Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

We are here to love, not to judge. I'd been blaming and raging. I certainly wasn't loving my daughter that afternoon as God loves me. God's love doesn't insist on perfection or even good common sense. Why then should I demand more of those I love? With this tiny change in perspective I began to see the need for correction wasn't in my daughter, but in me.

Your emotional reactions to the evil you encounter and your judgments of it show you what you need to change in yourself. Changing those parts of your personality that judge, react in fear, and cannot love into acceptance, fearlessness, and love is the journey you were born to make.

I think there comes a point where you have to grow up and get over yourself, lighten up…and forgive

I'm not a super emotional person, so that's one reason I love acting - it makes me deal with myself in that kind of way.

Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.

One thing I really envy about my friends who have kids is that as their children develop, they're able to revisit their own developmental stages and recognise themselves and undo a lot of things they decided.

The door to my heart opens inward. I move through forgiveness to love.

So the best thing is to really work on yourself and opening your own heart and just letting all that stuff [worrying] go. And it is possible. It's sometimes takes a lot of time; it's not easy. And a lot of sitting with yourself and trying to work with your own heart.

My child,you are broken. Unless you know that you are broken yourself,it will be severely laborious to love the broken people around you. You will be harsh and exacting towards them. But because you want others to like you, you will always attempt to hide your weaknesses from others. Let me strip away your masks,so that you may know who you really are.And when this truth sets you free,then shall you be free to genuinely love. Before this occurs,your love will be offered by the flask,not by the torrents of a river.

There are other kinds of emotional pain that emerge from our own mistaken thinking. As we surrender that pain, we are inviting into our thought system a guide who will lead us to different thoughts. It’s like the song “Amazing Grace”: I was blind and now I see.

You are your only hope, because we're not changing until you do. Our job is to keep coming at you, as hard as we can, with everything that angers, upsets, or repulses you, until you understand. We love you that much, whether we're aware of it or not. The whole world is about you.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

No behavior can be changed before it's acknowledged. And no addiction is beyond the reach of Love.

To read your own mind is to look at your self and read your soul. Hatred becomes love and that is the path I am working on

In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.

The experience of having a child does crack you wide open. I felt like I suddenly had to rebuild the skin that I'd grown over the years before having a child. Perhaps that might be quite interesting in terms of acting.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Meditation, especially for people who don't know very much about it and think it's this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.

Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us.

When you meet someone you love, whether or not they love you back, something occurs in you that makes you want to improve yourself.

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

A wonderful thing happens over time. You fall in love with the sound of your own voice.

I learned a long time ago that if you subscribe and believe the good, you have to believe the bad. My measure is my heart and what I know.

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.

I stumbled onto the best profession to heal my childhood: the only one that lets you release and express whatever is ugly and messy and beautiful about your life. We're in the business of creating human beings. The more we spew, and the more honestly we do it, the better. Try that on Wall Street.