April 2, 2024 • 51 mins
Previously recorded
In this special throwback episode, Michelle and Iyanla are getting healed. Iyanla shares her thoughts on spiritual involvement in mental illness. She also discusses mental health in communities of color, the importance of knowing your family history and how the unknown of your mother’s past can affect your future! CHECK IN to this episode to hear a new approach to healing.
For all things Iyanla, visit: https://iyanla.com/
Follow Iyanla on Instagram & Twitter: @IyanlaVanzant
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Instagram: @MichelleWilliams
Twitter: @RealMichelleW
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Checking In with Michelle Williams, a production of
iHeartRadio and The Black Effect. Hey Hey, Hey, y'all, how
y'all doing. I have someone absolutely amazing, a legend, gonna
(00:29):
go down in history as a trailblazer. She has been
helping people with their mental health since the late nineties.
And y'all, this icon, this legend is here to drop
some real knowledge that we can use today. I'm not
gonna waste no time. Let's get into it, y'all. This
(00:50):
is an amazing, amazing day that I have someone that
I can share space with. I'm gonna consider this sacred
space because of who she is, and that is what
she commands. Eyan la Venzant is one of the country's
most celebrated writers and speakers, among the most influential socially
(01:13):
engaged spiritual life coaches of our time, best selling author
and has a podcast on Shondaland Audio called The R Spot.
And she has fixed all of our lives, whether we
were actually on the show or just watching from afar.
Please welcome. I don't care. I know this ain't in person,
(01:34):
but stand to your feet and welcome mss Ian la
ven Zant.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Ah. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
It truly is a joy to sit with you. I
shared space with you some years ago at Essence Fest
a while ago. Oh my gosh, yes ma'am, Yes, ma'am.
And I'm glad that I got to honor you and
give you your fly hours while you were there. And
so today's episode is going to be a lot of honor.
(02:07):
But while you hear of your wisdom, I'm not even
gonna call them nuggets, because Iyanla, don't drop nuggets. Nuggets
is what little shit suits be dropping in the yard.
I'll tell you, she drops gems, Okay, life gems. You
debuted into the mainstream with your iconic appearances on the
(02:28):
Oprah Winfrey Show in nineteen ninety eight, and you taught
women to say I'm not broke, but instead to say
I am temporarily out of cash. Just some of your
many sayings and how you were one of the first
black women someone that we could look up to that
we could talk about our state of our mental health
(02:50):
without any shame, but somebody that we can say, wow,
missing Ila gets it. We're a trailblazer to do that
on such a big play. So from twenty two, from
back to nineteen ninety eight. How do you feel about
seeing how widely celebrated it is that we can talk
about our mental health.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, I just I'm so grateful, and I also want
us to do more than give it lip service. Now
at least we're talking about it, because you know, back then,
you didn't even want people to know if you had
a headache, you know, much less if you were feeling depressed.
So I'm really grateful, and I still have great concern
(03:36):
that the way mental health is addressed and spoken about
and the services for it scheople don't always meet the
needs of women of color, particularly women of color, because
the depth of our wounded us, the depth of our experiences,
(03:58):
aren't always include did in the How can I say
this the traditional psychological models. I worked with a woman
a few years ago who, from all perspectives and intentions,
was physically verbally aggressive and you know, off the charts
(04:22):
if I can. And I was working with her and
I said, you know what, you're depressed. It didn't look
like the normal lay in the bed, don't brush your
teeth depression. And what I discovered, and I did some
work and talked to some people and came to understand
that there is a form of depression that manifests as
(04:45):
overt aggressive or abusive behavior, specifically among black women, and
nobody was talking about that, you know, so I was
able to connect her to someone that was familiar with it.
So a lot of times we see with us what
would be called bad behavior, aggressive behavior, or the angry
(05:08):
black woman. It's really a form of depression. Depression meaning
that there's a place within where we feel totally alone,
totally unsupported, and hold the belief that we have to
do everything on our own for ourselves because nobody is
there to help us. That can be overwhelming, and what
(05:30):
it does to the average person is lays them down
in the bed. Yes, what it does to us very
often it sends us out with a vengeance. So it's
just something that I think we need to pay more
attention to.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
It not only sends us out with a vengeance, but
it's because we have to.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, a lot of people don't have, you know, the
resources to take time off to go get counseling with
someone that speaks to them.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I want your take on why do you think as
it relates to black people, that when we say the
word depression as if it's a plague. I want to
stay away from me. We don't talk about that, honey,
I'm saved, sanctified, feel with the hot host. Ain't no
depression over here, And it's like, yes there.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
It's cultural for us, I mean, dating back to our
oldest ancestors, A we don't affirm anything wrong, so there
can't be anything wrong with me. And if I can't
live up to the expectations, the requirements, the demands, the
responsibilities of whatever my role is in the village or
(06:48):
in the community and now in the society, then there's
something wrong with me. Culturally, I don't speak about that. Culturally,
we cover it up, we hide it, we mask it
because if there's something wrong with me, it's going to
impart certain responsibilities on other people. And because I don't
(07:08):
want to be a burden, let me just mask, cover high,
deny whatever is going on. So that's one thing. The
other thing is and this is specifically for women of color.
And I say women of color because I'm part Native American,
part Latin, and part Black and part so I say
(07:29):
women of color because very often, as descendants of Africans,
we don't look at the other our sister women in
the Native American culture or the Latin culture as experiencing
many of the same things that we do to a
different degree, but very often as women of color. This
(07:50):
whole notion of depression speaks to our strength. And since
we have the myth of the superwoman and the beast
of burden and the one responsible for everyone else, we
we can't abdicate our responsibilities or fail to meet the
(08:12):
expectations of others. So we deny again in mask or
overcompensate to prove to you, I'm not feeling like a
pile of crap. I'm going to overdo, overgive, over commit,
or overspeak, you know, yes. And then for Latin women,
(08:33):
you know, culturally, for them in the machismo of the
Latin community, what the woman wants or needs or whatever,
you know, that's subjugated to whatever the men are wanted.
And then in the Native community, you know, women are
like dust on your shoe. You don't even ask them.
They and if you ask them, they probably won't have
anything to say. So it's shifting. It's shifting, and we
(08:56):
have to be grateful. But the shift requires is that
we become willing to speak it aloud, to speak it aloud,
you know, yes, and not just carry the burden or
take on the responsibility as a part of this dysfunctional
culture that we find ourselves in here where women are
(09:19):
just carrying so much weight.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Carrying so much weight. And I thank you for affirming
and empowering us to begin to talk about it. Even
if some of us we're talking about we don't have
the right language for, we might not be talking about
it in the right way, but I'm so glad that
we are getting there. As it relates to depression, I
(09:43):
remember asking my mother. I became open about depression in
twenty thirteen, pretty much by accident. I was doing an
interview and somehow I was like, oh, yeah, you know,
back in twenty twelve, I was in the bed for
weeks talking about depression and I'm supposed to be promoting
Fell Out of the musical, and here I am. Somehow
(10:04):
depression gotten the mixed and mister an, let you know
how this goes like you might think you said something
off the record, but it made the interview and it
became sure this headline, and I was so ashamed because
I thought, are people going to look at me as
a liability? Then in twenty eighteen having to check myself
(10:27):
into a treatment facility for depression, and the support and
the love that I've gotten, and for people saying thank
you for not letting me feel like something's wrong with
me or that I'm alone. I have decided to speak
up about it and let people know the journey, and
(10:50):
thank you for being a trailblazer and helping people feel empowered. Yeah,
to talk about it. I'm saying all this to say,
even still trying to talk to say my mother about it.
She is seventy, there's still some oh yeah, resistance, resistance
and shame, shame even and even to talk about other
(11:12):
medical issues. I need to know what was carried in
my bloodline. Why are we so afraid to say, well,
you know, grandfather had such and such, such and such.
Now she did tell me, she said she does believe
my grandfather, had there been a diagnosis for him, that
he would have been bipolar. So I was shocked to
hear her say that. But mental health issues, I don't know,
(11:34):
like you said, if it's still because we don't want
to affirm anything wrong or give power to spirits, because
apparently what you give power to that thing manifesting girls
and I'm like, no, we got to know what grandfather had,
we got to know what Mama had.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well, again, for us, it is cultural, and you know
how it was handled back in great great grandma's days.
You went to the wise woman or the or the
medicine man, and you got yourself together. Every disease or
imbalance has a spiritual component, and many of us embrace
(12:10):
a spiritual foundation that doesn't always support us in telling
the truth about what we are experiencing. But culturally, not
only was it is it taboo to admit that there's
something wrong with you, It is inappropriate to speak your
family business. So God, now that I'm older and I
(12:35):
look back and I say, oh God, my cousin James
was gay. He wasn't even gay, he was hysterical. You know.
But black men, you didn't talk about it. You didn't
talk your family business outside. And very often we didn't know,
we didn't know. We called it something else.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
We called it crazy.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
They just different, They different, right, don't even you know?
