Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through

by Vanzant, Iyanla

  Finally, thank you Lord! I had drawn my line in the sand, and I was not willing to back up and draw another. Lesson learned.

  Pattern disrupted. Amen and Ase!

  Those whom the devil would tempt,

  He tells not a lie, but

  a lesser truth.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE PERSONAL LIE

  When I first moved to Maryland, it was more than a new beginning. It was a divine opportunity for me to catch up with myself and begin to practice some of the things I had learned and begun teaching in the world. My first book had been published and was selling with great success. Essence had published my story, and I was recognized as an energetic and popular speaker. My Philadelphia family was close enough that I could still feel and receive their support.

  Then there was home. My son was in prison. My youngest daughter was pregnant for the second time, and I was raising her son. Gemmia was expecting her first child with Jimmy, and although she refused to marry him, theirs seems like a solid relationship.

  I was moving forward but struggling within myself. I felt guilty about my son being in jail. I felt ashamed about Nisa having two children with no husband or formal education. At the core of my being, there was this gnawing belief that I did not deserve good things and that the not-so-good things were going to swallow me up.

  When Simon and Schuster published my second book, Acts of Faith: Daily Meditations for People of Color, my life took off at warp speed. On my first book tour, I traveled to 16 cities, stayed in firstclass hotels, and spoke to audiences who seemed to admire me.

  I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, when Gemmia called me at 10 P.M. to tell me she was in labor. I could not get a flight out until 7 A.M. the next morning. I got to the hospital 15 minutes after my granddaughter, Niamoja, was born. When I looked into her eyes, waves of Mommy guilt and failure flooded my body. This had been one of the most important days of Gemmia’s life and I had missed it—by 15 minutes. Jimmy hadn’t been there either. He had left Gemmia to take a friend to rent a car. By the time he got back to the hospital, the baby had been born. Who the hell goes to rent a car while his child is being born? Men who are emotionally unavailable that’s who! I glimpsed the family pattern. I saw it. I felt it. I denied it.

  Shortly after my granddaughter was born, I was named Best New Non-Fiction Writer by the American Booksellers Association. They flew me to Chicago, put me up in a four-star hotel, and gave me my award in front of more than 1,000 people. Just before I stood up to receive the award, I put my finger on the problem: I was numb. I didn’t feel proud or excited or happy. Something had taken over my mind and my body, leaving only a void.

  I offered some words of gratitude to the people who had helped to make this possible, and I took my seat. I was truly grateful, I think. Yet I was unable to accept my own worthiness. For a very brief moment I toyed with the idea of investigating what was going inside of me. Then I thought better of it.

  My next book, The Spirit of a Man: A Vision of Transformation for Black Men and the Women Who Love Them, was a download, an inspiration from something or someone on high, in response to the guilt and shame I was feeling about my son’s incarceration. I had tried so hard and wanted so badly for him to be different from my brother and my father. I wanted him to be living proof that I had not failed as a mother, even though I had had him when I was 16 years old. Every collect call from the Virginia prison destroyed that dream a little more. In the world of dashed dreams, my youngest daughter, Nisa, had given birth to her own son at age 16, and my oldest daughter, Gemmia, was basically raising her daughter alone.

  All of these disappointments and failures clouded over my growing success. Learning about Damon’s experiences behind prison walls, glancing over at my daughters who were struggling but making it, ripped open something inside of me. I had to know why this was happening to me; to them; to us. I had to unearth the damaged puzzle pieces, the life-threatening patterns I had passed to them.

  The book began with a very simple prayer that I now recognize as a cry for help.

  “Lord, what is going on? Why is this happening to me and my children?”

  I sat on the edge of my bed, repeating this one phrase over and over in my mind. When I heard the first words of what I now know was God’s response to my plea, I wasn’t sure what to do. As the thoughts and feelings continued to spill forth, I got a pencil and started to write them down. Within a few hours, I had written pages of information, some of which I understood, much of which I did not.

  I remember Gemmia and the baby coming into my room. I tried rather incoherently to explain what was going on. Gemmia knew that I had a gift that I did not yet fully embrace. In the calm and loving way that only she had, she said, “It would probably be good for everyone, including you, if you would put that in the computer instead of on that hotel message pad.”

  I followed her advice. I sat at the computer typing whatever I heard without worrying whether or not it made sense. Gemmia made sure that I had plenty of water, fruit, and something to eat. I stayed in my room for three weeks. In the end, I had a manuscript and a completely new way to tap into the Divine Spirit of God.

  My agent loved the manuscript and believed that my current publisher was not offering a competitive advance. She initiated a book auction, and Harper San Francisco bought The Spirit of a Man for $150,000. I now had lucrative contracts with two different publishers. Simon & Schuster recognized that my next book could be huge and pushed me to deliver it quickly in an attempt to beat Harper San Francisco to the marketplace. The Value in the Valley:A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas was born to great reviews and successful sales.

