In this empowering first episode of The R Spot Iyanla talks to Ms. E., a breast cancer survivor struggling with body image post mastectomy. Worried about how a new suitor may react to her altered body, Ms. E.’s love life has been non-existent since her life saving surgery. Iyanla gives Ms. E. her voice back and invites her to get under the story she’s telling herself about her experience. Ms. E.’s courage inspires Iyanla to share her own personal journey and how she fell in love with herself.
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Executive Producers: Sandie Bailey, Alex Alcheh, Lauren Hohman, Tyler Klang & Gabrielle Collins
Producer & Editor: Vince Dajani
Associate Producer: Akiya McKnight
The Our Spot is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Welcome to the Our Spot. I am Yngla, your host for what I intend to be an exciting, formative, and transformative journey through the world of relationships. This is the place where we will examine, explore, dissect, and investigate issues related to relationships, all types of relationships. I want to begin by voicing my gratitude to Shondaland and I Heart Media for providing me, providing us with this platform to explore and discuss what I believe is one of the most pressing issues in the world today, the issues that arise um and surround relationships. Now. My vision for offering the Our Spot is to support and facilitate discussions and conversations in which we all learn and develop the skills and tools required to make our relationships work. And you are going to be able to call me and talk to me live. I'll be taking live listener calls and sharing the real, raw experiences with you each week. And I want you to understand a few things about me. I was a hopeless love a hall like I love being in love, but just could not get my love to work or pay off in my relationships. Then, after a series of heartbreaks and deep heartache, I finally got clear about what love is and what it is not. That's when I learned how to love me more than I was willing to chase after the people's loves, and that's when my relationships became healthy, fulfilling, fun and loving. I want to share some of that, some of what I've learned about love aholism, just in case there are any love aholics out there who may need some recovery skills and tools. Because relationships are in the central part of our lives. Relationships are the places we grow, the places we experience love. Yet for some reason, surely it escapes me. Making relationships work productively, making them fulfilling, and making relationships meaningful is something that many of us struggle with. We simply don't have the tools, and I believe many of us have the wrong idea about what a relationship is, what they do, and why they even exist. We don't always realize that relationships are classrooms, they are laboratories of healing. And because we have the wrong idea about what relationships are and the purposes they serve, we look for the wrong things in the wrong ways and make an absolute mass of our relationships, whether it's your mother, your sister, your cousin, your co worker, or your boot, every relationship you have or have had as a purpose. And here at the our spot, we are going to get clear as a ding dong bell about the purpose of every relationship we are having, because the truth is, the only relationship you are ever having with anyone is a reflection of the relationship you are having with yourself. Oh or that that's a mouthful. I learned that until I got right with me, until I totally and unconditionally accepted and loved myself, my relationships were hard, confusing, chaotic, disappointing, disfunctional, and downright exhausting. In other words, they weren't working. OHI baby, that's where we're going here on the art spot, So let's get started. The greatest love of all is the love you have for yourself. One of the first letters I received when we announced that I was doing the art spot came from a woman named Maddie Blanchard. Miss Maddie asked me straight, no chaser, missy Omla, how did you fall in love with yourself? Well? Thank you miss Maddie for that beautiful setup for this our first show here on the art spot. I really have a special special place in heart and much gratitude for my coller today because she raises an issue that I know millions of women around the world face every single day as a result of post cancer surgery and the way it changes our body and our sense of self and our body image. And my collar today is dealing with it with such courage and her question, well, seemingly simple and maybe to some insignificant, just nails the issue. Nails it. Good afternoon, beloved, How are you? Oh my god, I'm wonderful. How are you? I'm blessed. Thank you well, you sound excited. You didn't know you were going to talk to me. This is a dream come true. I love you so much. Love is good and it's free. So I thank you for calling in And how can I support you today? What is your question? Concern? Own, issue, challenge, difficulty problem? I was really trying to figure out what would be the best topic for you today, and I think the biggest one for me. It's been a challenge of mine for going on almost eight years now. Um, I'm forty years old and seven, almost eight years ago, I had a mess ectomy with chess will reconstruction. So my body is altered and it's just it's different. And so I've been on this emotional and physical healing journey, and so my love life, my dating life has just been uh well non existent, and um, it's been very difficult. And so I guess today I wanted to kind of talk about how I can share my story with someone when I meet someone new, UM, because it's still to stay very frightening for me. UM. I want to learn how to share my story with someone in a way that still honors my story and also like braces them for the reality that my body is is just different. I have this initial kind of gut reaction when I go into it, almost like I'm I'm preparing myself for rejection. And yeah, that's I guess that's world story. