Jessica: Welcome to The Tapping World Summit 2014. This is your host, Jessica Ortner.
By listening to this interview you agree to the terms located at
thetappingworldsummit.com/disclaimer. We hope this interview helps you
become a happier and a healthier you. Enjoy.

We might intellectually know it’s something we should do, but forgiveness can
often feel impossible. Somehow we have tricked ourselves into believing that the
anger and the resentment can protect us from that thing ever happening again.
Without forgiveness, though, we lock ourselves in an emotional jail filled with
pain.

In this interview we are taking a deep look into forgiveness, what it really means
and how you can experience the freedom of forgiveness. To lead the way we are
speaking to New York Times best-selling author, Iyanla Vanzant. She has over
eight million books in print.
Once a teenage mother on welfare living in the projects, she is now becoming one
of the most influential voices in America. Ebony magazine says Iyanla’s books,
lectures and television appearances have made her a multimedia high priestess of
healthy relationships.
Iyanla is also familiar to daytime TV audiences for her role as a regular
contributor to The Oprah Winfrey Show, just a small show you might have heard
of. She’s now the host of Iyanla: Fix My Life, the number one reality show on the
OWN Network. Her newest book is called Forgiveness: 21 Days to Forgive
Everyone for Everything. Welcome, Iyanla.
Iyanla: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Jessica: I am thrilled that I get this opportunity. I was telling you before that I am a
massive fan. I have been for years. Basically my DVR is Iyanla: Fix My Life. It’s
great to talk to you.
I was surprised and so pleased to hear that you’ve become such a fan of Tapping.
It’s something that you use in your personal life, as well as on the show, even if
we don’t always see it on the show. Can we start off by hearing from you why
Tapping is a tool that you’ve started to use and why it’s something that you’re
passionate about?
Iyanla: Yes. I was fully introduced to Tapping when my daughter was being treated for
cancer. We used Tapping to help her with her pain, her fear and everything that
goes along with being a cancer patient. She had so much relief from it, so much
relief from the pain, from the fear, all of her thoughts about just being invaded, if
you will, by this disease. That’s how I got introduced to it.
I am a very strong proponent of spiritual technologies. For me a technology is
anything that’s developed in a scientific way, or a practical way, that can be used
to help us move energy in, around or through our bodies. I continued to explore

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and examine tapping, and eventually bumped into Lindsay Kenny, who trained
me as a Level 3 practitioner. She introduced me to the Tapping Summit.
I use it on myself. I use it on my grandchildren. I was tapping on my plant the
other day, but it was too late. Two weeks without water, even tapping can’t fix
that. I was tapping on the little leaf. It’s a gracious gift and a powerful technology.
Jessica: It’s something that I’ve heard that you have been using on the show and with
other people. When do you decide, okay, I’m going to start using some Tapping
to bring this in?
Iyanla: I tap with almost every guest on Iyanla: Fix My Life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t
always make the air for a variety of reasons, most of which is time. Also, tapping
is still fairly new to the general masses. To convince people that, as they say, “by
banging on my head I’m going to feel better”, it can be a little challenging.
So I usually wait until I hear a limiting thought or belief, “I can’t,” “It will never,”
“They won’t.” I wait until I heard a limiting thought or belief, or until I hear what
I recognize as an unconscious pattern in thinking. Then I say, “Come on, do this
with me.” I don’t even explain it. I just say, “Do it with me.” By the time they
start feeling better, they’re like, “If I feel this good from banging on my head...”
It’s tapping, not banging.
Jessica: Yeah, it’s powerful. I think that’s a great take-away. Sometimes we think that we
need to know how to explain it before we share it with somebody else. What’s so
powerful about the tapping is that you give people an experience. Then you can
feel the results, and then you can do it because it works for you.
Iyanla: Yes. I recently did a show with NFL wide receiver Terrell Owens. We tapped for
almost two hours. He said, “I feel great. I feel so great I do not want to be
slapping myself on the head anymore.” I said, “Okay, we’ve gone from tapping to
banging to slapping! Okay!”
Jessica: That’s fantastic. Today we are talking about forgiveness. You have a brilliant
book out about the topic. Like I said in the introduction, I think we hear about
forgiveness… We know it’s something that we should do, but when it comes to
actually doing it, it can feel impossible and something that is very easy to put off
with our busy lives. We think, “I’ll forgive them later,” or, “It’s not that big of a
deal.” Why is forgiveness something that we should really take the time to stop
and look at and practice?
Iyanla: I believe that forgiveness is a state of mind. It’s a way of being. It also needs to be
a daily practice, simply because it helps to keep our energy clear. So many of us
don’t forgive or have resistance to forgiving because we believe it’s for the other
person. It’s for someone else.
The truth is that until you forgive, your pain, your hurt, your wounds will
continue to bleed all over your life. When we understand that forgiving is for me,
I am born for-giving and for-getting.

