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Doorways
of Support and Inspiration: Iyanla Vanzant: Moments of Courage Katherine Martin Excerpted from Women of Spirit: Stories of
Courage from the Women Who Lived Them ( "Facing the truth
was one of the bravest things I have ever done. I was addicted. Not to
drugs. Not to alcohol. But to unconsciously creating situations
from which I needed to be rescued, situations that would
allow me to feel bad for myself, that I could wallow in, that I could
whine about, that gave me juicy stories to tell. Looking that
square in the eye was awful." Iyanla Vanzant burst into celebrity with her
best-selling book, Acts of Faith and her appearance on Oprah, where she has
become a regular guest. She's been called "an empowerment
specialist," a "spiritual bounty hunter," and "a spiritual
goddess." Where she came from to where she is now is an arc of inspiring
proportions. Born in the back of a taxi in My most courageous
moment is not a moment at all but a series of moments strung together around a
singular theme: telling myself the truth, the truth about who I am, about what
I want, about what I'm doing. That takes an incredible amount of guts, faith,
and strength. For me, it's most challenging in relationships. Some people do
their learning in careers. Some people do their learning alone. Me, I do my
greatest learning in relationships. "Iyanla, you've
had such a hard life, with an abusive husband and three kids." I hear that
all the time. But from where I sit now, looking back, I say, "No, I've had
a blessed life," because the level of learning I experienced in that
relationship was deep. In moments of weakness and darkness, I was forced to
face the truth about myself. And in those moments, nobody was there for me to
argue with, nobody was there to blame. What was there was a tiny voice that
knew the truth for me, about me. It was the voice of my spirit, and it would
come when I was crying because I had no money or food for my children. It would
come after I'd been beaten. And it would say something so outlandish, so
frightening, that at first I refused to listen: Get out of this relationship. It was a little whisper, but it sent a shudder through my body. It
made me cry. Having been abused as a
child, I had no sense of self. All I knew about me was what other people said,
and that wasn't too nifty. When I got married and had children, I recreated the
dysfunctional patterns of my childhood. I had a very abusive, codependent,
dysfunctional relationship. Of course, I didn't know any of those words back
then - these are all eighties and nineties terms. This was the seventies, and I
was young and convinced that whatever my husband did was okay, that the sun
rose and set on his behind. And so I argued with
that little voice. "If I leave him, I'll have nobody. If I don't have this
relationship, I'll be alone." I was angry. Not at my husband, but at God,
at the Goddess, and for that tiny little voice telling me that I needed to give
up something I had convinced myself I needed so badly. Then, one day, I don't
know if I was crying or bitching, but damn, I needed help. I had done all I
could do to make things work with my husband, to make things right for my kids.
But I'd been beaten one time too many. I'd been hospitalized. I'd even tried to
take my own life. I couldn't figure out what to do next. I just sat down and
said, "Help." Over the years, I've learned that "help" is
the most powerful prayer you can utter. If you sit quietly and ask, help will
come. It may not be the help you want, you may not like what you hear, but it
will come. Get out of this relationship. Once again, that's not
what I wanted to hear. "Is there anybody else up there? Can You give me
something else?" I was terribly unenlightened. I had no clue. In the end, I finally
had to admit that I was staying because I was afraid. I was staying because I
didn't believe I could do any better. Because I was addicted to being abused.
The truth was painful. Facing it was one of the bravest things I have ever
done. I was addicted. Not to drugs. Not to alcohol. But to unconsciously
creating situations from which I needed to be rescued, situations that would allow
me to feel bad for myself, that I could wallow in, that I could whine about,
that gave me juicy stories to tell. Looking that square in the eye was awful. I
was face-to-face with my own demons. Alone. I confided in no one, certain that
if my friends knew this horrible thing about me, they'd take their love away. I packed up my three
kids, Damon, Gemmia, and Nisa, who were five, three, and a year and a half.
Quietly, we left the apartment in At the station, I sat
Damon and Gemmia on the stairs. "Oh, my God." I suddenly panicked.
"What am I gonna do now?" The first step is always the hardest. The
first step is where we need the most courage, not only in taking it, but also
in understanding why we're taking it. If I hadn't understood why, eventually, I
would have gone back. It was quiet. No train
coming into the station. No train leaving. And yet out of nowhere came a man, a
young white guy, which was unusual because I lived in a predominantly black
neighborhood. He stopped right on the stair above my children and looked at me.
"Do you need something?" he asked. Not "Do you need help?"