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful question. Thank you so much for your courage. Thank you because there are hundreds of thousands of sister women who are struggling with this, and I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever heard of discussed out loud, So thank you. So two things I would like to ask you, and if they feel too private, you don't have to respond. I'm going to call you miss e so that you could be anybody in the universe. But he also stands for excellence, so I'm gonna call you miss excellence. Did you have reconstructive surgery? No? I did not? Good Okay, no, No, that's enough. No, I did not period. That's a that's a full answer. What I hear and what I would like to explore with you is the story you're telling yourself about your body number one. And the story you're telling yourself about what somebody else may think about your body. That's number two, because the only thing that you're going to get back is the story you're telling yourself. So I heard you say you're bracing yourself for rejection. I heard you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, a lack of acceptance of who you are because your body is different. Mm hmm okay, So what's the story you're telling yourself about the fact that you have no breast or one breast? Which is it? One on my left side? One very small one. Hey, it only takes a mouthful, darling. So you need people have to stay in their life on a mouthful of breast. That's all you need, just one low mouthful. Well, that's a good way to think about it. Listen, you only need one mouthful and you you only got one mouth Here you go. How about that? As we embark on this journey together, this Our Spot journey, the thing I want to share is how to fall in love with yourself. And we'll talk about that when we come back. Welcome back to the Our Spot. I'm Ymlin. Today we're talking about falling in love with yourself and we're looking at the breakdown that leads to the breakthrough. Okay, so let me hear you say this. I want to hear you say this. Okay, I have one breast. I have one breast. Okay, take a breath. Where do you feel that in your body? Where do you feel that I have one breast? Where do you feel that in your body? I feel it in in my chest, and I feel it in my stomach. Okay, stomach, that's your power center. So I have one breast because I have one breast because I had to sacrifice the other one in order to save my life. Now, where do you feel that in your body? I fill that in my in my throat, and in my chest. M what is the film of stomach though? Okay, let's let's go to the next level. Okay. I have one breast because I had to sacrifice the other one to save my life. And that makes me feel and that makes me feel sad. It makes me feel sad because it makes me feel sad. I didn't ask for this. Take a breath. Let it all come up. That's just the story. Let it all come up. I have one breath because I had to sacrifice the other one to save my life, and that makes me feel sad because I didn't ask for this. Where do you feel that in your body? Ah? I feel that in my heart, my heart. Yeah, take a breath. You're not breathing. You're holding your breath waiting for that rejection. When you meet someone and for the first time you unbutton your blouse and exposed to them, and you've set it up in your mind where they're just gonna, I don't know what they're gonna do, fall on the floor and scream or run, screw even from the room. Which one are you waiting for? Because you've set it up in your I want you to hear your story this far, So here comes Danny Nice, forty seven years old. It's got on a blue shirt and some jeans, looking real sexy, but it's tight butt. And you'll sit down and you have a nice you have a nice dinner together, you know, and he's liking you, and you're liking him, and you feel it in your stomach and in your chest and in your heart, and you're gonna say, Danny, I have to tell you something before we go any further. We're gonna say, Danny, I want you to know that I have one breath left. One. It's little, but it's a mouthful, and that's really all you need. You have one breath because I had to sacrifice the other one to save my life. And that makes me feel sad because I didn't ask for this. I'm really glad to be alive and I'm glad to have met you today, but I wanted you to know my story. Take a breath, jure putting the emphasis on the missing breast and not on the fact that you are alive and can still have the opportunity to date Danny or Bruce Fred or somebody. And it's okay to be sad, and don't read his face, let him take it in. He's only got one mouth and you've got a mouthful of breast, and you'll work it out if it gets that far. Ah, come on, tell me what you're thinking right there? What was that right there? Um? That hearing you say it, it just feels like it's something that is just so real and that I I feel like I could do that and um, okay, so let's do it. You tell me your story. My name is Danny. Hi. You want some more guacamole? Here, have a little more guacamole. Is this pineapple margharita just the best? I've had a lot of pineapple margaart Rey just but I'm telling you, this is really the best. Thank you for recommending this place. It's really good. Danny. Um, I really need to share um something with you. I need to share