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I’m a student of A Course in Miracles, and that’s what I know to be true about
myself and what I believe is true about all of us. We are born for giving love and
for getting love, but when we have negative energy, when we have emotional
imbalances, when we have pain or wounds or limiting beliefs, we can’t give love
and therefore we don’t get the love that we desire or deserve.
Jessica: It’s almost a full circle. We’ll find it continuously showing up in our lives in
different ways.
Iyanla: Absolutely. Showing up in your life because it’s in your mind, and until we clear
the mind and the emotional energy, or the heart, we will continue to issue
energetic invitations to people to come back and show us again, or offer up again
an opportunity to forgive.
Jessica: Iyanla, that’s something that really struck me when I was reading your book and
hearing you talk, is that we attract these invitations in our lives to bring light to
what needs to be healed. It’s often a very hard lesson because it seems very
unfair. We can often look at something and think, “What did I do to deserve this,”
or, “Why is God doing this to me,” and really feeling like a victim.
What I’ve gotten just from your lessons is taking that type of responsibility, which
can seem often hard to do. You have a really great story that I’d love for you to
share about your granddaughter’s father and the relationship with a grandmother
of your child, and how you saw it go full circle. Do you mind sharing that story
with us?
Iyanla: Oh, not at all. When I was very young, a young mother of three, I was divorced
from my husband, and his mother wanted to continue to be in relationship with
my children. Of course, she was a grandmother. I, on the other hand, wanted
nothing to do with him or her. I found all sorts of excuses and reasons and ways to
ignore her, to limit my contact with her, and in essence to block her from seeing
my children.
About three years after the divorce I became involved in another relationship. So
in my mind I’m starting a whole new life, in which she did not fit. I was never
rude or disrespectful to her, but I did resist and avoid her presence by any means
necessary and in doing so really denied her access to her grandchildren.
Fast forward. My daughter passed away in 2003, and her daughter was nine. She
ended up living with her father. For weeks at a time, months at a time, my
granddaughter’s father would not respond to my phone calls, to my requests. I
would speak to my granddaughter once a month, once every two months.
My daughter who passed away, this is her only child. I am distraught to say the
least. In addition to which this child grew up in my home. We had a relationship.
But her father had remarried and had moved on with his life.
Four years go by after my daughter’s death when my ex-son-in-law and I got into
a huge confrontation. It was truly a confrontation, verbal and physical. As I left
his house and began thinking about what had happened and why it had happened