Not "Can I help you?" But "Do you need something?" "Yeah, I need a
cigarette." He reached into his pocket and drew out a cigarette ... and a
token. Now, I didn't have a token, but I also hadn't asked him for one. Without
another word, he stepped around the kids and went off down the street. How did
this guy know I needed a token? I was so taken aback that I forgot to thank
him. I turned to shout, "Hey, thanks." Only seconds had passed. To
the right was a long city block. He couldn't have gone left because the train
tracks were there. Straight ahead was another long block. He was gone. Simply
vanished. And in that moment, I knew that he was an angel. I had a very
spiritual response to that: "Oh s-." Typical. "No, no, it
couldn't have been an angel. No, no, no." With that token, I got
away from a man I was sexually addicted to and began to acknowledge some very
ugly things about myself, no way around it. I was addicted to being abused. I
was addicted to the dysfunction in our relationship. And I use the word
addicted, because anything you do that creates a physical reaction once it's
withdrawn is an addiction, whether it's drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, food,
dysfunction, sex, or abuse. And so that's how I
learned that I could trust the voice. That it wouldn't lie to me. Usually, when
people tell me things I don't want to hear, I think they're lying. Or I get mad
at them. But you can't get mad at your gut. You can't get mad at your soul. With a little
ingenuity, I eventually got back into my apartment. I went to the neighborhood
hardware store and said to the gentleman there, "I need to change the lock
on my door." "Do you need to
change the lock or the tumbler?" "I don't know the
difference." I knew so little about taking care of myself in the world. I
had no woman training. No life skills. I learned how to write a check when I
went to the bank and asked the woman at the desk to teach me. She sat with me
for forty-five minutes explaining the whole process of banking and paying
bills. "To buy a lock is
to buy the whole thing," said the gentleman at the hardware store.
"To buy a tumbler is to buy the part you put the key in." "I just need the
part you put the key in." Very patiently, he
showed me how to change the lock. And it was as though Someone was watching
over me. I went back to my
apartment building. Using the phone in the booth on the corner, I called my
husband at work to make sure he was there, because I knew it would take him at
least an hour to get home. When he came to the phone, I dropped it, ran to the
apartment, and in less than twenty minutes changed the tumbler in the door,
raced across the street to the daycare center, got my kids, hurried back up to
the apartment, locked the door, and pulled down all the shades. I was back home
with my kids. It took several years
to get free of this man, during which he stalked me, shoved me around, and
humiliated me. One day, he beat me up in the street and ran off with the
children. My stepmother said, "Good, let him have them, you need a
rest." Eventually, I got a court order to protect us. For eleven years, I was
on welfare. One day, while I was still with her, an African American caseworker
at the welfare office said something to her colleague that shocked me into
getting not one, but two jobs. She said, "These welfare mothers make me
sick. We should take them all out to the field, put them on their knees, and
shoot them like cows." Not only did that shock
me into getting off welfare, but it also motivated me to go to college. I was in
October 18. I'll never
forget the date. I was in my first year of law school. That night, we got all
dressed up and went to a Stevie Wonder concert at "What does that
mean?" "I'm leaving. I'm
ready to settle down and get married." "What are you
talking about?" Instant dumbness: what do you mean, what are you saying, I
don't understand, how could you say that? "I told you I
didn't want a ready-made family. I want my own children, with a woman I'm
married to for the rest of my life. And I'm ready for that now." With that,
he walked out the door. I sat there stunned. I
couldn't move. I couldn't do anything. So here comes the
voice: You can't change people. You have
to accept people as they are. Why would you spend five years in a
relationship with a man who wanted something other than what you wanted? To which I responded,
as any normal, red-blooded female would, "Shut the hell up, that's not
what I want to hear." I got into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I
didn't eat, I didn't sleep. I cried, I vomited, and three weeks later, a friend
came to my apartment and banged and banged on the door until, finally, I went
to see who it was and let her in. "Okay, that's
it," she said. "Mourning's over. You knew from day one that he was
gonna leave you. Why are you acting like you didn't know?" It took everything in
me to hear her instead of arguing, to get out of bed and cut the drama and the
P.M.S. - the Poor Me Syndrome - to stop making him wrong and bad and to admit,
"I did this to myself. I have to stop giving myself over to people."
It was a pivotal moment. Every challenging, difficult, nasty situation I had
experienced from the time I was sixteen years old, I had done to myself. It
took a great deal to acknowledge that, to forgive myself and to make better
choices. When the truth falls
upon you, it works you to the core. I knew I had to investigate why I had done
these things to myself. The first thing I had
to get over was thinking there was something wrong with me. For a single, black
mother living in the projects with three kids, going to law school, and
presenting an image to the world that I could do it all, that was real hard. I
didn't have a clue why I was doing what I was doing, or what to do next. I was
in over my head. I had to sit down, shut up, and listen. Nothing else to do.