my story with you before we have another margharita. Okay, yeah, because then I'll be too drunk and I'll be talking out my head. Ahead, Um, Danny, I only have I only have one breast, and it's because I had to sacrifice the other way in order to save my life. And it makes me really sad because it's not something that that I wanted. It's not something that I I chose for myself. But I still have one. I had tell him the rest, tell him the rest. I only have one. And and it's abouthful, ye say, And that's all you need, Danny. So how does it feel? Where do you feel it in your body? To speak it that way? Where do you feel that in your body? I feel it. It's why it's in my chest a little bit. Um. It's weird. It's also I feel it kind of on my shoulders too. It's like I'm just carrying it differently. It took a lot of the weight off of off of my story. It just it feels lighter when I say it like that. I want to invite you to transform this from my story into my experience. I want to share my experience because your story is really what you're telling yourself that people will do when you share your experience. And very often we get S O S which is stuck on story, which makes us stuck on stupid. But I want to tell you what. It's so brilliant, brilliant about what you've shared. You didn't go into the drama of almost that. You were very clear that I had to sacrifice my brass to save my life. That beloved is a conscious choice. That's a conscious choice, and your choice is your power. So you made a powerful choice to save your life. And if that meant you had to sacrifice your right breast, so be it. So be it. But I want you to get up underneath that story you're telling yourself about your body being different. Yeah, it's different. So it's mine because at my age, a lot of different things have happened to my body. There are things in places that they weren't things before, and things that are not in place that they were. It's a mass, trust me. And the good news is I have too breaths want They both fell down, So now when you get to be my age, you only have one to fall down. That'll be that's exciting. Let's to pick up. I want you to get under that story of what you're telling yourself about your body being different, and we'll do that right after the break. Welcome back. I am y Len. This is the our spot, and we're talking today about how do you fall in love with yourself? I want you to get under that story of what you're telling yourself, and the way that you're gonna get on to that story is to write that story out. I've got one breast. I did, but damn, people gonna see me. They're gonna run screaming from the room, or nobody want me to bootle bo. You know, there's a lot of women with two breasts and still nobody wants them, so you ain't good company. It's the story, beloved. It is not the fact that you made a powerful choice to sacrifice your right breast in order to stay alive. Is the experience that you had and the choice that you make, and I want you to honor and celebrate yourself for that. You take a breath, tell me what you hear me saying. You don't have to repeat my words, but I want to get in that story. I want to hear what you heard me say about you. I heard you say that this is my experience and that it goes from just the story that I'm telling myself to this experience that I have, I have lived, and and that I made the choice to sacrifice my breast, and that was that was a conscious voice that I made in order to to live. Yes, and drink Margarita's, and drink margarita I again applaud your courage. I want to tell you something, and I promise you this is the absolute truth. My mother had breast cancer. She discovered she had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me. This was way back in the fifties and she was a poor woman of color, and back then, the only treatment for many women with breast cancer was a mastectomy. And I don't remember my mother because I was too when this happened. They wanted to do a mastectomy and my mother refused. She wouldn't sacrifice her breast. So when I was too years and six months, my mother died. She surrendered her life to breast cancer rather than lose her breast. And you sacrifice your right breast in order to stay alive. What a powerful choice, because my mother went to her grave rather than to make that sacrifice. Oh my God, take a breath. I also want you to learn how to breathe because you don't do that. Stop holding your breath. You're gonna meet Danny at the restaurant. You're gonna have a margarite and some guacamole, and you're gonna be just fine. I love you. Okay, get under that story, baby, Please go into that story. Right it out. And every time you hit the point where it hits your stomach or your chest or your throat. You say, I have one breast because I chose to sacrifice the other to save my life. And I want you to take off that part of this. And I didn't ask for this, or if you leave it on, I didn't ask for this, but I am woman enough to handle it. Oh my gosh, yes, and woman enough to handle it. And there'll be a man who's man enough to handle me. And the mouthful that I got to offer yes, yes, just like yeah, put your big girl panties on. Yeah, it's a lovely story. You could tell anybody. He might just stand up in applause. Who knows. Thank you so much for sharing your courageous story with me, And if you meet Danny or Bruce or Fred or whoever, please write me and let me know how they responded. I really do thank you, because I know there are hundreds of thousands of other sister women who needed to hear this. So thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm grateful for you, and please continue to listen to our spot. We