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and why he was doing this, I vividly saw a mental picture of my ex-mother-in-
law. That’s when I realized, oh my God, he is doing to me 30 years later what I
did to my ex-mother-in-law.
The truth of the matter is, he was simply moving on with his life and didn’t want
me hanging around as a memory of the past. What it felt like to me was that he
was blocking me from my granddaughter. I don’t know what was going on in his
mind, but sometimes when we’re learning we have to break a lesson down to the
basic elements instead of getting all hung up in the story: he did that, she did that,
they said this.
What is really going on here? I can’t see my granddaughter. When I came to the
awareness that I was experiencing, on my side, what I had done to my ex-mother-
in-law I just began to weep and tap. Weeping and tapping is a very powerful
thing.
Jessica: Yes, I’ve been there.
Iyanla: If you can weep and tap until you stop weeping, and the tapping begins to flow.
What I learned from that is we cannot really, truly, deeply heal the issue for the
final time until we experience it from both sides. In other words, you will find
yourself doing to someone what was done to you. Instead of being embarrassed or
ashamed or afraid, simply understand, “Aha, I am really healing this. I’m feeling
this from both sides.” That’s what you can tap out.
Jessica: Right. I know what I work with women, especially when it comes to the weight
loss and body confidence, which is my area of tapping that I’m passionate about,
so often they come up with people, and I’ve had this experience, I’ve shared it
before, people calling me fat or just making comments about my body and how
angry I felt. The idea of if this is how they speak to me I can only imagine how
they speak to themselves.
Iyanla: Oh, absolutely.
Jessica: I could have never reached that place if I didn’t do the tapping first on my pain, to
be able to see the other side. When you’re in that pain you can’t see the other side
of what the other person’s going through.
Iyanla: Yeah. I believe that tapping not only gives rise to compassion. As you said, you
begin to see and experience yourself and others differently. I believe that it’s a
gateway to wisdom, the wisdom of the spirit, the wisdom of the body and
eventually our own mental psychological wisdom. We begin to see things from
beyond the broken places in our own filter.
Jessica: Right. What I find interesting is when you teach forgiveness you start with self-
forgiveness. I think for many this is the hardest thing to do. Especially people that
are into personal development and spirituality, we work so hard on forgiving
everybody else, but forgiving ourselves seems like something very hard to do.
Why do you think that is and how do we approach self-forgiveness?

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Iyanla: Again, for the past 31 years I’ve been a student of A Course in Miracles. One of
the things that I’ve learned in that psychological treatise is that there is no
separation. There is only one. There’s only one mind. There’s only one life.
There’s only one spirit. There’s only one love. That oneness is what keeps us
connected. However, because of our ego and because of our bodies and because
of our programming, conditioning and socialization, we see one another as
separate.

What I believe is that as I forgive myself I grow within me the compassion, the
wisdom, the love required to begin to forgive others. The other thing that I know
about forgiveness is regardless of what was done or how it was done, by whom it
was done, what keeps us in the pain is our beliefs, our judgments and our thoughts
about the who, what, when, why and how. That’s what keeps us in pain.

So I say forgive your thoughts, forgive your beliefs, forgive your judgments about
what happened, to clear the energy within you and give you the necessary
wisdom, compassion and love that you need to forgive somebody else.

Jessica: Yes. In your book, just in the dedication, before you even get to the front page,
this really struck me: you listed the women in your life who had mothered you.
Then you ended it by saying, “I forgive my mind for thinking and myself for
believing that who you were and what you gave me was not enough, was not right
and was not exactly what I needed. I forgive myself for judging the women who
mothered me.”

Iyanla: My mother, my natural mother, my birthmother, passed away when I was two-
and-a-half. People chose to or forgot to tell me that. I was raised until age five
with my paternal grandmother who was probably 45, 50. I don’t know how old
she was when my mother passed away.

She raised my brother and I for the next five years while my father, bless his heart
– that’s what we say in the South, bless his heart – my father who was a total and
complete child of God cleverly disguised as a womanizer, cleverly disguised as a
philandering womanizer, was never home. My grandmother was physically and
verbally abusive, particularly to me.

When my father discovered the abuse he and my stepmother took us in, my

brother and I. He continued his philandering and womanizing, and eventually she
sent us to live with an aunt. It was in my aunt’s house where I was sexually
violated by my uncle. My aunt simply didn’t know how to respond to it, so she

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didn’t, which left me in the house believing that what had happened to me was
okay and that what had happened to me meant I wasn’t important.