So it's cultural or for us, but those taboos and
those behaviors that are not supported because we live in
a very different time. We live in a very different time.
You know, there was a time when I could go
and lay my head in Grandma's bosom, and her in
(13:16):
the prayer warriors would stand around me and lift me out.
But now Grandma might be in the crackhouse, or she
might be in a senior citizen center, or I might
not even know who she is, you know. So some
of the things, some of the things that we had
in our community, in our village, in our culture that
(13:36):
would support us in moving through these things, we don't
have them anymore, so we have to come up with
new ways. The other thing is people talk about mental health,
but they still think of two words crazy and wrong,
which then generates a lot of shame for black people.
(13:57):
You can be fat, you can be ugly, you can
be broke, but you can't be wrong. You know, it's
cultural for us, as we were indoctrinated to believe that
because our skin was dark and our hair was wooly,
and because we came from a place called Africa where
(14:17):
the majority of the people were dark with wooly hair,
there's something wrong with us. We don't meet the standard,
and we don't understand that. We carry that as a
cellular memory in our DNA. So let me weigh five
hundred pounds, and every medical facility wants to help me.
Let me be ugly as the bottom of somebody's shoe,
(14:38):
and I can go get some plastic surgery. But please
don't let me be wrong. Don't let anything be wrong
with me, okay, because then that triggers up that cellular
memory of being inferior and being savage, and being beaten
and being denigrated, dishonor disrespect. We don't understand that that
(15:00):
still rings true within us. So while we talk about
mental health, we still have these labels that we attached
to it, and we don't think of it just as
a form of health. It's health. Your mind needs to
be healthy, and that's what mental health is. How do
I get my mind healthy? It's nothing wrong with it,
(15:23):
But the same way I can have breast cancer, or
I can have diabetes, or I can have hypertension, or
I can have gout or arthritis, that's health in the body.
Mental health is simply health in the mind. And the
things that give you gout give you gout, and the
things that give you depression give you depression. And the
things that give you cancer give you cancer. And the
(15:43):
things that make you bipolar, make you buipolar. It's just health,
and that's how we got to think about it.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Come on, if y'll checking in is on the right path.
That is what we speak over here because we put
mental health way over here, but our part of a
vascular health, gynecological health, neural health, we all lump it
over here. Yeah, it's like I've tell people, you know,
some of the same mental health offices, psychiatric offices, psychologists.
(16:12):
They're in the same building as your obgyn. It's not
over there somewhere.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
The other thing that we don't give enough consideration to
is that there are physiological influences on mental health. If
there are certain imbalances and discordant energies in your physical body,
it will affect your mind. My daughter had coalon cancer
(16:37):
thirty one years old. Never drank, never smoke, had been
a vegetarian for twenty two years, and she got coalon cancer.
And they said it was a rare form of coalon
cancer called familial palopopis, which is supposed to be ancestral.
It runs through your bloodline. We couldn't find it in
my side of the family or her father's side of family,
(17:00):
but my mother did have breast cancer, so it may
have just hipped the generation and showed up that way.
But throughout her treatment, I mean it was just certain
days it was like, who is this person and where
did they come from? And in prayer one day, I
was just reminded, the same disease that is affecting her
(17:20):
body is affecting her mind. She is thinking with a
diseased mind. You cannot expect her body to be affected
by cancer and not have an impact on her mind.
And I was like, oh my god, I never even
thought about that. So there are physiological things that also
(17:42):
lead to certain mental health imbalances or mental health challenges.
I personally happened to believe that the whole notion of
being bipolar what they used to call what did they
had another name a manic depressive, manic depressed. It got
to be bipolar about but.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Ten years ago, but I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Oh yeah, it was manic depressive, then it became bipolar.
I happened to believe that there is such a powerful
spiritual component to bipolarists that you can't fix with a pill.
You can't fix that with a pill. There's something going
on in there with the spirit that you got to address,
(18:31):
you know, In African culture, it is believed that we
have what's called an egg bay, and an egg bay
is the union of our ancestors on the other side. Yes,
and sometimes for many of us in our ancestral line
(18:52):
people weren't buried with reverence. People weren't honored after they died.
They were hung on trees enough there for days and
then maybe dumped in a hole. But what happened to
put that spirit to rest so that that spirit would
have rest? You know now that the physical body is decayed,
(19:13):
who's calling that person's name in prayer? So I personally
believe that there are some spiritual imbalances in our ancestral
lineage that also lend to the experience of bipolarism. That's
just me. I'm crazy. Don't pay me no, mom.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
I have never durned near stood up during it. And
I can stand up because I got my breeches on below.
So okay, okay, so okay, okay, you're helping me. You
answered the why I've gotten so angry at people. Even
lately in comments of certain people talking about therapy and
(19:57):
Jesus therapy and spiritual reality, it's been said, well, you
don't need this because you don't trust God enough, but
I am so my cellular stuff is just going because
(20:17):
you just answered why people have a disconnect between our
mental health therapy that side and the spiritual side. It
can be and it is both. And you can have
prayer and like you said, you can have something going
on in the mind, but you're still a great woman,
(20:38):
You're still a successful man, but something's going on in
the spirit.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah. You know, think of your therapists as the gonecologists
for your brains.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You're talking right.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
You know you don't go to the godacologists to take
care of that stuff and then not do everything else
to take care of it. You know, your therapist is
the gonecologists for your brain, or the theologists for your brain,
or the.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Sound bite for the post.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Think of your sound bitts as the god ecologist for
your brain. Got to go in there o corral, see
what happening in what's going on, and then help you.
And in terms of prayer, God uses people so you
can pray and you can embrace whatever your faith walk is,
(21:26):
whether it's Jesus or Buddha, Muhammad or I mean Allah
or whatever it is. And maybe that divine entity is
going to send you to the right gonecologist for your brain.
Come on together, let me tell you a quick story.
My birth mother died when I was two, and unfortunately,
(21:50):
everybody either forgot or chose to tell me that my
birth mother was an alcoholic. And it was discovered when
she was carrying me that she had breast cancer and leukemia.
And so I was born and she died when I
was two years and three months old. And like I said,
nobody ever told me grow up thinking one woman is
(22:12):
my mother and she wasn't. I was thirty years old
and I found out. But here's the point that I
want to make. My mother was an alcoholic. I grew up.
I never drank. Never. I don't dream this very day.
My biggest drink is a is a Shirley Temple. And
every now and then I'll have kolua and cream when
I want to be grown.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Don't be grown. I thought she was gonna say ginger ale,
but okay.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
A lou and cream. And then also my mother was
the other woman. My father was married. My father was married,
and he and his wife lived around the corner. My
mother was his side piece, and she lived in my
grandmother's house. My father's mother's house, and that's where I
(22:55):
was born and my brother was born. And again, because
I never knew her, I grew up all my life
feeling guilty. I was always wrong. I always did something wrong,
no matter what happened, it was my fault. I was bad.
Blah blah blah blah blah. Fast forward. I was about
thirty years old when I found out the truth about
my mother being dead, being the other woman, and being
(23:17):
the alcoholic, and through work, spiritual work, prayer and meditation
and also working with I guess he was a therapist.
I discovered this. Hear me that I marinated in the womb,
first of all in liquor, so I probably had enough
(23:37):
liquor in the womb. I didn't never need another drink,
you know, I never I had probably you know, she
was an alcoholic. I don't know what she was drinking,
but probably. And the grace is, this is grace that
I was not born with fetal alcohol syndrome. I wasn't not,
(23:58):
but I was born within the emotional addiction, and it
was guilt. I marinated in my mother's guilt of being
the other woman. She was guilty and she was ashamed.
So for most of I mean, I was pregnant at sixteen,
pregnant at nineteen, lived in an abusive marriage, did so
(24:19):
many things that engendered guilt within me, and I just
lived it out until, with prayer, meditation and a good
support system, discovered that the guilt that I was living,
a shame that I was feeling, wasn't even mine, it
was hers. I didn't have anything to be guilty about,
anything to be ashamed of, but I marinated in it
(24:43):
in the womb. Let me tell you something, Michelle. I'd
work with that, and I researched it and I dug it,
and it just became clear to me that many of
us marinated in things in the womb. Shame, fear, guilt, aggression, loneliness, sadness, abandoned, abandoned, rejection, disappointment.
(25:04):
That's what our mothers were experiencing. And it gets woven
into the matrix of our DNA, of our cells, of
our bone marrow, and we come forth with these issues
and challenges and problems that affect our mental health and
then not even ours, they're not even ours.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
So not only intergenerational, but what would you call it,
intro wound, intrautero, something.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
In vitro, in vitro, you know, in utero, whatever you
want to call it. My mother was a drunken hear
me I say this. You don't say this because I'm
gonna get you if you say it. My mother was
a drunken hole who lived with shame and guilt. Now
I can say that, and I want to say that
to understand what she was experiencing so that I could
(25:55):
forgive it a meal. But once I did the spiritual
work of forgiveness for my then I also had to
do the work required to shift my consciousness and my behavior.
