Source: Paras Griffin / Getty
While wrapping up her recent Get Over It tour, Iyanla Vanzant made her final stop in Brooklyn. The 65-year-old inspirational speaker touched on a variety of topics pertaining to practicing forgiveness so you could finally “Get Over It,” it being whatever is holding you back in life.
One example that she shared was of the process it took to move past the ire she felt for her ex-husband when he left her for another woman, a woman she actually knew at that.
“I spent, right here in New York, 40 years loving the same man. I’m a slow learner,” she told the audience. “In and out, in and out, in and out of relationship with this one man, trying to get from him what I didn’t get from my daddy. But I didn’t know it at the time. I thought it was love. In denial.”
“The last time I married him, we had been together five or six years when he divorced me,” she continued. “He filed for divorce. Not only did he leave, he left me for somebody I knew. But he was going to do the same thing with a stranger so it really didn’t make no difference, right?”
She was pissed, or high in “pissossity” as she put it. She grappled with forgiving him when she couldn’t deny the rage she felt.
“I did not want to be spiritual at all. I wanted to hate his a–,” she told the crowd. “Sometimes you just don’t want to be spiritual, you want somebody to burn in hell. That’s why a lot of the time we won’t forgive, because we want revenge. ‘I want your a– to pay for what you did to me!’ And I was there. But I knew if I didn’t forgive, my work with you would be tainted, so I had to. I didn’t want to, but I had to forgive him.”
Knowing she couldn’t help anyone else fix their life if she hadn’t done the work on her own, she set out to practice forgiveness. Of course, it was rough.
“I started out writing it,” she said. “I always say write it, because you can put that energy down and transform it by burning it, tearing it up, flushing it.”
She wrote “I forgive you” over and over to push herself to believe it, and from time to time a simple “I forgive you” changed to “I forgive yo dumb a–!”
Vanzant also said it in the mirror because “They say you say it in the mirror, you’re speaking right into your soul.”
That was also tough. But when she confronted herself for her lack of readiness to forgive and move on, that’s when her efforts began to pay off.
“I said, ‘Ok Iyanla, you’ve got to get a little more willing,’ because willingness is the key,” she said. “Sometimes we can’t do stuff because we just ain’t willing to do it different, to go the extra mile. We’re just not willing.”
It also helped her to forgive by getting away from the people and things that might trigger her to be negative or focus on the past.
“I’ll never forget the day God told me to get out of Brooklyn. ‘Get out of Brooklyn!’ I’d been here all my life, my family was here, everything I knew was here,” she said. “‘Get out! Because you’re never going to rise above where you are until you rise above who you are.'”
