Ernest Holmes’ This Thing Called You. Some of the concepts were new, some I knew but didn’t quite understand, and I began to work with that.

Then, you know, you always have one person in your life who will say something that makes an impression on your soul. For me, it was my stepmother. All through my life. As a young girl, my stepmother used to say to me: ‘Don’t do that. You’re going to be somebody one day. Don’t act like that, and you’re going to be somebody one day.’ And for whatever reason, her words came alive in my being. ‘You are going to be somebody one day.’

And I just thought of asking myself, OK, who are you going to be? I wanted to be pain-free; I wanted to be safe; I wanted to be powerful. I wanted to be loved. So, I just started moving toward the things that I wanted to be. That’s what did it for me.

Sandie Sedgbeer: She was a powerful influence in your life. Did she live to see you be somebody?

Iyanla Vanzant: No. She passed before I graduated from Law School. When I graduated from college, she had lupus and wasn’t able to come to graduation, and before I completed Law school, she surrendered her life. So, she didn’t get to see it. But she knew it, and I think she’s just one of my angels now.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You had an interesting relationship with your father. He wasn’t there a great deal until later. You’ve said that nobody taught you how to be a woman and nobody taught him how to be a man. And that creates its problems. Did he live to see you become somebody?

Iyanla Vanzant: He lived to see me become both a college grad and an attorney, and failed to acknowledge either one, which was part of his pattern. My father was in my life but not available, not present, and not at all accountable, and that’s because that was who he was, and he had never been taught. He never knew his father, who was of mixed race. His mother was a Native American. He was raised in post-slavery Virginia. So, he had a little identity, a small foundation, lots of shame and guilt, and two absent parents. So, he did the best he could. I appreciate that now, but I didn’t know it then.

Sandie Sedgbeer: He did teach you something very valuable. He was an avid practitioner of yoga and a student of Paramahansa Yogananda, and he used to tell you to sit down, shut up, and listen, which you hated but saw the value of later on.

Iyanla Vanzant: Yes. He must have been in his late 40s when his life took a turn, and he started studying under Yogananda and would give us what I know now as Dharma talks. They were just lectures, which I didn’t want to hear from my father, and the one thing he used to always say to me was: ‘Sit down, shut up and listen,’ which is the key to meditation. You shut your mouth, you shut out the outside world, and you listen within. Who knew? I didn’t know that then, but I know it now, and so the awareness was that even in his dysfunction or malfunction, he left a valuable imprint on my soul, consciously, and its benefits.

Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Iyanla Vanzant