I'm not always wrong, it's not always my fault. It's
not my responsibility. And I don't have to sneak around
and hide round and not be the truth of who
(26:15):
I am because my mother was the other woman. I'm
telling you, it's all about mental health, and we need both.
We need the prayer and the spiritual work, and we
need somebody to help us unpack that. But how many
of us don't even know our mother's story Because culturally,
your mama is your mama. You don't ask her personal business.
(26:35):
But I want to know who was you sleeping with?
Was you holish? Was you drinking? Then just smoke some marijuana.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
And then like, Mama, you got any tips that you
can give me for later? I want to ask you,
but I want to affirm you. You must have did
something right. I'm here, what was going on? Right? Right?
Speaker 2 (26:54):
And I want to know. This is a very simple thing,
and many people who were here, I hope they will
do it, and I also hope they realize how difficult
it is. I ask your mother or your father, your parents, however, whatever,
what was her love story? When I recognize my parents
love story, can I tell you something didn't know? My
(27:15):
mother died when I was two years three months old.
I spent forty years in a relationship with a married man,
just like my mother, and I never even knew who
she was. Forty years in and out of a relationship
with a married man.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
So the same.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Same thing, same pattern. It's called pathology. So ask your
mother her love story. Where was she at mentally, emotionally,
physically when she was in relationship with your dad? Where
was who was she? Find out their love story, what
brought them together, how they came together? And I guarantee
(27:54):
you you're going to see pieces and parts and elements
of that in your life. Mental and emotional and physical being.
You're going to see it. So many of us get
to depression or or mental imbalance at a certain age
because we marinated in it.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So it is not our fault. But with what you
are telling us right now is an opportunity and a
God divine moment for it to be healed. You've heard it.
You can't heal what's not revealed. You repeat what's not repaired.
I don't know what to repair, so I'm repeating some
I don't even know it's what I'm repeating because I
(28:35):
think I think people think you're just doing your choices. No,
it's pathology, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
It is, and it not your fault, but it is
your responsibility. It's not your fault, but it is your
responsibility to do what is required to bring the level
of healing you need, because you're healing for future generations
(29:01):
and also for past generations, because as you clear it
for you, you clean it up in your egg bay, your
ancestors in the heavenly realm, you clean it up for them. Also,
you lift them as you left, because they're alive in
your DNA. Now that's just how I look at it
as a crazy African native American that eats and gotta
(29:21):
do lesson adults, gonna do less, do me, no mine,
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
You know so much, so much wisdom that is so divine.
I promise you. I don't think I've gotten to one
question that we had prepared.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Shut out.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
No no, no, no, no no no, I don't mind. I
don't mind. Spirit said other wise. Now considered everything that
you have gone through, and you still decided to help
other people. Other people could say, my mama left me too,
my mama died, but they tru to live in that.
(30:02):
What made you say I'm going to help others millions?
Speaker 2 (30:07):
I never said that. I never said it. It's about purpose,
it's about your calling. I never said that I was
trying to be in the black female Perry Mason. I want,
I wanted. I I'm a criminal defense attorney. That's what
I was trained for. That's what I thought. But once
I got to law school and was practicing law, I
(30:28):
realized I didn't go to law school to learn law.
I went to law school to train my mind because
I had never been taught how to think, and my
mind was rabid and rampant with all manner of Wahalla
and conflomeration. So I went to law school to learn
how to think because I needed to learn how to think.
(30:52):
And I know now I didn't know then when I was,
you know, fifty seven thousand dollars in debt and we
didn't have Biden's student forgiveness student law.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
I'm so mad, I said, Lord, I thank you for
letting me be able to pay him in for but
can I get my twenty k?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
No, I'm glad they're doing it now. You know, our
twenty k or my forty seven thousand would be ninety
thousand today.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I'm glad, like you said, Grace helped me pay it off.
But I also realized that I went to law school
so that I could recognize the discordance between man's law
and God's law. That's why I went to law school
because some of the things that are legal are totally unkind, unloving,
(31:42):
and to God, they just are and I didn't recognize that.
And I didn't know that, and so once I got it,
wait a minute, I'm not here to defend man's law.
I'm here to teach God's law. That is my purpose.
I am a teacher, and teacher in the most ancient
(32:03):
sense is an educator, and to educate is not to
put in, to jucate or draw out. Education is about
drawing out what's in because we all have the divinity,
we all have the wisdom, we all have what we
need inside, and the educational process or the process of education,
(32:25):
is to draw it out. Unfortunately, somebody didn't get the memo,
and what they do is they pour in, pour it in,
remember this and regurgitated, Remember this and regurgitated. Read this,
and tell me what you think about what they said.
And it doesn't allow us to use the creative origins
of our mind. Your mind is so creative and so powerful.
(32:46):
But we are educated to total line. We're educated to
look for external validation, and therefore we lose our inner authority.
I didn't learn none of that until that Fay forty
seven thousand dollars to get lost.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
So are you saying we can be so educated and
we don't use intuition.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
No, we don't use intuition. We don't trust ourselves. We
are programmed and condition not to trust ourselves. You tell
somebody something brilliant, and they say, who told you that?
They ain't gonna let you do that? You can't think
it's too good to be true. Yeah, you can't, you know.
And so I just got to the place and maybe
because I'm from Brooklyn and we're kind of rowdy, you know, where,
(33:26):
I said, this is what I'm doing and just you know,
allowing spirit to guide me along the way. I didn't
choose this. I was born for this or this perpose.
I was born to do what I do. And it's
it's frightening. It's been really really hard sometimes to be
the ones saying things. I remember years ago when I
(33:48):
used to show up just in African clothes and speaking
African culture and people are like, what can't You've got
to be out your mind, And now you know, Michael
Korus is making African clothes. Mm hmm. I was. I've
always been out ahead of myself, out ahead of my time.
But now to see youngins and people like you coming
(34:09):
up and talking and you know, the exers and the
zeers and the wires. So it's been really yeah, really
it's been. It's been a really powerful journey and I'm
glad to still be on it.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
You talk about the importance of development, personal development, Yes,
I'm trying to curate even who I follow on social media,
but I've had to do some unfollowing because it's this
conditioning of get the bag, get the bag, get the bag,
get the bag. Even somebody close to me, I was
telling him about this Mastermind course that I was gonna
(34:48):
invest in, and he said, I'm so glad that you're
talking about your brand development. He was like, what about
that personal I said, no.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
You didn't.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
We were all about the grind. Have you heard the
saying while you were sleep, I was grinding. No, I'm
taken nap right. But that personal development that you were
driving throughout the years. Why is personal development so important?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Because it gives you the inner authority. That had the
opportunity to go to Booie State University, one of the
historically black colleges, and they had an incoming class of
twelve hundred, and I spoke to them and two things
happened that were shocking to me. First, they all knew
(35:40):
who I was. These are eighteen nineteen year olds I
didn't know they knew who I was. And not only
did they know who I was, they were fans of
fixing my life and they could tell me episodes and
people and what happened to them people, and that was
shocking to me. The next shocking thing to me was
their willingness to be vulnerable. Young man stood up, thirty
(36:02):
three years old, entering college for the first time, and
talked about the fact that he was a victim of sex,
that his mother was a drug addict, that she was
trafficked and then he was trafficked. And he read yesterday
I cried and that started him on its healing journey,
his personal development. And another young woman stood up and
(36:23):
talked about being sexually abused at the age of five,
told her parents and they didn't believe her, and as
a result of that, she developed OCD. And I said,
to have OCDAL. Did they tell you had it? She said, no,
they told me I had it. I said, and you
believe them? She said, well, they diagnosed me. I said, well,
(36:43):
what if your mind simply gave you something to focus
on other than being raped, wouldn't that be wonderful? And
now that you recognize that you were raped, you can
now refocus your mind on something else. That's why personal
development is important. We have to know what's true for us,
what works for us, how we are influenced, what our
(37:04):
triggers are, and We don't get that by other people
telling us what to eat, what to drink, what to sleep,
to want, what to wear. You have to do your
work and the place that it shows up most frequently
where we can begin to identify what's off, what's in balance,
what we're feeling, what's triggering, is in our relationships. That's
why I'm doing our spot because we need tools to
(37:29):
build relationships. We need to develop to the degree where
we can be whole and complete in or out of
a relationship. Because we've been programmed, in conditioned to believe
that somebody else makes us whole. Either it's your teacher
or your boss, or your job, or your pasta or
(37:50):
your usher membership or your choir membership, or it is
the friends you got on Facebook. These are the things
that make you whole. No, no, you come whole complete,
and you need to learn how to trust that, honor
that live, that integrate that so that when you get
into a relationship, be it a love ship or in
(38:12):
your family ships, or in your workships, whatever it is,
that your whole, both feet on the ground solid, make
me whole. First of all, I'm a woman and you're
a man, and I don't want to grow a penis.
