But I had to remind myself that when you cannot embody what you know, maybe you don’t really know it. There was one thing I had come to realize. All the time that I was engaged in my childhood battle of seeking out my father’s acceptance and approval from my husbands, I had missed the “Father’s” true presence in my life. Ken, Steve, my producer friend, and several other men had come into my life to provide for me the support, guidance, and protection that I longed for and craved. Yet, because I was so busy looking for it in one place, I had missed the fact that it had always been there. I have had some great male friends in my life who have loved me unconditionally, and I didn’t have to sleep with them to get their support or approval. The Bible says that God always has a ram in the bush. I was so busy trying to chop down a huge tree that I had totally ignored the powerful presence of the male bushes all around me.
With that realization came the truth that I had fallen off of my spiritual center. I had surrendered too much of myself to doing things and not enough to being myself. On the emotional level, I had fallen into a pattern of terrorizing and brutalizing myself with my own thoughts. Before anyone else could, I would make myself wrong; before anyone else could, I would begin to doubt myself. It was the pathology of my early life that had been so engrained into the fibers of my being that I no longer recognized my habitual thoughts and behaviors. I knew better or at least, I thought I should know better.
None of this stopped me from doing great work in the world. I knew the spiritual principles; I knew the spiritual laws that made life work. Even when I did not practice them consistently, teaching them and sharing them with other people reinforced their extraordinary value. The question was: What kept me from practicing them in my own life, every day? The truth? I had become spiritually lazy. Because I knew the principles on an intellectual level, I pretended that I could backslide and fall down on my own daily spiritual practice. What I was able to admit to myself was that when you are entrusted to usher others you have to stay clear and clean. This means that God will shine light on your internal landscape to show you what has been hidden from your view. It’s not meant to be a punishment. It is all about fine-tuning your self-awareness. Nothing happens outside of you that isn’t going on inside of you. That is how the law of Cause and Effect operates.
Gemmia felt the same way. For days, she and I discussed the ways we had slipped out of our practice. We vowed to get on track. For her, that meant better time management. For me, it meant cleaning up, or perhaps cleaning out, my house.
Every 24 hours, the mind and the body need to eat, work, rest, and play. But in our fast-paced lives, we are living on borrowed time. We borrow hours from one day and put them into another. Some days, we work long hours and don’t get enough rest. On other days, we eat more and do not play enough. On most days, we work and eat and forego rest and play. After decades of doing that, the mind and the body become confused and no longer function at maximum capacity. These imbalances result in dis-ease: mental, emotional, and physical breakdown. I think the same is true in the heart.
What people commonly call stress, I believe is the rebellion of the heart. The heart can only take so much pain, disappointment, or upset. The heart is communicating to the mind, Hey! You better chill or else. My heart had been screaming to my mind for years, and for some reason my mind just would not listen. I had trained myself to push up the mountain rather than take the lift. Things only counted if I suffered. For far too long I had been willing to be beaten up and beaten down and pop back up smiling. If the mind and the heart are the foundation on which we create experiences in our lives, my foundation was crumbling and I needed to do something about it.
The wise woman was back. She reminded me of all the things I did know and encouraged me to put them to use. At the same time, I recognized someone else standing up within me. It was the warrior. She was not trying to fight; soldiers fight. Warriors had another level of honor to uphold. The warrior was ready to do battle within and without to save the kingdom. The kingdom was my mind and my heart. The warrior’s ultimate work was to protect my soul.
Driving home on the day I first experienced the warrior woman within me, I called my husband.
“Hello.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Wow! What brought that on?”
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you want to save our marriage?”
“Yes, I do, but I just don’t know how.”
“Do you need to know how? Or are you willing to do whatever it takes?”
“I want to save our marriage, and I am willing to do whatever it takes. Do you still love me?”
“Absolutely. You are the first man I have ever loved, and I want to save our marriage.”
With that, we both burst into tears. I was crying so hard I had to pull over to the side of the road. He was weeping from a place that I had never heard before. For the first time in a long time, I had an intimate moment with my husband. It was both powerful and frightening.
“When are you coming home?”
“I am on my way right now.”
“I’ll be here.”
Knowing as I did that I had come to the end of everything that I knew, I understood that I couldn’t go any further on my own. The wise woman spoke: Iyanla, your best intuition got you here. I waited. I prayed. What I needed to do was whispered into my heart.
Sitting on the side of the road, wiping my nose with the hem of my skirt, I called a sister-friend of mine. She and her husband pastored a church in Washington, D.C. I told her that I was in trouble; that my marriage was in trouble. I asked her if she and her husband would be willing to counsel me and my husband, to teach us how to be together. She said she would talk to him and get back to me. I asked her to pray with me and she did.
The next call I made was to Ken in Richmond. I asked him if he would be willing to work with my husband and me together so that we could clear whatever was going on between us. In typical Ken style he responded:
“Hot damn! Let’s kick some psychic butt! Come on down, honey!”
