Where is iyanla from

Rhonda Eva Harris was born in the back of a taxi to Sarah Jefferson, a railroad car maid. When Sarah Jefferson died from breast cancer in , Rhonda went to live with various paternal relatives, one of whom raped her at the age of nine. She gave birth to her first child, Gemmia in , her second Daman in , and third, Nisa in Frequently assaulted by her first husband she finally fled the violence in at the age of 27 with three young children to rear.

She spent three years from to as a Public Defender in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Feeling unfulfilled working in the legal field, Vanzant wrote Tapping the Power Within: A Path to Self-Empowerment for Black Women , the first of several books designed to teach pre-employment skills to marginalized women. Her sales totaled eight million copies. Not in the ground, hating her, hiding her, diminishing her, but bury her," Iyanla says.

The life Iyanla was living was bleak, but she was able to acknowledge that it wasn't something she deserved or had to accept. Once Iyanla better understood her own self-worth, the new identity emerged and she embarked on her life's true spiritual journey.

ET on OWN. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. In a fit of depression, I attempted suicide. After being released from the hospital psychiatric ward, Vanzant, with her three children in tow, went on welfare. She was on welfare for eight years before, struck by the unfulfilled purpose in her life, she applied to Medgar Evers College, despite protests from family members, and began attending classes.

Three-and-a-half years later she left welfare forever after graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in public administration and being offered a job that, as she said in Essence , "paid more than my former caseworker made! Three years after graduation, she attained a law degree from the City University of New York. Despite more than 20 years of practical study in the fields of spirituality and empowerment, however, Vanzant chose not to go into academics.

Rather than intellectual analyses, she offered very apt spiritual guidance. In all her books and talks, Vanzant has offered ancient, but still contemporary wisdom and common sense, leading her readers in and out of the "dark experiences. Vanzant has experienced the healing journey from despair to self-reliance that she so fervently wants others to take.

From her troubled past, she has emerged a winner, committed to an eclectic message of divine power and self-determination. This popular motivational speaker and prolific author has taken her audience by the hand and led them down the path of self-discovery, self-help, self-empowerment, and self-love. Vanzant stressed that all this social and self-improvement was made possible, however, only by "tapping the power within. In confronting discrimination, racism, rejection, and alienation, Vanzant took an approach that, for a feminist, was very non-traditional—less political and more spiritual.

She asserted in a telephone interview, "Spiritual consciousness does not make your problems go away; it does, however, help you view them from a different vantage point. It is our perception of them. Her own journey served as an inspiring model for others. According to Vanzant in Faith in the Valley , Black women, like many others, have found it "difficult to accept that life is more than hopping from one mountaintop experience to another. As she said in Faith in the Valley , "If we think of life as a twenty-four hour day, we know to expect twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness.

The way out always involves a choice: spiritual growth, faith, and strength, or in Vanzant's words, "the stuff our grandmothers were made of.

The author's pain and triumph, coming through her deepest spiritual valley, was most poignantly told in her memoirs Interiors: A Black Woman's Healing in Progress. While Interiors told of one woman's trip to insanity and her journey back, this survivor's suffering and recovery were told in a way that they became the story of all women.

It was important, she said, for women to have discovered who they were so they would have made their decisions accordingly. However, Iyanla has said that who she was has had nothing to do with her having been raped by her uncle at age nine.

Nor did Iyanla see herself as having been crushed by the nine years spent in an abusive marriage before she found the strength to leave it. She has said that being a welfare recipient did not make her the person she has become.