So you keep your penis over there. I keep my
huha over here. You know, yes, I don't. I want
(38:33):
to come to you whole. I don't want to come
to you broken. But because we're not taught how to
develop our intuition, how to speak our truth, how to
have a voice, how to stand up for ourselves lovingly
and kindly honoring other people. Because we're not taught those things.
We're taught to total line, kyletow keep the status quo. Please,
(38:56):
other people seek external validation. We're whimps and cripples when
it comes to relationships.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yes, I will agree. Oh, but you can't tell us
nothing about getting the money, honey. We are experts on that,
but are emotional intelligence.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
But when not experts on getting the money, because we
think that money comes from outside of us, and the
truth is money money. My own natural energy yield my
own energy, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling. Most people
hate their jobs, and then they wonder why they broke.
(39:35):
They work and work and work and work, and can
never seem to get what they want. Because my own
natural energy, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, how I'm living,
yields me a return yields me a return. So we
think that money comes from outside of us. It comes
from inside of us. It just manifests outside and what
(39:56):
you think about money, how you feel about money. That's
why you got to grind. I don't have to grind.
All I have to do is have a clear vision
and a clear intention and be aligned with the energy
freaky of what the desire.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Wow, beautiful. Well, I want to say when you ended
Fix my Life for the reason that you ended, courageous
maybe is the word, because you were on an amazing
network of fixing my life. And if I'm correct, I
believe you ended it because you were like the energy
(40:30):
that was coming from people on the outside. You was like,
uh uh, I can't do that. I'm not going to
allow people to do darts and social media everybody feels
like they have access to throw darts at you. But
I'm so glad you are on the R spot on
Shondaland because I was like, oh, where's she going? We
need you, we need you. Was that a hard decision
(40:55):
to end Fix my Life? No?
Speaker 2 (40:58):
I woke up one morning in spirits say this is done,
get out? I said, okay, easy? Is that I'm done.
You know, the process of doing it. It was like
I and then once I got that instruction, I swear
everything and fix my life was It was a joy
for me. I had a beautiful crew, I had a
(41:18):
beautiful time. It was a you know, every day in
my soul. I just thank Oprah Winfrey for having the
courage to mount something like fix my Life, which had
never been seen, and I hope we'll be seen in
some iteration. It is.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, let me tell you why it is, because memes forever.
Do you know which one of them I'm about to
call out?
Speaker 2 (41:42):
You know what? I didn't even know what a meme was.
People had to tell me.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I just learned, is a gift or Jiff, some Evan
or gis se see. You know I didn't it was
a gift, jiff, same thing. Okay, so I'm gonna do it.
Y'all turn your volume down. But this was right here, not.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
On my watch.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Watch, not on my watch. I was like, does she
have T shirts, a mug, a candle? I do know
you have Masterpiece Body Therapy, which is a Bathom body
product that's traditionally made with sacred herbs, oils, love, and prayer.
Not on my watch, But it let me know how
clear you are on boundaries. Yeah, how you made us
(42:27):
aware of boundaries also to be careful about what comes
out of our mouths. You've stopped many people, don't you
say that? On not on my watch? Yes? Yes, so
boundaries and being careful about what comes out of our mouth.
You kind of spoke to it a little bit. Why
are you so clear about the importance of boundaries?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Because people lied to me about my mother, and people violated,
made choices for me that I didn't get to participate in.
And because by people not having clear boundaries, safe boundaries,
I was violated and abused as a child. Just a boundary,
(43:11):
not a wall, not offence, but a boundary meaning allowing
people to know what is and is not acceptable in
your life. You got to do it, and you've got
to hold your boundaries and they have to be solid
and they have to keep you safe. And again, a boundaries,
not a wall. There are two different things. I did
(43:32):
a whole lesson on boundaries. Boundaries keep you safe and
boundaries teach other people what they can expect from you.
And they are a statement of what you expect from
other people. And in this life you don't get what
you ask for. You get what you expect. You always
get what you expect. So if you expect people to
(43:54):
honor you and to be kind and loving in a
certain way, you've got to have clear boundaries. So that's
very important to me. You know, I lived them from
birth till thirty under a lie because people didn't have
they violated my boundaries. I had a right to know
who my mother was and the fact that she no
longer inhabited a body, and for people to take that
(44:17):
away from me and live a lie and my stepmother
was my angel. I mean, it makes perfectly sense to me,
but to mere fact that I lived a lie, it
really you want to talk about something impacting your mental health,
you know. So yeah, that's why boundaries are important. And
the other thing is again, as a Native American, as
(44:38):
a descendant of Africans, you know, in Lacotta tradition, my
name is ya eo piapi, which means the people recognize
her voice. And in my YEurope lineage, my name is
eyam Lah, which means great mother. So I am the
great mother of whom people recognize my voice. Traditions and
(45:01):
my culture they all blend together. But in both of
those traditions, we believe that the essence and the power
of the soul comes through the voice. You know, if
you go to any Native American celebration ceremony, you really
hear words, you hear sounds, you know, hey, oh yea.
(45:21):
And then in African culture, everything is a song. Everything
is a song, even in African American culture. You know
when the pastor gets into that sing song in the
Lord is with you, ha, you know, yes, oh and on.
You know, because of the power of the soul that
comes through the voice. So we have to be much
(45:43):
more mindful of what's coming out of our mouth because
the mouth is a wound, and what comes out of
it you're giving birth to. So when you're speaking, I'm tired,
I'm crazy, you get all my nerves, I'm broke, I
don't want You're given births. So if we start to
think of our mouth as a womb that is perpetually
given birth, we want to be careful. We don't want
(46:05):
to have you know, deformed children and mentally had the
cap children and you know, meaning with the words that
we're speaking, because they're going to come to life, They're
going to come to life. People say all the time,
I'm broke, I'm broken, But no, you're not broke. You're
temporarily out of cash. Because when you say i'm broke,
(46:26):
you're talking about your being. So that could be a
broken heart or broken mind, a broken leg, a broken body,
a broken home. Stop saying not yes, I'm confused. No, no, no,
I'm not aware in this moment of what's the best
thing for me to do. Stop saying you confuse, because
that's a baby that you just birthed about the womb
you know of your tongue.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yes, yes, we speak our future. I probably say it
every other podcast. But a friend of mine brought to
my attention the meaning of the word future. He said, Michelle,
what do you think the word future means? I said,
something to come. He said, no, I just learned what
it meant. I said, I hate that you're almost forty
and you're just now learning what the work future means.
(47:10):
But it's exactly what you're saying, miss Yanla. The work
future means the time or period of time following the
moment of speaking or writing.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
That's right, it's in the or thinking or thinking. Yeah,
cause thank your future too. You can.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
You have been absolutely amazing. I'm thinking I said, I
just want to come to your house, sit at your feet,
and should I say cook for you. I don't want
you to have to do nothing.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
No, you come to my house. I'm gonna cook for
you anytime on the deck. We'll go sit on the
deck in piece and freedom or jump around and my
grandson will interrupt our conversation every forty five seconds.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
I am here for it all, Miss Eana Vinzen, Thank
you so much for checking in with us.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
I have been on the verge of tears, but I'm like,
just hold it together.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
But thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
I'll actual thank you.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Thank you for being so willing to be authentic and vulnerable,
and thank you for giving a voice to our healing,
our growth, our development as women, as people of color,
and using yourself as an example. Thank you for that
and for that purpose you were born. Yes you can sing,
and yes you can do lots of other things, but
(48:32):
the first scripture or the first sacred word in the
world was the spoken word. So this podcasts have become bibles,
and m for being a Bible that somebody can read
every single day.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Well we hear at checking in. We love you, everybody
make sure that you also head over to Shondaland Audio
and listen to the our Spot podcast. Inner Vision Innervision
is her coaching ministry, It's her life's ministry. We love
you over here. We love you so much. I honor
(49:09):
you and thank you for speaking in to me and
to millions of others by affirming us and get in
our lives right. We love you so much, y'all. O. MG,
mouth drop, y'all.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Wasn't this awesome? Honey? I laughed?
Speaker 1 (49:30):
I cried. I was just sitting here in pure awe
of how much fun we just had with Iyanla fan zend. Okay, Oh,
weren't y'all like blessed? I'm gonna do everything she said? Well,
she said, ask your mother about your love story, and
(49:51):
that you get what you expect. Wow, And that the
mouth is a womb. Okay, she said so much. And
I loved how she said. We don't want to affirm
anything wrong. We don't want to affirm it. Like she said,
it don't mean that you're a bad person. It don't
(50:12):
mean that you're wrong. Maybe just this response or maybe
your interpretation of what someone said or what someone did
was wrong, and it's Okay, y'all, I'm not gonna say
too much. Re listen to this episode if you have to.
There's not much I can say other than I am
truly humbled that she graced us today. And I'm truly
(50:33):
humbled that you guys took the time out to listen.
