It is often difficult to identify the exact moment that your life falls apart. In most cases, it is not a one-shot deal. If you ask most people who have had the experience of losing everything they love or believe in, they will probably say it was not one telephone call or one letter, one revelation or realization that caused the collapse of life as they knew it. I now understand that my life fell apart one piece at a time. Piece by piece; one experience, one situation, and one circumstance at a time, until I found myself standing in the midst of a heap of broken promises, splintered relationships, and shattered dreams. It is not a place I ever imagined I would find myself again, after I had gotten through it the first and second times.
The breaking down into pieces of a life is a painful thing to watch and even more painful to endure. Even more devastating is that as your life begins to unravel, day by day, piece by piece, there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. You see what is happening. You know what is happening. And you want anything other than what is happening to happen. You see, somewhere deep inside, we all know that lives are not built to fall apart. That is just not what lives are meant to do. The lives we are given by God are meant by God to grow, to blossom and flourish. The reality is, however, lives do crumble.
I now realize that lives fall apart when they need to be rebuilt. Lives fall apart when the foundation upon which they were built needs to be relaid. Lives fall apart, not because God is punishing us for what we have or have not done. Lives fall apart because they need to. They need to because they weren’t built the right way in the first place. I came to this realization one day, after many days, weeks, months, and years of trying to fix the cracks in my foundation. One day, one moment of time, as I sat helplessly surveying the broken pieces of my mind, heart, and life, I recognized that a broken life is a test of faith of the highest order.
In that testing moment, I thought I had only a few choices. I could take the handful of pills I was holding in my left hand, or I could take the gun in my right hand, raise it to my temple, and pull the trigger. I just wanted the pain of the brokenness to stop. I had another choice, but it was the last thing I thought I could do. The other choice was to give myself permission to feel the pain, fear, and devastation of all that confronted me, hoping that something miraculous would occur.
Obviously, I didn’t take the pills or pull the trigger. And somewhere amid my broken mental and emotional pieces, I knew that any attempt to manage my misery would be futile. That moment of helplessness led me into a moment of surrender. I buried my face in my pillow and cried for hours. It was a single act of human surrender, one instant of being willing to trust myself and my Creator, that was as close as I could get to lifting my eyes toward the hills, from where I hoped my help would come. My help did come and it only took five and a half years to reach me.
When I come face to face with the truth, my heart races and my ears get hot. There was a time when I thought that this physical response was fear. I now know that it is not fear at all. When I come face to face with the truth, my bloated humanness falls away, and I experience the energetic surge of my soul as it stands up within me. The truth is that I knew for a long time, five years to be exact, that I needed to share the story of my most recent life experiences. The experiences I had after I had become famous. The truth is that I was being disobedient to my own inner guidance. Friends and family had told me to write about all that I had learned as a result of leaving The Oprah Winfrey Show, falling flat on my face doing my own show, ending my marriage to my lifelong love, losing my daughter—my best friend—to colon cancer, and seeing my life fall apart over the two years that followed. The truth is, I flat out refused to do it!
In my refusal process, I started three other books, completing only one. I started several other writing and recording projects, only to lose interest and drop out. Rather than doing what my own inner guidance directed me to do, I allowed myself to become engrossed in more pleasurable activities, like making scrapbooks, watching reruns of Law & Order, and anything else I could think of to keep me busy. The good news is that when you have something to do, life will not allow you to move forward until you do it. The bad news is the same. I told myself and anyone who asked that I had already shared enough of my life, my heart, my wisdom with the world. There are some things people do not need to know; certain things I had a right to keep private. The truth is, I was scared. I wasn’t scared to tell the story. I was afraid of walking through the pain of the story. I was afraid of facing head-on what I had discovered about myself and my life as it crumbled around my feet. Most of all, I was deathly afraid of the responsibility of standing up straight in the power and majesty of what my life was becoming. You see, when you experience some of the things that I have experienced, something happens to you. First, you are humbled. Then, you get clear. Once you get clear about who you are, what you do, and what you are being called to do, you become powerful. As you sort through the pieces of your life story, as you sift through the rubble of what is left, your character becomes stronger. You are propelled into a higher level of responsibility for yourself, into a deeper appreciation for all of the pieces of your life, and into a deeper level of accountability to God. I was afraid of what that much responsibility would require of me. Fear will make you resistant, rebellious, defiant, and disobedient.
There were some other things that I was afraid of, too. I was afraid of telling a story that involved other people. I care about these people. I care about what they think of me. I was afraid they would be hurt by what I had learned about them, as I learned so much more about myself. The fear I experienced, I had to admit, was my attempt to fight evidence about reality. The truth is, we all have our own personal reality. My experience leads to my reality, and their experience would lead them to theirs. My story has nothing to do with anyone except me, and the same is true for everyone else. Anyone who has raised children can attest to the reality that each child will have a different perception of the same experience. This results in the telling of different stories, by different people about the same occurrence. The truth is, I was making a valiant search for an excuse to be disobedient to the voice of my own Spirit. As a good friend of mine would say, I am better now!
