Counselor, lawyer, writer, lecturer
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2379/Vanzant-Iyanla.html
Iyanla (pronounced EE-yan-lah) Vanzant has overcome overwhelming personal difficulties to become a lawyer, minister, talk show host, best-selling author, and national advocate for literacy. Through her self-named "dark valley experiences," those that like real valleys are necessarily traversed on the path from one mountain or peak to the next, Vanzant has emerged at a far different place from where she started and with a far more positive perspective on life than most anyone could imagine. Emerge magazine has hailed her as "one of the four most dynamic African-American speakers in the country." In 1992 Thomas Bradley, then Mayor of Los Angeles, called her "an inspiration to all women, particularly young African-American women growing through hardships in the inner city."
Using her powerful speaking and writing abilities, Iyanla Vanzant has been on a mission to educate women, especially those of color, to create a better life for themselves and their communities, by discovering the kingdom of God within. This best-selling author and spiritual-life counselor was ordained a "Yoruba Priestess" in 1983 (in New York). The Yoruba religion (from Nigeria) blends and adapts ancient African spirituality with contemporary African American culture. For Vanzant and her ancestors, African spirituality has been essential, since around 4000 B.C., to healing and transforming the mind, body, and soul. More recently, in September of 1997, she was a gospel minister with Dr. Barbara King, at Hillside Chapel and Truth Center, in Atlanta.
Iyanla Vanzant had a troubled childhood. After her mother died when she was two or three years old, Vanzant was raised by her grandmother. Rather than a haven of safety, Vanzant found her new home exposed her to physical and sexual abuse. She received good grades, even though she was not encouraged to do so. On a self-professed search for love and security, she found herself pregnant by age 16, and had three children by 21. She was married when she was 18 and nine years later, when she finally left her abusive husband, Vanzant said in an article written for Essence, "I accumulated several black eyes, three fractured ribs, a broken jaw, a displaced uterus, and something far worse: the death of my personhood. In a fit of depression, I attempted suicide."
After being released from the hospital psychiatric ward, Vanzant, with her three children in tow, went on welfare. She was on welfare for eight years before, struck by the unfulfilled purpose in her life, she applied to Medgar Evers College, despite protests from family members, and began attending classes. Three-and-a-half years later she left welfare forever after graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in public administration and being offered a job that, as she said in Essence, "paid more than my former caseworker made!"
Three years after graduation, she attained a law degree from the City University of New York. Despite more than 20 years of practical study in the fields of spirituality and empowerment, however, Vanzant chose not to go into academics. Rather than intellectual analyses, she offered very apt spiritual guidance. In all her books and talks, Vanzant has offered ancient, but still contemporary wisdom and common sense, leading her readers in and out of the "dark experiences."
Vanzant has experienced the healing journey from despair to self-reliance that she so fervently wants others to take. From her troubled past, she has emerged a winner, committed to an eclectic message of divine power and self-determination. This popular motivational speaker and prolific author has taken her audience by the hand and led them down the path of self-discovery, self-help, self-empowerment, and self-love. Vanzant stressed that all this social and self-improvement was made possible, however, only by "tapping the power within."
In confronting discrimination, racism, rejection, and alienation, Vanzant took an approach that, for a feminist, was very non-traditional—less political and more spiritual. She asserted in a telephone interview, "Spiritual consciousness does not make your problems go away; it does, however, help you view them from a different vantage point.… Your political reality is determined by your personal reality.… Racism and sexism in and of themselves are not what limit black women in America. It is our perception of them." Vanzant's Faith in the Valley, the companion book to her best-selling Acts of Faith, has inspired thousands of black women to seriously consider how their own behavior might have been causing certain avoidable problems. Her own journey served as an inspiring model for others.
According to Vanzant in Faith in the Valley, Black women, like many others, have found it "difficult to accept that life is more than hopping from one mountaintop experience to another.… Somehow we forget there is a valley between every mountain.… Eventually we <must> do the work it takes to get out of those dark experiences called valleys." Vanzant the counselor reminds her readers that "valleys are purposeful," that the highs and the lows, the light and the dark, have all balanced out and each experience was necessary to appreciate the other.
As she said in Faith in the Valley, "If we think of life as a twenty-four hour day, we know to expect twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness." Arriving at this realization would point the way up and out of a valley. The way out always involves a choice: spiritual growth, faith, and strength, or in Vanzant's words, "the stuff our grandmothers were made of." Women are to choose faith in God instead of the things that provide illusory comfort.
The author's pain and triumph, coming through her deepest spiritual valley, was most poignantly told in her memoirs Interiors: A Black Woman's Healing in Progress. While Interiors told of one woman's trip to insanity and her journey back, this survivor's suffering and recovery were told in a way that they became the story of all women. It was important, she said, for women to have discovered who they were so they would have made their decisions accordingly.