Every week, y'all, tune in every week, y'all check in.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I gotta go and absorb all this goodness we just had,
all right, and I don't want to ruin it by
trying to do what I normally do at the end
of an episode. Let me go. I gotta go check
(50:56):
in with myself right now. I love y'all so.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Much by.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Checking In with Michelle Williams is a production of iHeartRadio
and The Black Effect. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Checking In with Michelle Williams, a production of
iHeartRadio and The Black Effect. Hey Hey, Hey, y'all, how
y'all doing. I have someone absolutely amazing, a legend, gonna
(00:29):
go down in history as a trailblazer. She has been
helping people with their mental health since the late nineties.
And y'all, this icon, this legend is here to drop
some real knowledge that we can use today. I'm not
gonna waste no time. Let's get into it, y'all. This
(00:50):
is an amazing, amazing day that I have someone that
I can share space with. I'm gonna consider this sacred
space because of who she is, and that is what
she commands. Eyan la Venzant is one of the country's
most celebrated writers and speakers, among the most influential socially
(01:13):
engaged spiritual life coaches of our time, best selling author
and has a podcast on Shondaland Audio called The R Spot.
And she has fixed all of our lives, whether we
were actually on the show or just watching from afar.
Please welcome. I don't care. I know this ain't in person,
(01:34):
but stand to your feet and welcome mss Ian la
ven Zant.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Ah. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
It truly is a joy to sit with you. I
shared space with you some years ago at Essence Fest
a while ago. Oh my gosh, yes ma'am, Yes, ma'am.
And I'm glad that I got to honor you and
give you your fly hours while you were there. And
so today's episode is going to be a lot of honor.
(02:07):
But while you hear of your wisdom, I'm not even
gonna call them nuggets, because Iyanla, don't drop nuggets. Nuggets
is what little shit suits be dropping in the yard.
I'll tell you, she drops gems, Okay, life gems. You
debuted into the mainstream with your iconic appearances on the
(02:28):
Oprah Winfrey Show in nineteen ninety eight, and you taught
women to say I'm not broke, but instead to say
I am temporarily out of cash. Just some of your
many sayings and how you were one of the first
black women someone that we could look up to that
we could talk about our state of our mental health
(02:50):
without any shame, but somebody that we can say, wow,
missing Ila gets it. We're a trailblazer to do that
on such a big play. So from twenty two, from
back to nineteen ninety eight. How do you feel about
seeing how widely celebrated it is that we can talk
about our mental health.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, I just I'm so grateful, and I also want
us to do more than give it lip service. Now
at least we're talking about it, because you know, back then,
you didn't even want people to know if you had
a headache, you know, much less if you were feeling depressed.
So I'm really grateful, and I still have great concern
(03:36):
that the way mental health is addressed and spoken about
and the services for it scheople don't always meet the
needs of women of color, particularly women of color, because
the depth of our wounded us, the depth of our experiences,
(03:58):
aren't always include did in the How can I say
this the traditional psychological models. I worked with a woman
a few years ago who, from all perspectives and intentions,
was physically verbally aggressive and you know, off the charts
(04:22):
if I can. And I was working with her and
I said, you know what, you're depressed. It didn't look
like the normal lay in the bed, don't brush your
teeth depression. And what I discovered, and I did some
work and talked to some people and came to understand
that there is a form of depression that manifests as
(04:45):
overt aggressive or abusive behavior, specifically among black women, and
nobody was talking about that, you know, so I was
able to connect her to someone that was familiar with it.
So a lot of times we see with us what
would be called bad behavior, aggressive behavior, or the angry
(05:08):
black woman. It's really a form of depression. Depression meaning
that there's a place within where we feel totally alone,
totally unsupported, and hold the belief that we have to
do everything on our own for ourselves because nobody is
there to help us. That can be overwhelming, and what
(05:30):
it does to the average person is lays them down
in the bed. Yes, what it does to us very
often it sends us out with a vengeance. So it's
just something that I think we need to pay more
attention to.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
It not only sends us out with a vengeance, but
it's because we have to.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, a lot of people don't have, you know, the
resources to take time off to go get counseling with
someone that speaks to them.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I want your take on why do you think as
it relates to black people, that when we say the
word depression as if it's a plague. I want to
stay away from me. We don't talk about that, honey,
I'm saved, sanctified, feel with the hot host. Ain't no
depression over here, And it's like, yes there.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
It's cultural for us, I mean, dating back to our
oldest ancestors, A we don't affirm anything wrong, so there
can't be anything wrong with me. And if I can't
live up to the expectations, the requirements, the demands, the
responsibilities of whatever my role is in the village or
(06:48):
in the community and now in the society, then there's
something wrong with me. Culturally, I don't speak about that. Culturally,
we cover it up, we hide it, we mask it
because if there's something wrong with me, it's going to
impart certain responsibilities on other people. And because I don't
(07:08):
want to be a burden, let me just mask, cover high,
deny whatever is going on. So that's one thing. The
other thing is and this is specifically for women of color.
And I say women of color because I'm part Native American,
part Latin, and part Black and part so I say
(07:29):
women of color because very often, as descendants of Africans,
we don't look at the other our sister women in
the Native American culture or the Latin culture as experiencing
many of the same things that we do to a
different degree, but very often as women of color. This
(07:50):
whole notion of depression speaks to our strength. And since
we have the myth of the superwoman and the beast
of burden and the one responsible for everyone else, we
we can't abdicate our responsibilities or fail to meet the
(08:12):
expectations of others. So we deny again in mask or
overcompensate to prove to you, I'm not feeling like a
pile of crap. I'm going to overdo, overgive, over commit,
or overspeak, you know, yes. And then for Latin women,
(08:33):
you know, culturally, for them in the machismo of the
Latin community, what the woman wants or needs or whatever,
you know, that's subjugated to whatever the men are wanted.
And then in the Native community, you know, women are
like dust on your shoe. You don't even ask them.
They and if you ask them, they probably won't have
anything to say. So it's shifting. It's shifting, and we
(08:56):
have to be grateful. But the shift requires is that
we become willing to speak it aloud, to speak it aloud,
you know, yes, and not just carry the burden or
take on the responsibility as a part of this dysfunctional
culture that we find ourselves in here where women are
(09:19):
just carrying so much weight.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Carrying so much weight. And I thank you for affirming
and empowering us to begin to talk about it. Even
if some of us we're talking about we don't have
the right language for, we might not be talking about
it in the right way, but I'm so glad that
we are getting there. As it relates to depression, I
(09:43):
remember asking my mother. I became open about depression in
twenty thirteen, pretty much by accident. I was doing an
interview and somehow I was like, oh, yeah, you know,
back in twenty twelve, I was in the bed for
weeks talking about depression and I'm supposed to be promoting
Fell Out of the musical, and here I am. Somehow
(10:04):
depression gotten the mixed and mister an, let you know
how this goes like you might think you said something
off the record, but it made the interview and it
became sure this headline, and I was so ashamed because
I thought, are people going to look at me as
a liability? Then in twenty eighteen having to check myself
(10:27):
into a treatment facility for depression, and the support and
the love that I've gotten, and for people saying thank
you for not letting me feel like something's wrong with
me or that I'm alone. I have decided to speak
up about it and let people know the journey, and
(10:50):
thank you for being a trailblazer and helping people feel empowered. Yeah,
to talk about it. I'm saying all this to say,
even still trying to talk to say my mother about it.
She is seventy, there's still some oh yeah, resistance, resistance
and shame, shame even and even to talk about other
(11:12):
medical issues. I need to know what was carried in
my bloodline. Why are we so afraid to say, well,
you know, grandfather had such and such, such and such.
Now she did tell me, she said she does believe
my grandfather, had there been a diagnosis for him, that
he would have been bipolar. So I was shocked to
hear her say that. But mental health issues, I don't know,
(11:34):
like you said, if it's still because we don't want
to affirm anything wrong or give power to spirits, because
apparently what you give power to that thing manifesting girls
and I'm like, no, we got to know what grandfather had,
we got to know what Mama had.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Well, again, for us, it is cultural, and you know
how it was handled back in great great grandma's days.
You went to the wise woman or the or the
medicine man, and you got yourself together. Every disease or
imbalance has a spiritual component, and many of us embrace
(12:10):
a spiritual foundation that doesn't always support us in telling
the truth about what we are experiencing. But culturally, not
only was it is it taboo to admit that there's
something wrong with you, It is inappropriate to speak your
family business. So God, now that I'm older and I
(12:35):
look back and I say, oh God, my cousin James
was gay. He wasn't even gay, he was hysterical. You know.
But black men, you didn't talk about it. You didn't
talk your family business outside. And very often we didn't know,
we didn't know. We called it something else.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
We called it crazy.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
They just different, They different, right, don't even you know?
So it's cultural or for us, but those taboos and
those behaviors that are not supported because we live in
a very different time. We live in a very different time.
You know, there was a time when I could go
and lay my head in Grandma's bosom, and her in
(13:16):
the prayer warriors would stand around me and lift me out.