For the next 15 minutes I sat in total stillness. I was startled back to reality by the telephone ringing. It was the pastor’s wife. “We’re in. We can do Wednesdays. What time will work for you?”
I was crying again. I put the car in drive and headed home. I so wanted to call Gemmia, but I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t be sure she would agree with what I was about to do, because she was having issues of her own with Jimmy.
Gemmia had one boyfriend her entire life. She met him when she was 15 and dumped him when she was 30. She was in the middle of that separation when I was leaving the Iyanla show. As with almost everything, Gemmia kept her challenges to herself. She did tell me that she had had enough of him and his lies. What lies? She wouldn’t say. I could sense her sadness, but she, like me, knew how to hide her emotions. She, like me, refused to let anything take her down. She kept many things to herself. What she did do was write in her journal. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, Gemmia wrote what she really felt in the safety of her private pages.
Most people thought that Gemmia was quiet and shy. Shy she was not. Quiet, I’m not sure. My experience was that she chose her words very carefully. She was observant and wise beyond her years. Her wisdom had certainly saved me many more times than I care to remember. Gemmia was grounded and centered in a way that I often longed to be. She had always said that when she grew up, she wanted to be like me, clear and spiritually on purpose. Yet, in her presence, I felt that she was the master and I was the student.
What Gemmia had that I did not was an absolute shut-off valve. When she was done, she was done. The day that I stood up to Bill Geddie at Buena Vista was the day she knew she had to make a decision. If I could take a stand like that for myself and risk everything I had ever worked for, she said, surely she could tell a mere man that she no longer chose to endure his bad behavior.
I had no idea that my adult c
hild was inspired by me. I knew she deeply loved and profoundly respected me, and yet to think that my behavior encouraged, instructed, or supported her was something I hadn’t considered. In fact, we often joked that she was the real mother and I was her child. Gemmia taught me so much about myself, life, and how to be my most conscious self.
Gemmia was an avid fashionista and once told me that I looked like I was stuck in a 1960s time warp. Shortly thereafter, we took a field trip to Bloomingdale’s, where she taught me how to dress. I had to admit, the outfits Gemmia chose made me look ten years younger.
I taught her how to cook. She raised the basics I had taught her to new heights. I taught her how to fry chicken. She taught me how to oven-fry it. I taught her how to bake a cake. She produced a different flavor cake, in a different shaped pan for Niamoja every holiday. While I stuck to the basics and mastered them, Gemmia ventured out, experimented with different spices and herbs, and gave her meals more depth and dimension. It was the honey glaze on the turkey and the apples in the cornbread stuffing that let me know she was ready to take over Thanksgiving dinner. When Gemmia turned 29, we shifted Thanksgiving Dinner to her house, but I retained the privilege of doing Christmas, which was her favorite holiday. There was just something about putting up the tree on Christmas Eve, wrapping presents until the wee hours of the morning, and watching her mother cook that made Christmas a joy for her. I shared that joy with her as my children became adults and their children slept over on Christmas Eve.
There were so many things Gemmia knew that I did not. I often watched her deal with angry and upset people with a smile on her face. She was an expert at handling people. She rarely responded to their upset with anything other than a smile. Someone once said to me that anytime they spoke to her, it sounded as if her words were smiling.
Gemmia was also an excellent mom—way better than I had ever hoped to be. She was patient and gentle with Niamoja, her one and only princess. She made a point of having specific days when she and Niamoja did special things. Tuesday was baking day. I always got the benefit of their Tuesday-time on Wednesday. Most Fridays, when Gemmia wasn’t working or traveling with me, were movie nights. They popped corn and slept on the livingroom floor in front of the big-screen television. They also went to the theater and museums together. Sometimes they would invite me. Most times not.
One day I asked Gemmia where she had learned to be such a good mom. Without batting an eye she said, “I only had one mother. Where do you think I learned? You always focus on what you did wrong, but I am alive because of what you did right.” I left the room and wept.
If you asked me, I would have said that I taught my daughters absolutely nothing good about relationships. Gemmia would beg to differ. Every now and again she would remind me of something I had said about men or done in my relationships with them that had taught her a powerful lesson. I expected to be perfect.
Gemmia accepted that I was human. According to her, she had learned a great deal from my humanness. Gemmia told me she knew that standing up to Bill Geddie was a stand for my independence, not from men or from domination, but from fear. Fear that I would lose something; fear that he would hurt me; fear that I could not make it without him. She said that those were her fears also. Those were the fears that she had been dealing with in her relationship with the only man she had ever been intimate with. She loved him, and she knew that his behavior kept her in bondage. When I pressed for details, she gave me her Gemmia look and changed the subject.
Gemmia, my daughter, mother, teacher, and best friend, opened my eyes, heart, and mind in a way that few people ever have. It was very strange to know that my daughter and I had come to the very same place in our relationships with men, and that I didn’t know how to guide her or myself to the next step.