  The Spirit of a Man was a great book that confirmed that most men do not read self-help. Its failure left me doubting whether I had a communication line to God at all. It didn’t matter. I had to keep moving. Within a year of publishing The Value in the Valley, I wrote Faith in the Valley, a book of potent inspirational messages for women designed to get them to the other side of life’s difficulties. The publishing world, like most entertainment businesses, loves to duplicate success. Faith sold decently, but it was not the megahit that Simon and Schuster had anticipated. Back to the drawing board for them. Deeper into numbness for me.

  When I tell you I was moving fast, I put the emphasis on fast. I was writing and flying all over the country speaking. I had begun to teach classes and conduct workshops in Maryland and Washington, D.C. Gemmia was my second in command. She managed my business and encouraged me to charge for my classes and workshops. She orchestrated my first makeover by changing my usual traditional African-inspired garb for more contemporary attire accented by African-inspired jewelry. She braided my hair, and when that became too much to manage, she encouraged me to cut my hair off.

  It was Gemmia who encouraged me to create a prayer team to staff every class and every workshop. If I was going to call my work spiritual work, it had to be deeply rooted in the basic spiritual practices that had saved my life, such as prayer and meditation. I asked around, and this family member asked that friend; that friend brought this friend, and before we knew it, there were 14 of us working as the team we called Inner Visions.

  Twenty-five years ago, when the spiritual movement was a virtual embryo, there was no money in it. Or perhaps I should say that if you were a person of color, there was very little money in it, unless you were a preacher. I make that distinction because my career emerged around the same time Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra both began to appear in large venues across the country before sold-out crowds. Although I had published and sold more books than either of them, I had yet to be invited to be a guest on the Today Show or Good Morning America, and Oprah was simply out of the question. I contented myself with doing things on a much smaller scale. I told myself that because I was doing good work, it didn’t matter. Somewhere inside, however, there was a cesspool that kept pumping not good enough into my brain.

  When you do not believe that who you are and what y
ou do is good enough, that message will contaminate everything you do. People coast to coast would tell me how this book or that class had changed their lives. I heard the words, but I could not receive what they were saying. Deep down, I thought they were either mistaken or out-and-out lying.

  Comparisons are a form of violence. When you believe you are not good enough, you will compare yourself to others. I constantly compared myself to other spiritual or self-help gurus. I compared my income and their public acclaim to my lack of the same. I became more and more numb to the good things that were happening in my life. I beat up on myself for not doing the right things, in the right way, to make the money I needed to live a comfortable life. My classes were filled. The workshops were in demand. I was busy, busy, busy. And I was broke, broke, broke.

  I kept wondering when my time of prosperity would come. I had no idea that I was sitting right in it. I couldn’t see it, because my thoughts and beliefs about myself had not changed. Somewhere in my mind, part of me still felt like an impostor, the ugly, worthless teenage mother on welfare, pretending she had it all together. Deep down inside she was shit, she came from shit, and the shit she was doing would never make anything any different. Of course, I didn’t share this with anyone. I just went about my business. In the bliss-filled moments when I was serving those who came to receive the gifts that I’d been given, I was a genuinely wonderful vessel, but offstage I was more and more numb.

  In the publishing world, I had become a cash cow. I discovered how lucrative my work had become when my first publisher reissued my first book, Tapping the Power Within, with a cover so closely resembling the best-selling Acts of Faith, that you might mistake one book for the other. Not long afterwards, the same publisher decided to publish Interiors, a manuscript written years earlier for the women in my life-skills program. After I began the editing process, I realized that writing that book was for my healing alone. It was not for the world. But the publisher ignored my request to table the manuscript. The book was released anyway, with my face plastered on the cover to seduce my one-million plus readers. I’m not sure what the readers did. I sued that very small, independent, black-owned publishing company for breach of contract and copyright infringement. It was a terrible ordeal. It was a betrayal of the highest order. I refused to acknowledge the book, autograph it, or allow a copy of it to enter my home.

  I got new representation and my new attorney retooled all of my contracts with Simon and Schuster, who reissued Acts of Faith in hardcover and paid me a sizeable advance. My agent, attorney, and publisher then began to reshape my publishing career. Everyone seemed to feel that my message was universal and I was limiting myself by staying “black.” They said my message had worldwide appeal. It was decided that I should “cross over” to the larger selfhelp market that was booming at the time.

  I wasn’t sure what to think or how to feel. Here I was suing an independent black publisher, and now they wanted me to drop “black” from my titles. It was frightening. Finally, though, Gemmia and I decided to roll with it. We determined there was nothing wrong with me expanding my work to the broader market. There was no danger of me being confused with anyone else. I was Iyanla, pure and simple. The question was, Who the heck was Iyanla? Or better yet, Who had she become?

  When doubt is present in your consciousness it indicates a much more profound problem. The real problem is the personal lie. Everyone has one: It is a story that we tell ourselves about who we are and what we do and do not deserve in life. Your personal lie is a function of all of the broken pieces of your puzzle—all of the elements of your history, all of your experiences, all that you havebeen taught about yourself merging with all that you have made up about yourself. Your personal lie circulates throughout your entire being and determines how you move, or if you can move at all.