But now Grandma might be in the crackhouse, or she
might be in a senior citizen center, or I might
not even know who she is, you know. So some
of the things, some of the things that we had
in our community, in our village, in our culture that
(13:36):
would support us in moving through these things, we don't
have them anymore, so we have to come up with
new ways. The other thing is people talk about mental health,
but they still think of two words crazy and wrong,
which then generates a lot of shame for black people.
(13:57):
You can be fat, you can be ugly, you can
be broke, but you can't be wrong. You know, it's
cultural for us, as we were indoctrinated to believe that
because our skin was dark and our hair was wooly,
and because we came from a place called Africa where
(14:17):
the majority of the people were dark with wooly hair,
there's something wrong with us. We don't meet the standard,
and we don't understand that. We carry that as a
cellular memory in our DNA. So let me weigh five
hundred pounds, and every medical facility wants to help me.
Let me be ugly as the bottom of somebody's shoe,
(14:38):
and I can go get some plastic surgery. But please
don't let me be wrong. Don't let anything be wrong
with me, okay, because then that triggers up that cellular
memory of being inferior and being savage, and being beaten
and being denigrated, dishonor disrespect. We don't understand that that
(15:00):
still rings true within us. So while we talk about
mental health, we still have these labels that we attached
to it, and we don't think of it just as
a form of health. It's health. Your mind needs to
be healthy, and that's what mental health is. How do
I get my mind healthy? It's nothing wrong with it,
(15:23):
But the same way I can have breast cancer, or
I can have diabetes, or I can have hypertension, or
I can have gout or arthritis, that's health in the body.
Mental health is simply health in the mind. And the
things that give you gout give you gout, and the
things that give you depression give you depression. And the
things that give you cancer give you cancer. And the
(15:43):
things that make you bipolar, make you buipolar. It's just health,
and that's how we got to think about it.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Come on, if y'll checking in is on the right path.
That is what we speak over here because we put
mental health way over here, but our part of a
vascular health, gynecological health, neural health, we all lump it
over here. Yeah, it's like I've tell people, you know,
some of the same mental health offices, psychiatric offices, psychologists.
(16:12):
They're in the same building as your obgyn. It's not
over there somewhere.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
The other thing that we don't give enough consideration to
is that there are physiological influences on mental health. If
there are certain imbalances and discordant energies in your physical body,
it will affect your mind. My daughter had coalon cancer
(16:37):
thirty one years old. Never drank, never smoke, had been
a vegetarian for twenty two years, and she got coalon cancer.
And they said it was a rare form of coalon
cancer called familial palopopis, which is supposed to be ancestral.
It runs through your bloodline. We couldn't find it in
my side of the family or her father's side of family,
(17:00):
but my mother did have breast cancer, so it may
have just hipped the generation and showed up that way.
But throughout her treatment, I mean it was just certain
days it was like, who is this person and where
did they come from? And in prayer one day, I
was just reminded, the same disease that is affecting her
(17:20):
body is affecting her mind. She is thinking with a
diseased mind. You cannot expect her body to be affected
by cancer and not have an impact on her mind.
And I was like, oh my god, I never even
thought about that. So there are physiological things that also
(17:42):
lead to certain mental health imbalances or mental health challenges.
I personally happened to believe that the whole notion of
being bipolar what they used to call what did they
had another name a manic depressive, manic depressed. It got
to be bipolar about but.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Ten years ago, but I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Oh yeah, it was manic depressive, then it became bipolar.
I happened to believe that there is such a powerful
spiritual component to bipolarists that you can't fix with a pill.
You can't fix that with a pill. There's something going
on in there with the spirit that you got to address,
(18:31):
you know, In African culture, it is believed that we
have what's called an egg bay, and an egg bay
is the union of our ancestors on the other side. Yes,
and sometimes for many of us in our ancestral line
(18:52):
people weren't buried with reverence. People weren't honored after they died.
They were hung on trees enough there for days and
then maybe dumped in a hole. But what happened to
put that spirit to rest so that that spirit would
have rest? You know now that the physical body is decayed,
(19:13):
who's calling that person's name in prayer? So I personally
believe that there are some spiritual imbalances in our ancestral
lineage that also lend to the experience of bipolarism. That's
just me. I'm crazy. Don't pay me no, mom.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
I have never durned near stood up during it. And
I can stand up because I got my breeches on below.
So okay, okay, so okay, okay, you're helping me. You
answered the why I've gotten so angry at people. Even
lately in comments of certain people talking about therapy and
(19:57):
Jesus therapy and spiritual reality, it's been said, well, you
don't need this because you don't trust God enough, but
I am so my cellular stuff is just going because
(20:17):
you just answered why people have a disconnect between our
mental health therapy that side and the spiritual side. It
can be and it is both. And you can have
prayer and like you said, you can have something going
on in the mind, but you're still a great woman,
(20:38):
You're still a successful man, but something's going on in
the spirit.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Yeah. You know, think of your therapists as the gonecologists
for your brains.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You're talking right.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
You know you don't go to the godacologists to take
care of that stuff and then not do everything else
to take care of it. You know, your therapist is
the gonecologists for your brain, or the theologists for your brain,
or the.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Sound bite for the post.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Think of your sound bitts as the god ecologist for
your brain. Got to go in there o corral, see
what happening in what's going on, and then help you.
And in terms of prayer, God uses people so you
can pray and you can embrace whatever your faith walk is,
(21:26):
whether it's Jesus or Buddha, Muhammad or I mean Allah
or whatever it is. And maybe that divine entity is
going to send you to the right gonecologist for your brain.
Come on together, let me tell you a quick story.
My birth mother died when I was two, and unfortunately,
(21:50):
everybody either forgot or chose to tell me that my
birth mother was an alcoholic. And it was discovered when
she was carrying me that she had breast cancer and leukemia.
And so I was born and she died when I
was two years and three months old. And like I said,
nobody ever told me grow up thinking one woman is
(22:12):
my mother and she wasn't. I was thirty years old
and I found out. But here's the point that I
want to make. My mother was an alcoholic. I grew up.
I never drank. Never. I don't dream this very day.
My biggest drink is a is a Shirley Temple. And
every now and then I'll have kolua and cream when
I want to be grown.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Don't be grown. I thought she was gonna say ginger ale,
but okay.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
A lou and cream. And then also my mother was
the other woman. My father was married. My father was married,
and he and his wife lived around the corner. My
mother was his side piece, and she lived in my
grandmother's house. My father's mother's house, and that's where I
(22:55):
was born and my brother was born. And again, because
I never knew her, I grew up all my life
feeling guilty. I was always wrong. I always did something wrong,
no matter what happened, it was my fault. I was bad.
Blah blah blah blah blah. Fast forward. I was about
thirty years old when I found out the truth about
my mother being dead, being the other woman, and being
(23:17):
the alcoholic, and through work, spiritual work, prayer and meditation
and also working with I guess he was a therapist.
I discovered this. Hear me that I marinated in the womb,
first of all in liquor, so I probably had enough
(23:37):
liquor in the womb. I didn't never need another drink,
you know, I never I had probably you know, she
was an alcoholic. I don't know what she was drinking,
but probably. And the grace is, this is grace that
I was not born with fetal alcohol syndrome. I wasn't not,
(23:58):
but I was born within the emotional addiction, and it
was guilt. I marinated in my mother's guilt of being
the other woman. She was guilty and she was ashamed.
So for most of I mean, I was pregnant at sixteen,
pregnant at nineteen, lived in an abusive marriage, did so
(24:19):
many things that engendered guilt within me, and I just
lived it out until, with prayer, meditation and a good
support system, discovered that the guilt that I was living,
a shame that I was feeling, wasn't even mine, it
was hers. I didn't have anything to be guilty about,
anything to be ashamed of, but I marinated in it
(24:43):
in the womb. Let me tell you something, Michelle. I'd
work with that, and I researched it and I dug it,
and it just became clear to me that many of
us marinated in things in the womb. Shame, fear, guilt, aggression, loneliness, sadness, abandoned, abandoned, rejection, disappointment.
(25:04):
That's what our mothers were experiencing. And it gets woven
into the matrix of our DNA, of our cells, of
our bone marrow, and we come forth with these issues
and challenges and problems that affect our mental health and
then not even ours, they're not even ours.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
So not only intergenerational, but what would you call it,
intro wound, intrautero, something.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
In vitro, in vitro, you know, in utero, whatever you
want to call it. My mother was a drunken hear
me I say this. You don't say this because I'm
gonna get you if you say it. My mother was
a drunken hole who lived with shame and guilt. Now
I can say that, and I want to say that
to understand what she was experiencing so that I could
(25:55):
forgive it a meal. But once I did the spiritual
work of forgiveness for my then I also had to
do the work required to shift my consciousness and my behavior.
I'm not always wrong, it's not always my fault. It's
not my responsibility. And I don't have to sneak around
and hide round and not be the truth of who
(26:15):
I am because my mother was the other woman. I'm
telling you, it's all about mental health, and we need both.