I am going to tell you a story about how a New York Times best-selling author ends up flat broke, looking for a place to live. I am going to show you how a 37-year relationship ends in divorce by e-mail. I am going to share with you the intimate details of how an internationally recognized spiritual teacher ends up on the edge of the bed in a million-dollar home slated for foreclosure, contemplating suicide. I am also going to tell you about the power of friends, faith, and prayer.
I am going to tell you about betrayal and the devastation it causes for everyone involved. I want to share with you what I have learned about having and not having a vision, and the cost of holding on to a vision that is not yours. I want you to know what I have learned about personality flaws, human weaknesses, a corrupted mind, a broken heart, and a depleted spirit. These are the pieces of my life that led to its total and complete collapse, pieces of a puzzle I didn’t even know existed until my life fell into pieces.
The puzzle and all of its pieces came from my family of origin; some people I knew, others I had never met. What held the puzzle pieces in place was their blood running through my veins. The puzzle was in my genes. By virtue of my life, their lives and lies remained alive, in me, and as me. I have come to believe that my story is very much like the story of many women, particularly African American women. Many of us marinated in wombs that did not support the development of a solid foundation, a clearly defined puzzle picture, a strong sense of who we are. This is not to blame our mothers. They too most probably did not have a clear picture of who they were or from what and whom they originated.
Sure, our parents and grandparents may tell us family stories and reminisce about the good old days. However, it’s rare that we get the low-down, dirty, all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print truth about who did what to whom
and what was really going on when we came into being.
I believe that my story, like so many other stories, is a demonstration of the generational karma visited upon women as a result of the families we are born into. Some people believe in karma. Others do not. I am not advocating for it one way or the other. What I am offering is that there is this thing—something— that moves through generation after generation of women, affecting how we see ourselves and how that identity often works against our own best interest. It is an energy that many of us are born into, live through, and struggle valiantly to live beyond. Whether or not you believe there is such a thing as karma—the lessons and deeds of past lives unfolding as the experiences and affairs of this life—you do know that there is a law of cause and effect. It is a universal law of nature: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In my life, I experienced many reactions for which I could find no action, no first cause. From this I concluded that there was something else going on. I came to recognize that there was this piece of me, one I did not understand, that controlled how I moved in the world. This thing meant I had a propensity to think a certain way, to nurse certain emotions and beliefs, and to hold on to certain expectations and limitations. This thing, I came to believe, was a generational karmic energy passed on to me through my bloodline.
My story is also what I call a story of pathology. Pathology is the study of the nature and origin of dis-ease, and disease is readily carried in the blood. The disease I discovered in my life experience was cancer. Not just the breast cancer that killed my mother or the colon cancer that stole my daughter’s life. I am not just talking about physical cancer. I am addressing pathology of mental, emotional, and behavioral disease, patterns that had infected the foundation of my life. I found it interesting, puzzling, and quite disturbing that although my mother had died when I was two years old, I had repeated many of her mistakes in relationships and parenting. Equally astounding was that while I had no conscious memory of her and little knowledge of her life experiences, I was like her in many respects. How I came to be like my mother was a missing piece of my puzzle. I sense that many women live a pathology like this, of beliefs and behaviors passed down from one generation to the next, causing them to live lives plagued by low self-value and a diminished sense of worth.
My story describes a pathology of abandonment and shame; abuse and self-abuse; betrayal and guilt; unworthiness and loss. My story is very much like my mother’s story. Her story was very much like her mother’s, who died when she was 13. And my story is very much like that of my daughter, whose mental and emotional pieces were shaped by my pathology, though I did not know it at the time.
My story is a story of distorted pictures and patterns: mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns. Some I recognized as they were playing out, others I did not. When I did recognize the pattern, the puzzle piece, I felt powerless to change it into something else. When I could not or did not change them, the patterns dominated my life. When I was unaware of the pattern, I felt like a victim. Many women I have worked with over the years live lives of victimhood (this is happening to me) and victimization (they are doing this to me), just as their mothers and grandmothers did. I came to discover that I was not a victim. Instead, I learned that I was making both conscious and unconscious choices that were grounded in a pathology that I in part inherited and in part created. My greatest lesson was the discovery that I held the key to my freedom in the center of my being. The key was my Spirit. No pathology is stronger than your Spirit, and there is no puzzle that your Spirit cannot put together.
As you read my story, I want to offer you some encouragement. I want to encourage you to remember that this is my story; how I see it and how I remember it. It has nothing to do with how anyone else sees it or remembers it. I want to encourage you not to read my story at the level of personality: yours, mine, or that of anyone involved. If you look only at the personality, you will be confused, angry, and heartbroken. Instead, I encourage you to read my story with the awareness that we each come into this life with—a spiritual curriculum. Our spiritual curriculum is chosen by our souls to facilitate growth, learning, and healing. It frames the lesson we must master through the experiences we encounter. The spiritual curriculum of each life has one aim: to get us back to God. If we judge our spiritual curriculum as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair, we will miss the point of the lesson, and we will repeat the class over and over until we understand that what we go through in life is the road map back to God.