  It is a function of what is stored on your internal landscape, your perceptions and misconceptions about life and how you fit into the scheme of things.

  In the modern world, the personal lie is also known as your core belief. The way the personal lie operates in your consciousness is that it becomes the lie about yourself that gets projected onto other people and into the environment. When the lie is projected, we see in others exactly what we resist, avoid, or deny about ourselves. If your lie is that you are bad, you will see others as bad, and at the same time, you will be unable to acknowledge that there is or could be anything bad within you. If your personal lie is that you are stupid, you will see others that way and imagine that you are better than or smarter than those “stupid” people around you.

  As we project the lie outward, we experience a great deal of internal conflict. Unfortunately, most of us are not aware of the lie. We have no clue that we are being driven by an unconscious thought working against our best interests and greatest efforts.

  My personal lie, my foundational belief, was that I was not good enough. As a result, nothing I did was ever good enough. This made sense to me. It was what I had learned throughout my childhood. As an adult, I felt a lingering dissatisfaction with everything I did. I always felt that I had to do more, give more, and be more because nothing was ever good enough.

  From welfare to law school wasn’t good enough. From selfpublishing and selling books out of the trunk of my car to sixfigure advances and being one of the most sought-after speakers in the country still wasn’t good enough. The only thing that gave me some modicum of peace was when someone who had read a book or heard a tape told me her story and thanked me for helping her. In my work, I was deeply Spirit-connected and able to share from the deepest place of my being. When I heard how people had learned from me, and how I had helped change their lives, I could breathe a sigh of relief, believing that maybe I was finally becoming good enough to matter. But the feeling was always short-lived.

  It has been almost four years since I had heard from Eden. By the time he reached out to me, he was living in Atlanta. He needed some information, and I kept the conversation short. I had finally started breathing again. I was no longer a frightened little girl in a woman’s body. I was all grown up, living in another state, writing books, and speaking all over the country. Iyanla had arrived! At least that was what I told myself.

  When Eden called me again, the conversation was lighter and longer. This time he wanted me to speak at an event he was hosting. It meant there was a possibility that I might see him face to face. This time I wasn’t afraid. I had an inner clarity that I had worked my little buns off to achieve. I had prayed and healed, grown and changed. I liked myself a lot more now. I loved what I had become and what I had made of my life. I knew that somewhere in my being, I was still in love with the man I fell in love with when I was a young girl. But I went to Atlanta anyway.

  I still liked the way he looked and the way he smelled, and I still refused to think about it. When I got back home and he started calling once a week, then every other day, then every day, it felt really good; but I refused to think about it. I refused to think about him being engaged to someone else and breaking it off just as we began to talk again.

  There was just too much at stake. My life. My work. My sanity. My heart. I was no longer desperate to love or be loved. I no longer needed to prove anything to myself or anyone else. The one thing I really had to get a handle on was the way I could feel my eyes light up when he walked into the room. Now that was a problem.

  Six months into the calling back and forth, I found myself in Atlanta, in his bed. This time we talked about it. This time we made a plan. This time we both agreed that we were meant to be together. On his next trip to the Washington area, he took me to dinner at a small Mexican restaurant. When the waiter brought the food, he also brought a small black box. I didn’t see it at first. When I did, I held my breath. Just like the first kiss, he was asking me. I said yes over chicken quesadillas.

  Our marriage began with an elaborate spiritual ceremony in Nigeria. Because I had been initiated as a priest in the Yoruba tradition, it was required that he also be in
itiated so that we would be “equally yoked.” We spent seven days going through a series of rites and rituals designed to clear our past transgressions and open the way to a harmonious new beginning. He slept on a cot on one side of a bare brick room, and I slept on a similar cot on the other side. Early each morning, the women from the village would take me to do my ceremonies. When I returned, we would spend the rest of the day talking about the past and preparing for the future. On the third day, while I was gone, the men came to take him to do his ceremonies. As the women ushered me back to the room, I saw a parade of men walking across the second-floor balcony of the compound. There was my godfather with several other village men surrounding someone who looked vaguely familiar. He waved. I waved back and asked one of the women, “Who is that?”

  She laughed a hearty Nigerian laugh and said, “Who is that? That, my sistah, is your husband!”

  I looked again. The men had shaved off his beard. I had never seen him without a beard. He was wrapped in a white sheet from the waist down, with a white towel draped over his head. All of a sudden, my heart began to pound so loudly that I could hear it in my ears. I had an overwhelming urge to cry. It was as if my heart was breaking, but I did not understand why. At the same time, there was a voice screaming inside my head:

  I can’t marry that man! I don’t know who he is!

  It was such a startling response that I froze in the middle of the courtyard. One of the women was nudging me along. I swallowed the tears that were starting, turned away from the stranger on the balcony, and let the women escort me back to our room. I sat on the edge of the bed as they danced around me in celebration.

  “Your husband is being prepared for you. Your husband is being prepared for your life. Dance, my sistah! Dance!”