We need the prayer and the spiritual work, and we
need somebody to help us unpack that. But how many
of us don't even know our mother's story Because culturally,
your mama is your mama. You don't ask her personal business.
(26:35):
But I want to know who was you sleeping with?
Was you holish? Was you drinking? Then just smoke some marijuana.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
And then like, Mama, you got any tips that you
can give me for later? I want to ask you,
but I want to affirm you. You must have did
something right. I'm here, what was going on? Right? Right?
Speaker 2 (26:54):
And I want to know. This is a very simple thing,
and many people who were here, I hope they will
do it, and I also hope they realize how difficult
it is. I ask your mother or your father, your parents, however, whatever,
what was her love story? When I recognize my parents
love story, can I tell you something didn't know? My
(27:15):
mother died when I was two years three months old.
I spent forty years in a relationship with a married man,
just like my mother, and I never even knew who
she was. Forty years in and out of a relationship
with a married man.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
So the same.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Same thing, same pattern. It's called pathology. So ask your
mother her love story. Where was she at mentally, emotionally,
physically when she was in relationship with your dad? Where
was who was she? Find out their love story, what
brought them together, how they came together? And I guarantee
(27:54):
you you're going to see pieces and parts and elements
of that in your life. Mental and emotional and physical being.
You're going to see it. So many of us get
to depression or or mental imbalance at a certain age
because we marinated in it.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So it is not our fault. But with what you
are telling us right now is an opportunity and a
God divine moment for it to be healed. You've heard it.
You can't heal what's not revealed. You repeat what's not repaired.
I don't know what to repair, so I'm repeating some
I don't even know it's what I'm repeating because I
(28:35):
think I think people think you're just doing your choices. No,
it's pathology, yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
It is, and it not your fault, but it is
your responsibility. It's not your fault, but it is your
responsibility to do what is required to bring the level
of healing you need, because you're healing for future generations
(29:01):
and also for past generations, because as you clear it
for you, you clean it up in your egg bay, your
ancestors in the heavenly realm, you clean it up for them. Also,
you lift them as you left, because they're alive in
your DNA. Now that's just how I look at it
as a crazy African native American that eats and gotta
(29:21):
do lesson adults, gonna do less, do me, no mine,
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
You know so much, so much wisdom that is so divine.
I promise you. I don't think I've gotten to one
question that we had prepared.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Shut out.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
No no, no, no, no no no, I don't mind. I
don't mind. Spirit said other wise. Now considered everything that
you have gone through, and you still decided to help
other people. Other people could say, my mama left me too,
my mama died, but they tru to live in that.
(30:02):
What made you say I'm going to help others millions?
Speaker 2 (30:07):
I never said that. I never said it. It's about purpose,
it's about your calling. I never said that I was
trying to be in the black female Perry Mason. I want,
I wanted. I I'm a criminal defense attorney. That's what
I was trained for. That's what I thought. But once
I got to law school and was practicing law, I
(30:28):
realized I didn't go to law school to learn law.
I went to law school to train my mind because
I had never been taught how to think, and my
mind was rabid and rampant with all manner of Wahalla
and conflomeration. So I went to law school to learn
how to think because I needed to learn how to think.
(30:52):
And I know now I didn't know then when I was,
you know, fifty seven thousand dollars in debt and we
didn't have Biden's student forgiveness student law.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
I'm so mad, I said, Lord, I thank you for
letting me be able to pay him in for but
can I get my twenty k?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
No, I'm glad they're doing it now. You know, our
twenty k or my forty seven thousand would be ninety
thousand today.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I'm glad, like you said, Grace helped me pay it off.
But I also realized that I went to law school
so that I could recognize the discordance between man's law
and God's law. That's why I went to law school
because some of the things that are legal are totally unkind, unloving,
(31:42):
and to God, they just are and I didn't recognize that.
And I didn't know that, and so once I got it,
wait a minute, I'm not here to defend man's law.
I'm here to teach God's law. That is my purpose.
I am a teacher, and teacher in the most ancient
(32:03):
sense is an educator, and to educate is not to
put in, to jucate or draw out. Education is about
drawing out what's in because we all have the divinity,
we all have the wisdom, we all have what we
need inside, and the educational process or the process of education,
(32:25):
is to draw it out. Unfortunately, somebody didn't get the memo,
and what they do is they pour in, pour it in,
remember this and regurgitated, Remember this and regurgitated. Read this,
and tell me what you think about what they said.
And it doesn't allow us to use the creative origins
of our mind. Your mind is so creative and so powerful.
(32:46):
But we are educated to total line. We're educated to
look for external validation, and therefore we lose our inner authority.
I didn't learn none of that until that Fay forty
seven thousand dollars to get lost.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
So are you saying we can be so educated and
we don't use intuition.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
No, we don't use intuition. We don't trust ourselves. We
are programmed and condition not to trust ourselves. You tell
somebody something brilliant, and they say, who told you that?
They ain't gonna let you do that? You can't think
it's too good to be true. Yeah, you can't, you know.
And so I just got to the place and maybe
because I'm from Brooklyn and we're kind of rowdy, you know, where,
(33:26):
I said, this is what I'm doing and just you know,
allowing spirit to guide me along the way. I didn't
choose this. I was born for this or this perpose.
I was born to do what I do. And it's
it's frightening. It's been really really hard sometimes to be
the ones saying things. I remember years ago when I
(33:48):
used to show up just in African clothes and speaking
African culture and people are like, what can't You've got
to be out your mind, And now you know, Michael
Korus is making African clothes. Mm hmm. I was. I've
always been out ahead of myself, out ahead of my time.
But now to see youngins and people like you coming
(34:09):
up and talking and you know, the exers and the
zeers and the wires. So it's been really yeah, really
it's been. It's been a really powerful journey and I'm
glad to still be on it.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
You talk about the importance of development, personal development, Yes,
I'm trying to curate even who I follow on social media,
but I've had to do some unfollowing because it's this
conditioning of get the bag, get the bag, get the bag,
get the bag. Even somebody close to me, I was
telling him about this Mastermind course that I was gonna
(34:48):
invest in, and he said, I'm so glad that you're
talking about your brand development. He was like, what about
that personal I said, no.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
You didn't.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
We were all about the grind. Have you heard the
saying while you were sleep, I was grinding. No, I'm
taken nap right. But that personal development that you were
driving throughout the years. Why is personal development so important?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Because it gives you the inner authority. That had the
opportunity to go to Booie State University, one of the
historically black colleges, and they had an incoming class of
twelve hundred, and I spoke to them and two things
happened that were shocking to me. First, they all knew
(35:40):
who I was. These are eighteen nineteen year olds I
didn't know they knew who I was. And not only
did they know who I was, they were fans of
fixing my life and they could tell me episodes and
people and what happened to them people, and that was
shocking to me. The next shocking thing to me was
their willingness to be vulnerable. Young man stood up, thirty
(36:02):
three years old, entering college for the first time, and
talked about the fact that he was a victim of sex,
that his mother was a drug addict, that she was
trafficked and then he was trafficked. And he read yesterday
I cried and that started him on its healing journey,
his personal development. And another young woman stood up and
(36:23):
talked about being sexually abused at the age of five,
told her parents and they didn't believe her, and as
a result of that, she developed OCD. And I said,
to have OCDAL. Did they tell you had it? She said, no,
they told me I had it. I said, and you
believe them? She said, well, they diagnosed me. I said, well,
(36:43):
what if your mind simply gave you something to focus
on other than being raped, wouldn't that be wonderful? And
now that you recognize that you were raped, you can
now refocus your mind on something else. That's why personal
development is important. We have to know what's true for us,
what works for us, how we are influenced, what our
(37:04):
triggers are, and We don't get that by other people
telling us what to eat, what to drink, what to sleep,
to want, what to wear. You have to do your
work and the place that it shows up most frequently
where we can begin to identify what's off, what's in balance,
what we're feeling, what's triggering, is in our relationships. That's
why I'm doing our spot because we need tools to
(37:29):
build relationships. We need to develop to the degree where
we can be whole and complete in or out of
a relationship. Because we've been programmed, in conditioned to believe
that somebody else makes us whole. Either it's your teacher
or your boss, or your job, or your pasta or
(37:50):
your usher membership or your choir membership, or it is
the friends you got on Facebook. These are the things
that make you whole. No, no, you come whole complete,
and you need to learn how to trust that, honor
that live, that integrate that so that when you get
into a relationship, be it a love ship or in
(38:12):
your family ships, or in your workships, whatever it is,
that your whole, both feet on the ground solid, make
me whole. First of all, I'm a woman and you're
a man, and I don't want to grow a penis.
So you keep your penis over there. I keep my
huha over here. You know, yes, I don't. I want
(38:33):
to come to you whole. I don't want to come
to you broken. But because we're not taught how to
develop our intuition, how to speak our truth, how to
have a voice, how to stand up for ourselves lovingly
and kindly honoring other people. Because we're not taught those things.