think people come into our life and love us and that we love them back, but the truth is that people come into our life. We have relationships with other people to demonstrate to ourselves the depth of love we are capable of. Now, Unfortunately, we are much better at pouring that love on other people than we are about giving it to ourselves. How do you fall in love with yourself? One day at a time, one kind gesture at a time, one card wasn't bouquet of flowers, one box of candy at a time that you give to yourself. It takes time, and there'll be some days you don't like you, and that's okay. It takes patients. It takes patience. You gotta be patient with yourself when you see how ridiculous you are as a human being. Well, since this is our first time together, I don't want to overwhelm you, but I want to start right here. You want to love yourself, find some time each day to spend with you. Every relationship starts by spending time with the other person, whether it's online or on the phone or in person. And since you don't have to call yourself, you could start just spending time with you, quiet time with yourself. Now, I don't want you to interrogate yourself, but I do want you to make some deep inquiries of yourself about what is the story you're telling yourself about yourself and what you think other people will tell themselves about you. It's important that you understand that because what you tell yourself about yourself will determine the foundation of your relationship with everyone. What is the story you're telling yourself about yourself? And is it a love story or is it a horror story that recounts every single thing that you think is wrong with you? Now I can imagine that you may be asking yourself, well, who are you at? What can you tell me about relationships that I don't already know? And I think that's a fair question. So let me give you a little background on me so that you'll understand how I learn the skills to step all up in your relationship business. I am a La no Nasy on the van ZANDT. While some of you may know about me and my climb from the basement of life to become a lawyer, a minister, a spiritual life coach, and the host of Illan La Fixed My Life on the Oprah Winfrey Network, others may be new to the world and persona of Illan La van zand So allow me to introduce myself. I am yam La born Rhonda Eva Harris in a year I won't bother to mention out loud. I was born to an alcoholic mother and a womanizing father. My father was a married man and my mother was the other woman. I was the second child of three born in that relationship. My birth mother, Sahara Elizabeth, died when I was about two and a half almost three. Unfortunately, growing up, I didn't remember that, and the big people in my life, the adults, well they decided that it would be better for me if I didn't know that, so they just never mentioned that my mother was dead. So I was taught and raised to believe that my father's wife, my stepmother, was my mother. My stepmother, who in the end turned out to be a living angel in my life, was part Cuban and part Jamaican, which man, I didn't look anything like her that. She was fair skinned, I was not. The texture of her hair was soft and fine. Mine was not. She was delicate, almost fragile, and very demera. I was anything but that, and so that's how it began for me. I looked different, I felt different. I was different from my mother and no one can tell me why. I tell you this not for the shock value, but to emphasize that what we experienced to his children, what we are taught, and what we are exposed to in our formative years becomes the foundation of our relationship with ourselves, but also the structure and template we used to build all of our relationships. It's called a bonding pattern. I was raised by my Native American grandmother until I was five years old. Now she favored my brother, who was a severe asthmatic, watching my father move in and out of my life, going with him when he visited his girlfriends, being bribed into silence with candy and ice cream, meeting a woman and then another woman, and then the woman I was told was my mother when I was about four, a woman who looked nothing like me, and then being shuttled around among family members because my father was financially unstable and my mother's stepmother could not care for me and my brother. Let me just say that my beginnings were rough, and by the time I was thirteen, I really did not like myself. I had a dark complexion, which at the time was not fashionable. I was fat, or at least that's what they told me I was also, according to my brother, ugly. Then you add to that my feelings, my emotions. I felt bad, wrong, ugly, abandoned, unwanted, and unloved. Those feelings grew infested until I was about twenty one years old, when in the midst of postpartum depression, I attempted to take my own life. Well, I'm here today, so I guess you know. I failed. But that was my first wake up call that something had to change. I muddled along for another six or seven years, dragging my three children with me, until the internal pain and external chaos became so excruciating that I was forced to look at myself. I had to look at myself because everyone else was gone. I had left my physically abusive husband, the fathers of my first two children had left me. Most of my friends were in the same or worse situations than I was. My father and I were barely on speaking terms. I had not seen nor heard from my brother in almost three years. I had refused to speak to my grandmother for seven years, and my stepmother had passed on. I was broke and sad and confused and mad as hell. So how did I fall in love