I'm very lucky, and blessed, that my inner guidance is strong and tenacious. It
persisted even when I was rebellious and, eventually, it won out. You see, the Goddess
always has a plan. God will meet you where you are. My connection to God and
the Holy Spirit and the Goddess are what I held onto, and I learned that They
didn't love me any less because I was making myself crazy. I didn't lose any
Brownie points because it took me so long to see the truth and change. Discovering who I was
and what made me tick also required that I listen to people's criticisms. You
can imagine how easy that was for me. Normally, when someone criticized me, I'd
feel bad and run around trying to get people to see things my way. In the
process, I didn't always tell the truth about what the person said in the first
place, which eventually got back to that person and then I'd be in a whole
great big mess. When I was afraid that someone wasn't going to like me or was
going to be mad at me or leave me, I'd lie. I'd say whatever I thought I needed
to say to keep someone from being angry with me or from leaving me. I didn't
know it then, but now I understand that I did these things out of fear. It was the divine
essence of God and the spirit of Goddess that moved me to pay attention, to not
run away and to not lie. Now when people criticized me or said things about me,
instead of getting hurt and angry and mad, I'd take it in and ask to be shown
any kernel of truth in it. And when the truth was revealed, oh, my God, it was
horrible, absolutely horrible by our usual standards. Things like, "You
have a tendency to draw negative attention to yourself because negative
attention is the only kind of attention you ever got." Not surprisingly, a
common theme in my life was betrayal - close friends, family members, or people
I really trusted would betray me, embarrass me publicly. My spirit had
something to say about that: People lie
to you because you lie to people and to yourself. People lie about you because
you lie about people. Jesus, I thought my
teeth were going to fall out. That was ugly. It was much more comfortable to be
"poor me" than to face the truth that I'd lie to impress people, to
make them think I knew more than I did or had more than I had, that I'd been
places I hadn't been. All because I didn't know who I was. And I didn't know
that who I was, just as I was, was good enough. That it was okay. What I'd
grown up with, all I'd ever known was, "There's something wrong with you
... because you can't keep still, because you can't stay clean, because your
mother's dead and you're being raised by a grandmother who doesn’t really like
you, because your hair won't grow, because you're black, because you're
female." That was the template, those were the threads that were woven
into my quilt: There has to be something wrong with you for people to treat you
the way they do. My greatest courage was
pulling those threads out of the quilt, dismantling it when I didn't know how
to make another one. My challenges today are
very different. As a self-empowerment guru of sorts, it's particularly hard to
be faced with situations, experiences ... opportunities to know myself a little
better and a little deeper, when at any moment the National Enquirer might be out in my backyard waiting to catch me
in a raw moment. When my second book, Acts
of Faith, became a best-seller and my son Damon, who was then twenty, went
to jail for selling drugs, I thought, "Oh, my God." It was very, very
difficult dismantling that, looking at it and working through my guilt and
fear, working through my self condemnation, my judgment of him, my judgment of
myself, my anger with white America... all of it, in less than twenty-four
hours. Once I understood what was really going on, I told the world. I wasn't
going to let anybody use it against me. Exposing myself
publicly was risky, but I've learned that there's a healing in it, for me and
for others. Truthfully, I saw it coming with my son and I didn't listen,
because I was afraid to acknowledge that maybe I hadn't given him what he
needed. Today I understand that I gave him what I had and if he needed more, I
just didn't have it. To be able to say that was huge: "I've made mistakes.
If I had it to do all over again, I'd probably do it a lot differently. But at
the time, it was my best." To not beat myself up about it or hold myself
guilty about it, but just to be aware of what I'd done and forgive what needed
to be forgiven. Damon went to jail for
three and a half years. In retrospect, it was the best thing that could have
happened. Had he not gone to prison at that time, he would be dead. He was
hanging out with the kind of people you see in Cine-Max smut. Interstate
trafficking of stolen cars and drugs. Stuff I can't even spell. The minute he
was old enough to think for himself, he did everything he could do to prove
that he was independent, out from under my control. And he made some poor
choices. Now, at twenty-nine, his emotional development is somewhat lagging
because he missed critical years being in prison. But he also learned a lot.