These four women kind of shaped my view of womanhood, of myself as a young

woman, of mothering, of who I’d be in the world. Of course, that’s kind of a
shaky foundation to stand on. So as I grew I had this very distorted image of
myself and as most human beings not knowing how to, not understanding the
necessity of it I didn’t look at me. I looked at them.

So for becoming a teenage mother I blamed them. For not finishing my high
school or my education I blamed them. For all of the challenges that I was in and
out with men I blamed them because they, I thought, hadn’t given me what I
needed. I believe that because of what they had given me I somehow wasn’t good
enough, didn’t deserve more and I was very angry and upset at them. Thoughts,
beliefs, judgments.

As I began to study the course, as I began to take responsibility for my own

internal landscape, what I bumped into were all of these beliefs about these
women that simply weren’t true. How I judged them. They should have... Why
didn’t they…? If they had of… I judged them.

But had my life not been, Jessica, exactly as it was, I would not be who I am
today. Forgiveness supported me in getting to that understanding. Tapping helped
me release the pain that I had holding onto those thoughts, beliefs and judgments.
I hope I haven’t said too much.

Jessica: No. Incredibly powerful. There might be someone listening, and this thought pops
into my head when we have this conversation about forgiveness, is if you forgive
somebody does that mean that you’re saying what they did was okay? I think
that’s where people hit this block. They think, “If I forgive them, then I’m saying
that what they did was right and that I’m okay with it.” That can feel
disempowering.

Iyanla: I want to repeat this again. Until YOU forgive yourself and others your pains,
wounds and hurts of the past will continue to bleed and stain YOUR life. Yours,
you and yours, two important words. Again, because we believe that you and I are
separate, that you’re over there and I’m over here, as long as we believe that, and
we don’t understand our connection to one another through life and mind and
love, every damaging thought that we hold about someone else keeps us in prison.

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There’s a beautiful quote by a friend of mine, Paul Ferrini, that says, “Every nail
you hammer in your brother’s hand keeps you on the cross.” If we could really
understand that forgiving my brother, my father, my rapist, my mother, the one
who abandoned me, the one who sold me my first bag of drugs, the one who made
fun of me, called me fat, told me I was ugly, all sorts of things, until we forgive
them we are on the cross. You, you and yours, two very important words.

Jessica: Yes, very powerful. What I’m getting from this as well, and something that I’ve
just heard from you, is there’s this underlying belief with everything that you’re
saying, which is everything happens for a reason.

Iyanla: Yes.

Jessica: Tell us more about that belief and how that’s shaped who you are today.

Iyanla: I believe, now – I didn’t in my former life when I was an untapped individual, I
believed that, how can I say this, I believed that things happened to me. As a
tapped individual and a true student of life and spiritual technology, I understand
that things happen through me. Not to me, which makes me a victim, but through
me which makes me powerful.

When I began to see things showing up in my life again and again and again,
“Why is this happening to me again? Why is my relationship falling apart again?
Why am I broke again? Why am I feeling like this again?” I was powerless. But
when I began to understand this is happening through me and I start saying,
“Okay, what am I thinking,” then this continues to show up.

Everything begins in mind, Jessica. Everything begins in mind. If it’s in your life
somehow, some way, your mind has created it. Wait a minute, because I hear,
“Oh, what about the children with the dread diseases and what about being raped
as a child? Did they create that?” They may not have created that specific
incident, but we are all born with a purpose in life and we are all born to fulfill
that purpose. Sometimes that purpose, we get to that purpose through very
difficult experiences and circumstances.

A child with a dread disease, let’s say. Let me use my own child, who died of a
rare and despicable form of colon cancer, did her thinking create cancer?
Absolutely not! However, her inability to express anger, her unwillingness to
share the truth of her emotional being, created an energetic buildup in her body.
Was that the cancer? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? Could be.

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What she taught herself and taught me moving through the cancer was a lesson I
would never get anywhere else. While it looks like she had this horrible dread
disease, what she learned gave her a whole new life. This is what she said to me,
Jessica, “I have many, many things to do that I can’t do in this body. This body is
too small. I have to do it in another way.” I said, “Oh my God. Are you kidding
me? Are you kidding me?”