We're taught to total line, kyletow keep the status quo. Please,
(38:56):
other people seek external validation. We're whimps and cripples when
it comes to relationships.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yes, I will agree. Oh, but you can't tell us
nothing about getting the money, honey. We are experts on that,
but are emotional intelligence.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
But when not experts on getting the money, because we
think that money comes from outside of us, and the
truth is money money. My own natural energy yield my
own energy, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling. Most people
hate their jobs, and then they wonder why they broke.
(39:35):
They work and work and work and work, and can
never seem to get what they want. Because my own
natural energy, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, how I'm living,
yields me a return yields me a return. So we
think that money comes from outside of us. It comes
from inside of us. It just manifests outside and what
(39:56):
you think about money, how you feel about money. That's
why you got to grind. I don't have to grind.
All I have to do is have a clear vision
and a clear intention and be aligned with the energy
freaky of what the desire.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Wow, beautiful. Well, I want to say when you ended
Fix my Life for the reason that you ended, courageous
maybe is the word, because you were on an amazing
network of fixing my life. And if I'm correct, I
believe you ended it because you were like the energy
(40:30):
that was coming from people on the outside. You was like,
uh uh, I can't do that. I'm not going to
allow people to do darts and social media everybody feels
like they have access to throw darts at you. But
I'm so glad you are on the R spot on
Shondaland because I was like, oh, where's she going? We
need you, we need you. Was that a hard decision
(40:55):
to end Fix my Life? No?
Speaker 2 (40:58):
I woke up one morning in spirits say this is done,
get out? I said, okay, easy? Is that I'm done.
You know, the process of doing it. It was like
I and then once I got that instruction, I swear
everything and fix my life was It was a joy
for me. I had a beautiful crew, I had a
(41:18):
beautiful time. It was a you know, every day in
my soul. I just thank Oprah Winfrey for having the
courage to mount something like fix my Life, which had
never been seen, and I hope we'll be seen in
some iteration. It is.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, let me tell you why it is, because memes forever.
Do you know which one of them I'm about to
call out?
Speaker 2 (41:42):
You know what? I didn't even know what a meme was.
People had to tell me.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
I just learned, is a gift or Jiff, some Evan
or gis se see. You know I didn't it was
a gift, jiff, same thing. Okay, so I'm gonna do it.
Y'all turn your volume down. But this was right here, not.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
On my watch.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Watch, not on my watch. I was like, does she
have T shirts, a mug, a candle? I do know
you have Masterpiece Body Therapy, which is a Bathom body
product that's traditionally made with sacred herbs, oils, love, and prayer.
Not on my watch, But it let me know how
clear you are on boundaries. Yeah, how you made us
(42:27):
aware of boundaries also to be careful about what comes
out of our mouths. You've stopped many people, don't you
say that? On not on my watch? Yes? Yes, so
boundaries and being careful about what comes out of our mouth.
You kind of spoke to it a little bit. Why
are you so clear about the importance of boundaries?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
Because people lied to me about my mother, and people violated,
made choices for me that I didn't get to participate in.
And because by people not having clear boundaries, safe boundaries,
I was violated and abused as a child. Just a boundary,
(43:11):
not a wall, not offence, but a boundary meaning allowing
people to know what is and is not acceptable in
your life. You got to do it, and you've got
to hold your boundaries and they have to be solid
and they have to keep you safe. And again, a boundaries,
not a wall. There are two different things. I did
(43:32):
a whole lesson on boundaries. Boundaries keep you safe and
boundaries teach other people what they can expect from you.
And they are a statement of what you expect from
other people. And in this life you don't get what
you ask for. You get what you expect. You always
get what you expect. So if you expect people to
(43:54):
honor you and to be kind and loving in a
certain way, you've got to have clear boundaries. So that's
very important to me. You know, I lived them from
birth till thirty under a lie because people didn't have
they violated my boundaries. I had a right to know
who my mother was and the fact that she no
longer inhabited a body, and for people to take that
(44:17):
away from me and live a lie and my stepmother
was my angel. I mean, it makes perfectly sense to me,
but to mere fact that I lived a lie, it
really you want to talk about something impacting your mental health,
you know. So yeah, that's why boundaries are important. And
the other thing is again, as a Native American, as
(44:38):
a descendant of Africans, you know, in Lacotta tradition, my
name is ya eo piapi, which means the people recognize
her voice. And in my YEurope lineage, my name is
eyam Lah, which means great mother. So I am the
great mother of whom people recognize my voice. Traditions and
(45:01):
my culture they all blend together. But in both of
those traditions, we believe that the essence and the power
of the soul comes through the voice. You know, if
you go to any Native American celebration ceremony, you really
hear words, you hear sounds, you know, hey, oh yea.
(45:21):
And then in African culture, everything is a song. Everything
is a song, even in African American culture. You know
when the pastor gets into that sing song in the
Lord is with you, ha, you know, yes, oh and on.
You know, because of the power of the soul that
comes through the voice. So we have to be much
(45:43):
more mindful of what's coming out of our mouth because
the mouth is a wound, and what comes out of
it you're giving birth to. So when you're speaking, I'm tired,
I'm crazy, you get all my nerves, I'm broke, I
don't want You're given births. So if we start to
think of our mouth as a womb that is perpetually
given birth, we want to be careful. We don't want
(46:05):
to have you know, deformed children and mentally had the
cap children and you know, meaning with the words that
we're speaking, because they're going to come to life, They're
going to come to life. People say all the time,
I'm broke, I'm broken, But no, you're not broke. You're
temporarily out of cash. Because when you say i'm broke,
(46:26):
you're talking about your being. So that could be a
broken heart or broken mind, a broken leg, a broken body,
a broken home. Stop saying not yes, I'm confused. No, no, no,
I'm not aware in this moment of what's the best
thing for me to do. Stop saying you confuse, because
that's a baby that you just birthed about the womb
you know of your tongue.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Yes, yes, we speak our future. I probably say it
every other podcast. But a friend of mine brought to
my attention the meaning of the word future. He said, Michelle,
what do you think the word future means? I said,
something to come. He said, no, I just learned what
it meant. I said, I hate that you're almost forty
and you're just now learning what the work future means.
(47:10):
But it's exactly what you're saying, miss Yanla. The work
future means the time or period of time following the
moment of speaking or writing.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
That's right, it's in the or thinking or thinking. Yeah,
cause thank your future too. You can.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
You have been absolutely amazing. I'm thinking I said, I
just want to come to your house, sit at your feet,
and should I say cook for you. I don't want
you to have to do nothing.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
No, you come to my house. I'm gonna cook for
you anytime on the deck. We'll go sit on the
deck in piece and freedom or jump around and my
grandson will interrupt our conversation every forty five seconds.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
I am here for it all, Miss Eana Vinzen, Thank
you so much for checking in with us.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
I have been on the verge of tears, but I'm like,
just hold it together.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
But thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
I'll actual thank you.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Thank you for being so willing to be authentic and vulnerable,
and thank you for giving a voice to our healing,
our growth, our development as women, as people of color,
and using yourself as an example. Thank you for that
and for that purpose you were born. Yes you can sing,
and yes you can do lots of other things, but
(48:32):
the first scripture or the first sacred word in the
world was the spoken word. So this podcasts have become bibles,
and m for being a Bible that somebody can read
every single day.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Well we hear at checking in. We love you, everybody
make sure that you also head over to Shondaland Audio
and listen to the our Spot podcast. Inner Vision Innervision
is her coaching ministry, It's her life's ministry. We love
you over here. We love you so much. I honor
(49:09):
you and thank you for speaking in to me and
to millions of others by affirming us and get in
our lives right. We love you so much, y'all. O. MG,
mouth drop, y'all.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Wasn't this awesome? Honey? I laughed?
Speaker 1 (49:30):
I cried. I was just sitting here in pure awe
of how much fun we just had with Iyanla fan zend. Okay, Oh,
weren't y'all like blessed? I'm gonna do everything she said? Well,
she said, ask your mother about your love story, and
(49:51):
that you get what you expect. Wow, And that the
mouth is a womb. Okay, she said so much. And
I loved how she said. We don't want to affirm
anything wrong. We don't want to affirm it. Like she said,
it don't mean that you're a bad person. It don't
(50:12):
mean that you're wrong. Maybe just this response or maybe
your interpretation of what someone said or what someone did
was wrong, and it's Okay, y'all, I'm not gonna say
too much. Re listen to this episode if you have to.
There's not much I can say other than I am
truly humbled that she graced us today. And I'm truly
(50:33):
humbled that you guys took the time out to listen.
Every week, y'all, tune in every week, y'all check in.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I gotta go and absorb all this goodness we just had,
all right, and I don't want to ruin it by
trying to do what I normally do at the end
of an episode. Let me go. I gotta go check
(50:56):
in with myself right now. I love y'all so.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Much by.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Checking In with Michelle Williams is a production of iHeartRadio
and The Black Effect. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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