And I learned to stop being a mother and how to be a friend. After all these years,
one of the things I've had to acknowledge to my children, and to myself, is
that everything they needed from me I learned after they needed it. I asked
them to forgive me for not being present emotionally, which I couldn't do until
I'd forgiven myself. My children are such divine beings. "Forgive for
what?" they said. "We always knew where you were, we always had a
home and food." But I know that what I didn't give them emotionally still
affects their lives. They have challenges because of the steps we missed
together. And I can't change that. I can only be available to support them when
they feel the need for growth. When I learn something new, I tell them. When I
find a good book, I get one for them. When I hear of somebody who has some
insight or enlightenment, I let them know. I share with them. And I let them
know I'm still growing, I'm still learning. So far, all of them are
appreciative. Except my youngest daughter, who, at twenty-six with two kids and
a dysfunctional relationship of her own, is me all over again, which is
difficult to watch. Every now and then, I offer her a gem of wisdom. Usually,
she throws it back at me. I pick it up and go on about my business. Some people expect me
to be a finished product, some expect me to walk on water. But I'm gonna take a
boat anyway. When things show up in my life, I stop and question, "What
part of me is this?" At times, I don't know if I have the courage to do
what's being asked of me. It happened when I was on Oprah. I found a pocket of unworthiness in me that I didn't know
still existed. The first time I was on
Oprah, I thought, "This is great. This is a wonderful opportunity to share
my work with the world." I was focused on sharing the work, helping
people, guiding, supporting, offering another perspective. After about the
sixth show, that kind of faded away, and I said, "Oh s-, the most powerful
woman in TV is asking me - again - to be on her show." I almost lost my
mind. Who the hell did I think I was that I could come out of an incestuous,
dysfunctional family into promiscuity and more dysfunction only to cross my
legs on TV with Oprah Winfrey - again? I had to be outta my mind. To deal with that, I
had to open a pocket of unworthiness where I had put, "I am unworthy
because I didn't come from the house in the suburbs with the picket fence, and
because all three of my children have different fathers, and because I've been
in a number of dysfunctional relationships, and because I was addicted to
abuse, to men and sex, to drama and crisis and being a victim, to needing to be
rescued." Of course, nowhere in that pocket was the fact that I had worked
my ass off to not only transform myself and my life but also to transmute the
energy I was accustomed to living in - and that's why Oprah Winfrey wanted me
on her show again. It wasn't about me. It was about the same everlasting love
and divine presence that's available to everybody. It was about serving God. A Course in Miracles calls it the Holy Instant when you recognize and
realize your oneness with God. If I were to string together my moments of
courage, they probably wouldn't amount to an hour. My whole life: one hour.
Because it only takes ten seconds to get the insight and then, the moment you
hear it, it only takes two seconds to accept it and acknowledge it. Sometimes,
you acknowledge it but you don't accept it. Sometimes, you hear it and you
don't even acknowledge it. So those courageous moments probably don't even add
up to an hour in all my forty-eight years. But they have been the most
profound, life-altering experiences that I have ever had. And it has nothing to
do with being on the best-seller list, it has nothing to do with being on
Oprah, it has nothing to do with having two cars in the garage. It has only to
do with the courage to be vulnerable to God, to myself, to those around me. It
has only to do with the courage to trust that right where I am, God is, and She
speaks to me. Iyanla graduated summa cum laude from At home in A woman with a big and infectious laugh, Iyanla's
letting herself have fun these days in ways a child on welfare never could.
"When I was twelve, I never got a pair of heels, I never got to go to a
hairdresser or to a department store," she told the Dallas Morning News a few years ago. "When I should have been experimenting with how
I wanted to look, I was sixteen and raising a baby. Now that I'm forty-six, I
get to try myself on. Next year, I may be bald, I may go back to braids, I may
'lock my hair again. I don't know. But the message doesn't change. God loves
you. So stop looking at me." From the book, Women of Spirit: Stories of Courage from the Women Who Lived Them. Copyright © 2001
by Katherine Martin. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, An award-winning screenwriter and author, Katherine Martin created the
People Who Dare™ franchise, which began with her bestselling book, Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the
Women Who Lived Them (New World Library, 1999). She has produced sold-out
Women of Courage theater performances
about which Allen Nause, artistic director of Artists
Repertory Theatre says, "Women of
Courage is one of the most riveting, emotional, and ultimately inspiring
pieces of theatre you are ever likely to see…This is theatre at its most
powerful. It can change your life." Katherine's latest book is Women of Spirit: Stories of Courage from the
Women Who Lived Them. She's currently writing a guide to crafting a
courageous life and is the Courage Counselor at iVillage.com, the largest
women's site on the Internet. Ms. Martin travels and lectures nationally about
courage. Among others, Katherine has spoken with Deepak at The Chopra
Center and as one of the featured speakers in the preeminent Voices lecture
series in
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