Iyanla Vanzant learned to use her own teachings to cope with the death of her daughters.
On Tuesday in the episode Tamron Hallthe life coach told how she first felt when her youngest daughter Nisa died in July, considering her profession and how she coped with her grief after losing her eldest daughter Gemmia 20 years ago.
“The deceptive intelligence of the ego always wants you to think that you’re not enough, that you’re not good enough, that you’re not worthy,” began Vanzant, 70. “And for me, spending my whole life teaching other people, helping other people, fixing other people — when something happens in my life, the first thing my ego tells me is: ‘You’re a fake, you’re a fraud. You can save other people, but you can’t save your child.’”
“When I lost Nisa, I knew how to do it because I had already buried Gemmia,” she explained. “You see, when I buried Gemmia, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to be a woman burying a child. So when I lost Nisa – it’s been 115 days – when I lost Nisa, I knew how to do it. That’s grace. I knew how much needed to be done. I knew who to call. I knew I shouldn’t try to do everything by myself.”
Iyanla Vanzant on ‘Tamron Hall’.
Show in the Tamron hall/YouTube
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As for the relationship she had with Nisa, Iyanla: Fix my life The host also referred to how “one of the most sacred relationships on the planet is the relationship between mother and daughter”.
“All children bring to life the subconscious questions of their parents. That child lives in your body. That child knows you inside out. That child heard your voice, your secret thoughts,” Vanzant said.
She continued, “When you give birth to a daughter, she brings to life those things that you hold inside that you may not even know are there, and she will show them to you in the way that she shows up in the world.”
“So Nisa showed me who I was and a lot of ways that I wasn’t,” added Vanzant, who blithely implied that she saw parts of herself in her daughter that maybe she didn’t want to see.
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Iyanla Vanzant and Tamron Hall on the “Tamron Hall Show.”.
Show Tamron Hall/YouTube
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At that point, host Tamron Hall read aloud a 2009 quote from Vanzant about how she survived the death of her daughter Gemmia, who died at age 32 of colon cancer on Christmas Day 2003.
“I survived that, I’ll survive this,” Vanzant replied. “There is a saying in the Caribbean: The bigger the monkey, the bigger the stick to beat it with. So I have a big life. I have a great place in the world. I have a great task.”
What kind of task is that? She believes it is “facilitating the evolution of human consciousness, one mind, one heart, one life, one spirit at a time.”
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Vanzant began her career as a public defender, which led to a radio hosting gig, and eventually, a regular guest appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the nineties of the last century. Then she started her own talk show, Iyanla2001. After that, Iyanla returned with Iyanla: Fix my life, which ran for 10 seasons from 2012 to 2021 on Winfrey’s OWN network. Back in 2013, Vanzant — who is also mother to son Damon , 53 — talked to PEOPLE about how to deal with Gemma’s death. “I knew she was dying, but she didn’t,” Iyanla said at the time. “I took care of her every day for 15 months. After that, what do you do? I didn’t get out of bed for six months.”
Leaning heavily on her faith, she added that she eventually recovered from that difficult period in her life “through prayer and forgiveness.”
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Source: HIS Education