with myself. Well, for me, it started with a book. I was in Borders bookstore. You remember Borders books, right, That's when we got books that had covers and pages, not that we could scroll through. I don't remember what I was looking for, but I was standing in front of a shelf when a book literally literally fell off the shelf and hit me on the head. That book was entitled This Thing Called You by Ernest Holmes. It was a small book, almost like a pamphlet. So I sat down and started reading it. Now I did buy the book, and by the time I got to the end of the book, the thing that I understood was that I had to change my mind. I had to change my way of thinking about who I was, who I was not, how I saw myself, how I treated myself, what I expected of myself, and what I expected from myself. As a result of reading that book and understanding, really understanding what the author was trying to convey, I spent the next three or four years reading, praying, searching, researching, trying to understand who I was and who I was choosing to be. It was excruciating because I felt so alone and confused and doomed to a life of sadness, a loneness and pain. This thing called me was a mess. But then I remembered something. See, I grew up in the church. My Native American grandmother, who passed as an African American, raised me in the church, and if she didn't do anything else, she taught me how to pray. So in the pitch black darkness of my life, I started praying, and that led me to want to create a relationship with something greater than me. For me, that greater thing was God. But I had to find another kind of God because the one I had been taught to worship was mean and moody and very far away. I had to find a God who knew me and loved me and cared about me with all of my flaws and pimples and weaknesses and human frailties. Now, for some God may not be the route they take into love, and that's okay for now. But here's the truth I had to consider and you may want to consider. When it comes to dealing with human beings. It takes a little more than human skill and human know how to deal with other human beings. But that's just life. According to Iyamlah, you feel totally free to ignore that juicy little tidbit. So how did I fall in love with myself? It took me quite a while, but for me, it started with forgiveness. I started forgiving all of the people that had taught me that I was unlovable, all of the people who had abused me, abandoned me, neglecting and rejected me. All of the people who had lied to me. Now, there were a lot of incidents and experiences along the way, but I'm not gonna give you that. I'm just gonna give you the top line. Once I started forgiving them, I had to. I didn't want to, but I had to look at my own behavior, how I had participated in my own pain. I had to look at the lies I had told myself and those I had told other people, which gave them the right to treat me poorly. Let me be very very clear, I had a myriad of disfunctional relationships in my life, but none of them was more dysfunctional than my relationship with myself. I had rejected myself, I had abandoned myself, I had neglected myself. I had lied to myself. And that is exactly what I experienced in every relationship I was having with every person in my life, particularly men. Uh. As we embark on this our spot journey together, I will tell you more one. We have so much to explore and discuss together here on the art Spot. In the coming weeks, we are going to look at some really juicy, tasty relationship issues, things like what is a healthy relationship? I am astonished at the number of people who don't know what a healthy relationship is. We're gonna look at how do you know when it's time to let go, because we will hold on and squeeze the last breath out of a dying relationship. How do you love again after being laughed or losing a loved one? That's an important issue, particularly at this time. How do you identify abuse in a relationship, because there are all kinds of abuse, some of which go completely unnoticed and unhealed. I want to look at the changing definition of marriage because people are doing some stuff out there. Just I'm old school. Some of this stuff I don't understand. I heard about a thing called a thrumble. Somebody helped me, and it's not all gonna be heavy and deep and healing. I want to talk about sex and how to keep the love like burning when you old and the hair has fallen off your private parts. How does a relationship survive when you have different political or religious views? Because that's a hot topic right now. And what about this one? Can you love two people at the same time? Yeah, baby, we're gonna talk about that, So I hope you will come back and tune in as we explore how to navigate the often rough but absolutely exciting to rains of relationships. Now, even though you're just listening to me talk, I want you to participate. I want you to be an active participant in this conversation. Not only can you talk to me, you can talk to me live. Just give me a call at seven seven five three zero seven seven seven six eight. That's seven seven five three zero seven seven seven six eight. Now, be sure to follow me on social media for all of the calling times. But I want to leave you with this today. Relationships are an essential part of our lives. What we want to do is we want to learn how to make them work. We want to learn how to make them productive and fulfilling, and we want to do it without struggle and suffering. We're gonna talk about that right here on the our Spot, I Mean Yamla and I'll see you next time. The r Spot is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.