In this journey we are about to take together, I also want you to know about the value of a daily spiritual practice—the painful and necessary process of surrendering your life into God’s hands and the slow, revealing process of personal redemption, leading to that moment when you are redeemed in your own eyes. I want to tell you what I have learned about joy and pain, fear and courage, anger and passion, and most of all, peace. I want you to know how I found peace among the broken pieces of my life. One powerful tool that I use to sustain my peace is EFT or the Emotional Freedom Technique, also called Tapping.
What I want you to know now, before you read any of these stories, is that none of us is immune to the challenges of life. No matter how famous you are, how much money you make, or how “big” you become in the eyes of the world, none of us is immune to the challenges, difficulties, and pain of life and being human. Although I would have never said it aloud, I thought I should be immune. I was quite horrified to discover I was not.
Finally, I want to share with you what I have learned about the power of family patterns and the permanent marks they leave on your life. It is the presence and power of these patterns that live in our blood that make it absolutely necessary to have a solid spiritual foundation, an intimate and viable relationship with God. If I have learned nothing else in the last five years of my life, I have learned that I can depend on God. I now know, without a shadow of doubt, that God can and always will hold me up, sit me down, push me forward, pull me back, turn me around, keep me in line, move me along, teach me what I need to know, and remind me of what I already know. In the stories I will share with you in this book, I pray that you too will come to understand that God can and will do in you, through you, and for you everything that is required, at just the right time, in the perfect way. This is what I have learned and what I have been asked to share with you. I do it with the prayerful hope that my story and your story will converge at some point with such power and love that we will all become beacons of peace on the earth. Toward that end, I am in peace, not pieces.
Let It Be So!
Iyanla
When you have no positive pictures and, are unable to access the feelings those pictures would evoke, you have a tendency to make up what you want the pictures to be. More often than not, the pictures you create are not fully developed, causing you to live your life in the blur of false images.
CHAPTER 2
THE WALKING WOUNDED
It is hard for me to imagine that after loving someone for more than forty years of my life, I would arrive at a day when the mere thought of being in the same room with him would be distasteful. Now, don’t get me wrong; I wish him no harm. In fact, there is still a part of me that actually loves him. Fortunately, I am proud to say, today I love me more.
Oh, but there was a time! A time when I was blinded and crippled by what I thought was loving him. Suffice it to say that we wanted to love each other. We really tried to love each other, and on a good day, we were convinced that we did love each other.
I wish I could say that it was a real love, but today I choose to no longer deceive myself in that way. Today, I understand that I was hooked on my own denigration. I was hooked on my own dysfunction. There was a hook inside of me that got caught on proving to myself that I could never and would never have what I wanted. He just happened to be passing by when I threw my hook into the sea of life.
My first husband was a Vietnam veteran who struggled with the demons of drugs and re-entr
y when he came home. The second was a functional illiterate and recovering heroin addict. My third husband was the embodiment of everything I needed to live out my lifelong fantasy. The fantasy that my father would love, accept, and rescue me. By then, I could afford the kind of wedding that I always wanted my father to provide for me: large and extravagant. Because I wanted everyone to know that I was worth it. Worth every extravagant dime.
My third husband was my forbidden fruit—the thing I could not have and did not need, which made me want him even more. He was the prize that would prove to me and everyone else that I was worthy of my father’s love. The truth of the matter is, everything about him was really about my father. I had a tremendous amount of unfinished business with my daddy. The men I married were the souls who volunteered to spend time in my life so that I could work through that business.
When I married Eden, I was at the beginning of being a success in my life, while emotionally, there was a place in me that still felt like a failure. The spiritual bones of my life were ill-formed and far from solid. I loved God but I didn’t really know God, not then, not yet. I was transforming from who I had been into who I was becoming; but I still wasn’t quite sure of who I was, what I wanted, or where my life was heading. To the naked eye, I looked fine. I could walk and talk and tie my shoes while spelling my name. I was earning more money than I ever thought was possible. I was traveling the world and doing things that I never imagined I could or would be able to do. My children were grown and making it on their own with the broken pieces of myself that I had given to them. And then there was this one other thing I forgot. In the process of planning and having a wedding, I forgot there would actually be a marriage, a union of minds, bodies, souls, and issues that would come together as soon as the ceremony was over.
Finally, I had a home and a husband. However, just beneath the surface, the bones of my soul were aching; some were smashed and others were held together by small fragile pins. My relationship with the man I thought would make everything all right was not doing what I demanded that it should do: make me feel whole. He was not happy and I was miserable. We tried as best as we could to fix it. If you were to ask him, he would probably say the demise of our marriage was about me: what I did and didn’t do. Or perhaps, he would say it was about him: what he could not and would not do.
Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through Page 2