My point is that everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen in order for
us to learn what we need to learn and fulfill our purpose. But when we hold onto
negative emotion, limiting thoughts and beliefs, fear, anger, shame, guilt,
resentment, bitterness, we’re not learning. Tapping helps us move those things,
those energies, those thoughts and beliefs and judgments, out of our
consciousness so that we can see our lessons and our experiences in another way.

Can I tell you another quick story?

Jessica: Please.

Iyanla: I was in a relationship with one person for 40 years. Okay, how old are you
Jessica?

Jessica: I’m 28. That’s a long time.

Iyanla: It seems like you’ve been around a long time, right? Imagine 40 years, okay?

Jessica: Okay. It’s a long time.

Iyanla: People have teeth that aren’t that old. Married him twice, separated back and
forth, up and down. Anyway, the last time we got married I realized as we got
deeper and deeper into our relationship that I married my beliefs and ideas about
him, and not who he truly was.

Jessica: Wow!

Iyanla: I spent a lot of money on our wedding, so three months into the marriage I’m not
going to give you up because I had a spiritual awakening.

Jessica: Those are expensive flowers. I get it.

Iyanla: You’re going to stay married to me, okay? Five years in, I’m like, “Oh my God,
what am I doing and why am I doing it?” Anyway, we eventually separated and I

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was devastated. Not because we separated, but because I had to come face-to-face
with my thoughts, beliefs and judgments and my fantasies about who I was and
who he was.

As we separated he became involved in a relationship with another woman, a

woman that I knew, a woman that I had helped, a woman who I would have to see
every other Tuesday. That led to what I call high pissosity. It’s one thing that
you’re going to leave me, because he left and I was angry about that too. It’s
another thing that you’re going to take up with somebody and I’ve got to see you
all together. I’m talking high pissosity. That is the highest vibration of anger you
can find.

But because of my daily spiritual practice, because forgiveness had become a

state of mind and a way of being for me, and because I knew I had to forgive, I
immediately began to forgive. I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive
you. I forgive you. I forgive you. I started saying it, and I didn’t believe it. I said,
“Okay, let me write this because the speaking is not helping me.” I started writing
it. I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you. That wasn’t working either.

So I tapped on it, “I just forgive.” That’s all I said. Sometimes in tapping you just
take the basic statement. You can’t even bring your brain to come up with a whole
term, a whole turnaround statement. So you just, I forgive you, I forgive you, I
forgive you, I forgive you.

As I began to tap more and more my statements got a little deeper, “I forgive you
for not being who I wanted you to be, I forgive you for embarrassing me
publically by picking up with that woman.” I started right where I was. After
maybe two or three sessions what I found myself saying was, “I forgive myself
for accepting less than I wanted and desired.”

Jessica: Woo, that’s powerful.

Iyanla: I forgive myself for being willing to live a charade just to keep up appearances in
the public. I forgive myself for not having the courage required to tell you how I
really feel. As I tapped on the most minute base belief and thought, it cleared the
energy so that the truth could come to the surface.

Jessica: So far you’ve given us these two really great tips when it comes to tapping. You
might not even have realized you did that. You first shared with us that you pulled
over, and you were crying and just tapping.

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I think that is so important to share that, because when we learn a new modality or
anything new it’s very easy to get caught up in this whole perfectionism of, “Am I
saying the right thing, am I doing this right?” You’re showing us the simplicity of
it and how powerful it can be to just allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling,
and begin tapping without saying any words, but just feel that feeling and tap.

The second thing that you just said is that those were the words that intuitively
came to you, so you began tapping while simply saying, “I forgive you,” or
anything else that came to mind. I think it’s so powerful when we give ourselves
that gift of trusting our intuition and using whatever words feel right while we’re
tapping.

Iyanla: Yeah. As you clear the energy, again as you clear the energy, as you start running
whatever is going through your mind, because I believe, or my experience has
been, that if I clear the thought I will clear the belief, I will clear the judgment, my
shoulds and can’ts and why nots and how comes.