I arrived home to find my husband sitting in one of the two rocking chairs in our bedroom, in front of the fireplace. As I entered the room, I realized that we had rarely sat there together. He must have had a different realization. For the first time in a very long time, my husband grabbed me and held me. It wasn’t an I want sex holding, and it wasn’t a let me get this over with holding. It was a deep, sincere we are in this together embrace that nearly made my knees buckle. The way he held, rubbed, and rocked me made me feel hopeful and a bit excited. When we finally separated, he told me he had been thinking about us all day. I told him about my side-of-the-road breakdown and how I had been guided by the Holy Spirit about what we needed to do. But before I could tell him the plan, he said that the Holy Spirit had spoken to him also. Quickly, I had to decide if I would speak or if I would let him take the lead. Remembering how he had just embraced me, I yielded.
“I have to leave, Iyanla. I have to go and find my vision, get my life on track, come back and court you, and start this marriage all over.”
What the hell are you talking about? I thought it, but I did not say it.
“I’ve been resentful because I’m not contributing to our marriage. I’m not standing on my own. If we are going to make it, I have to be able to stand on my own.”
This does not sound good! Another thought I did not speak aloud.
“I really feel that Spirit is telling me to take the time to order my own life so that we can have a life together.”
I couldn’t hold the silence any longer.
“What spiritual authority are you relying on for your guidance?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when you get guidance from the Holy Spirit, you have to test the Spirit by the Spirit. You have to make sure that what you are hearing is coming from the Holy Spirit and not just any spirit passing by on the way to McDonald’s.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I mean, is there a scripture, is there a section of A Course in Miracles, is there anything that you can turn to that ensures that what you are hearing is divine guidance?”
He was on the defensive now. “You are not the only one that Spirit speaks to, you know!”
“I am not doubting you, but I know that when the Holy Spirit is working, everything that is given to everyone involved lines up, and what you are saying to me does not line up with what I have been given. That makes me suspicious.”
“Well, what were you told?” It was going to be a competition.
“I’m not denying that is what you heard, it just doesn’t line up with what I got and what has been confirmed for me.”
“So tell me what you heard. I’m open.”
I shared the plan for counseling with the pastor and his wife and breath work with Ken.
“I’m not feeling that,” he said, “and I really need your support. This isn’t just about you. This is about what I need to do for myself, so that I will be able to do better for us. You always talk about finding a vision. Well, I don’t have one and haven’t had one for a long time. I need to be able to look at you and know that I am an equal partner in this relationship. Right now I’m not.”
He said some more words that I couldn’t or didn’t hear. I was too busy listening to my heart echoing in my ears. This was it! The end had finally come. He asked me a question that I did not hear, so I did not answer.
“See how you dismiss me and my feelings!”
“Forgive me. I was trying to listen.”
“So what are you hearing?” He knew that there was a zone I could enter to get information when I needed it.
“What I am hearing is if you leave this house, you’re never coming back.”
“I don’t believe that! I believe this is what I must do to save this marriage. I must find my vision. I must court you. I will be back.”
He really believed what he was saying. There was nothing I could do that would change his mind. But I decided to make one last-ditch effort.
“You are talking about separating. That is not from God. God is about unity. God is about holding on and breaking through. We don’t need help to love each other. We need help in learning how to be together. That is what the pastor and his
wife can teach us. That is what God wants us to learn.”
“I don’t believe that. I am asking you to trust me.”
Just then, one more piece of guidance was whispered to me.
Let him take the lead. It was as if a dear friend were whispering in my ear. Let him take the lead.
Then the telephone rang. It was the pastor’s wife. My heart sank as I explained that my husband was not open to the counseling. She said she would pray for us.
We spent the rest of the day talking and packing. He didn’t know where he was going. We talked about our mistakes and our misgivings. Sometimes we stopped to dry our tears. Him first. Then me. He shed tears because he was afraid he was making a mistake. I shed tears because I knew he was. But I had to encourage him. I did so by promising I would wait for him, no matter how long it took. He wanted a year—a year to find his vision and come back to me.
I asked him to forgive me for anything I had done to undermine his confidence. I acknowledged my coldness and my meanness. I tried to explain my fears, the ones that had multiplied after we’d slept on the floor of my office together. He started to remind me of all of the uncaring things he thought I had done and said; then he caught himself and stopped.
It wasn’t until he started putting his clothes in the car that it really hit me. Thirty-seven years of my life, of loving this one man, were about to come to an end. Oddly, while I was falling apart, he seemed energized. He looked taller and seemed clearer.
The first four months after we separated, we spent more time together than we had living under the same roof. Things felt lighter between us; the pressure had been released. We were no longer forcing ourselves to stay together. Instead, we were choosing to be together. We spoke several times a day. We went out to dinner. We spent many intimate nights together. When I needed him to stay with my grandson, he would. And when he was around, he continued with his household chores: the trash down the hill, raking and blowing the leaves, and helping me with the groceries. We went from being husband and wife to being boyfriend and girlfriend.
Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through Page 19