The thoughts are always running, and as I hear them I just tap on them.
Sometimes I say, “Oh my goodness, that was a very strange thought. I wonder
where that came from. I must have been holding onto that for a while. I wonder
what’s underneath that. Let me just keep thinking. I forgive you for not being who
I wanted you to be, just like my father. I forgive you for not being who I needed
you to be, just like my father.” I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing!”

As you begin releasing that energy, remember, things happen through you, not to
you. So if it’s in your world, if it’s in your life, you’re not attracting that specific
thing, that disease, that rape, that brutalization. You’re not attracting that, but
you’re learning how to be in the face of that. That is all of our purpose, how to
remain grounded in the safety, in the love of the one life, one mind, one spirit as
we go through whatever we’re going through. Does that make sense?

Jessica: It makes so much sense. Especially throughout this summit, we talk a lot about
asking yourself to go deeper and say what’s underneath that or when was the first
time you ever felt that way? What a great example that naturally you got to the
point where you realized this isn’t even about you. This is about my father. You
went back to when that first started.

Iyanla: The other thing that I hope people got is if it’s in your world it’s there by
energetic invitation. Since all thoughts begin in the mind, there has to be a thought
in the mind that’s bringing this forward.

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In a very recent episode of Fix my Life, I worked with a couple. The wife was
accusing the husband of cheating, and just browbeating him, just denigrating him
in front of the children and the church, everywhere. It was just horrible. She was
so vehemently angry. I asked her a simple question. I said, “Okay, are you really
willing to heal?”

Because willingness is a very key ingredient in tapping. If you insist that the way
you see it, hold it, know it is the way it is, then chances are tapping isn’t going to
work for you unless you do the powerful reversal statement, “Even though feeling
this way is making me miserable and causing me to kick the cat, and there’s a part
of me that doesn’t want to let it go because it’s familiar, it’s because I get to be
right, I’m still willing to love myself.”

Anyway, this wife was so vehement about the husband and it just wasn’t feeling
right to me. I said, ‘Okay, what’s really going on here? I’m not understanding.
This beautiful man, he’s apologized, he’s done everything.”

He had an emotional affair and she wouldn’t let him forget it. As I went through
working with her, what I came to understand was that prior to him having the
emotional affair that he confessed, she had a physical affair that she had never
confessed. She was actually covering her own guilt and shame and fear,
distracting him from the possibility of knowing what she did by beating up on
him. I said, “You’ve got to forgive. You’ve got to confess it.”

They were punishing each other. He was punishing her for being mean and vile
towards him. She was punishing him because she felt unattractive. That’s why she
believed he had the emotional affair. They were doing the same thing to each
other. It wasn’t until she was able to forgive herself, for the affair and her
behavior, that they were able to come together and really work through the
challenges in their relationship. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Jessica: Yes, so beautiful and again brings us back to that point of what you need to heal
will continuously manifest itself in your life until you face it.

Iyanla: Bleeding and staining, bleeding and staining. Her previous affair bled on and
stained the energy of her marriage. My judgments of and feelings of abandonment
and unimportance I had with my father bled into my marriage. We’ve got to clean
it up.

Jessica: Someone’s listening to this and they decide, okay, I want to forgive and they feel
a little bit overwhelmed by the idea. They know they want to start going in that

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direction. How can they start using tapping and what should they expect? Is it a
few rounds and then they’re forgiven or does it need to be a daily practice? What
advice do you have for someone who wants to start to go down this path?

Iyanla: A couple of things. One, if you have any resistance to forgiveness then don’t want
to forgive, want to feel better. Let’s start there, “I want to feel better. I really do. I
really want to feel better. I want to feel lighter. I want to feel clearer. I want to
feel more positive and productive. If I have to forgive to get there, I’m willing to
do it.”

Jessica: It could be something as simple as, “Even though I’m resistant to forgiving,” or,
“Even though a part of me doesn’t want to forgive him/her, I love and accept
myself and how I feel.”

Iyanla: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We have to acknowledge that part of us that has a pattern,
a belief, a judgment or a pattern of thinking that holds this experience, whatever
the experience is, in our lives.

You talked earlier about weight. Often when I work with people around weight,
there is an expectation there that a) they will always be fat because they have
always been fat, and not overweight but fat. The difference in words may sound
slight, but it’s the energetic behind the thought. It’s one thing to be overweight.
It’s another thing to be fat.

If you have a thought about fat, you’ve got probably five or six layers of other
beliefs and judgments underneath that. You start right there. You’ve got to deal
with your resistance to whatever it is. If you have a belief that I’ll always be this
way because I’ve always been that way, whether it’s fat or sad or sorrowful or
whatever, you’ve got to get rid of that.

The other part of it is your willingness to let go of everything you believe about
why the situation is the way it is. I’m fat because I’ve got glandular problems. I’m
sad because nobody ever loved me. You’ve got to be willing to let those layers go
also.

However, when we’ve had those beliefs and thoughts for so long, they’re familiar.
Even though they cause us pain they’re comfortable because we know how to
handle the sorrow, the sadness, the anger, the resentment, the bitterness. We know
how to move through that. We have no clue of what it will be like to be thin or to
be in love or to be wealthy. We have no idea. A part of us is afraid of that, and
that’s what creates the resistance.

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Jessica: Yes. Even if you make any progress in those areas of your life you’ll never have
any satisfaction. You’ll always think, if I could only be a little bit skinnier, or a
little bit richer, or the relationship could be a little bit better. There’s no peace,
even if it seems like we’re making progress.

Iyanla: Yeah, until you get to those underlying beliefs and judgments. As you tap and as
you clear the energy on the simplest form, the simplest form, I just want to feel
better, the other stuff, Jessica, and I know you know this, it just rises to the
surface. “Where did that come from? How did I recognize, realize, come to
understand that I did to my ex-mother-in-law what’s being done to me? How did I
do that?” I was clearing the energies, layers and layers and layers of energy.
That’s the beauty of tapping, and every other spiritual technology. That’s the
beauty of it.

Jessica: I was reading that you have a way that you use tapping every morning, where you
journal and then you tap. Can you tell us about that process?

Iyanla: Yeah. I journal every morning. I call it a brain dump. I wake up, and whatever is
coming out of my brain I put it down on paper. Sometimes, not all the time, I
bump into negative thoughts and beliefs, feelings that I know are going to create
some kind of experience in my life that is not going to make my life pleasant.
When I do that I go back and I tap on them. I simply read them, just as I wrote
them, and I tap on them and I see what happens.

I have been writing for a long time, and the other day I bumped into what I call an
ancient thought or habitual thought. “Oh my God, nobody’s going to buy my
book.” I just tapped on it, “Oh my God, nobody’s going to buy my book. Oh my
God, nobody’s going to buy my book.” You would think 16 titles later I don’t still
have those experiences, but it’s in there. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable. So I just
tapped on it.

The other thing that I do is very often now my journaling will evolve into a prayer
or evolve into a realization or evolve into some sort of affirmation. I tap on those
too, because we can tap stuff in as well as tapping stuff out.

Jessica: Yes, very powerful.

Iyanla: When I have a clear prayer or a clear set of affirmations, I immediately tap them
in so that it’s in me, because things happen through you, not to you.

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Jessica: Yes. This might sound strange, but I find it inspiring that you still have that
thought of no one’s going to buy my book, and then you’re able to be aware of it
and to let it go.

The reason I think it’s so important to bring this up is when it comes to a tool like
tapping where it’s so effective and you’re letting go of so much, sometimes
someone will have an old thought come up and they’ll think, “I’m doing it wrong,
why am I being negative and why am I not happy 100% of the time?” And they
shame themselves every time they feel a negative emotion.

Iyanla: Yeah. Also, you’ve got to understand. Again, I’m a student of spiritual technology
and spiritual science. What I understood was when I think a thought repeatedly,
habitually – and many of us have habitual thoughts, that means we don’t even
know we’re thinking them – they touch every aspect of your being.

That thought about nobody’s going to buy my book is probably not something
that I, Iyanla Vanzant, would think today, but it may have been an old thought
stuck between my toes. It may have been in my armpit. Now as I’m stretching or
moving or writing or praying it just rose to the surface. I’m not going to be upset
about it. I’m not going to entertain it. I’m not going to give it tea. I’m not going to
pay the rent for it to be here. I’m going to get rid of that bugger.

Yeah, it could be anywhere in your body. I tell people often, when you have a
tragedy, when you have a shock to your system, when you have a shock to your
body, it will unleash energy that’s locked into your body. Sometimes if you fall or
you slip or you have a car accident I say, okay, this is the time to clean up all your
emotional baggage because you just unearthed energy in your body, fear or upset
or whatever. So yeah, I do have that thought. I’m a woman. Oh God, I need to
lose ten pounds, my husband is going to leave me, I’m fat. Okay, let me get over
that.

Jessica: I can start tapping, yeah.

Iyanla: Let me start tapping on it. I will tap on anything. I will tap on I paid all this
money for this food in this fancy restaurant and it tastes like crap. Let me tap that
out.

Jessica: For those who want to do some more tapping, we are going to provide a tapping
audio for everybody that can get started. As we’re wrapping up here, though, I
want to take it back to something else that we were talking about that I think is
worth revisiting and really ending with.

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What you said in the beginning is by looking at the women in your lives, and the
way that you had a lot of anger and hurt around that situation, and rightfully so for
that time, it wasn’t until you were able to see that those experiences led you to a
higher purpose. You can now speak to us, and teach me and all the people that are
listening, in such a powerful way because you’ve been through that.

That’s a belief I carry in my life if something hard happens or I face any

tragedies, of thinking I might not get the lesson now but if I can tap on the pain I
know one day it’s going to make sense.

Iyanla: Absolutely.

Jessica: Maybe it won’t all make sense, but I’ll at least know the purpose, that it’s led me
to something great.

Iyanla: The human mind thinks that things have to make sense. We’re living on the East
Coast and it’s snowing right now. Does it make sense that these big flakes of
white water are coming out of a place of nowhere? Does that make sense? No, but
we know this to be snow and we know how to have that experience.

It’s the same thing in our life. Things may not make sense, but they’re falling
upon you, they’re coming down, they’re there and you’re having the experience.
Tapping supports us, facilitates us, and being better as we’re having the
experience. The experience comes to give us purpose and meaning, purpose and
meaning.

One of my teachers said to me once, “Stars only shine in the darkness.” If you’re
a star, stop complaining about the darkness. We are each a star in our own life.
We each want to shine. We each want to be powerful and brilliant in our own
lives. We have to stop complaining about the darkness because that’s the only
time we really get to shine.

Jessica: Yes. Incredibly powerful, Iyanla. Again, for everyone that’s listening we’re going
to provide a tapping meditation to support you in this journey. Iyanla, as people
move forward and begin to forgive, and their lives open up in whole new ways,
any parting wisdom for these shining stars?

Iyanla: I would say even when you don’t want to, even when it seems unfair, even when
you think you can’t, forgive everyone for everything, everyone for everything,
beginning with you. Forgive your thoughts about everyone and everything.

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Forgive your beliefs about everyone and everything. Forgive your judgments
about everyone and everything, starting with you. If we can just start there, if we
can just begin there, we’re going to see how powerfully and beautifully our lives
begin to change because we become different.

I think the one thing I would repeat and leave with our guests today is that we are
born for giving love and for getting, or receiving, love. The way the universe
works, the more you give the more you get. Forgive so you can get everything
you desire in your life.

Jessica: Beautiful. Iyanla, thank you so much.

Iyanla: Thank you, my beloved.

 

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