Oprah’s Advice to Me
Okay, okay, okay it was advice to me and many others at Spelman College, during their 2012 commencement weekend, but it felt like she spoke directly to me.
May 19, 2012, on center stage in Sisters Chapel, I was afforded the opportunity to sing with the Glee Club (yes I graduated over 5 years ago, but once a glee clubber, always a glee clubber...hmph!) and sit on the first row (next to Latrice Pace of the Pace Sisters whoop! whoop!) during a question and answer session with the one and only Oprah Winfrey. She spoke and gave advice on just about everything, such as education, growing up po (can’t afford the last two letters), spirituality, and weight loss. The one thing that stuck out to me was her connection between being physically healthy and being spiritually aligned with the one she called “the source.”
Oprah: It’s all about your connection to the source. I’ve started to lose weight again and it’s excited, but exciting because for me the path this time is not about the diet. I get up in the morning and exercise for an hour. You have to. For years, I believed I could get away without it. You just can’t. You may when you’re 18, 19, 20, but it will catch up with you. You’ve got to put in the physical hours but the physical hours aren’t enough.
So what I now know to be true is that any problem you have, any disagreement with your external is all the dysfunction within your internal self and it’s all in direct proportion to how you are connected to the source...
It [the lack of connection] shows up in your health, your inability to sustain balance that is required to be a solid human being. It will show up in your life, it will show up in your work if you are not working from the core...
My greatest advice to you is that when you do and do and do, and do not allow enough time to be, eventually you will not be able to sustain it. Because life is about the being. And about using the being in order to further the doing but first you have to be. There is no advice greater than when you’re in trouble ‘to be still and know that I am God.’ You have to get still in order to hear it...
So, sustainability to me is in direct proportion to how connected you are to the source of all things and your ability to sustain - whether it be in your work, your health, your caring for your value in the world - its all about being connected to that part of you that knows really truly where you come from.
Need I say more?!
The woman has spoken! Does this mean if you are not as thin as a pole you don’t know God? Heavens no!! There are many thin heathens! (I kid!...kinda) It just simply means that if your relationship with the Lord is intact ‘everything will be added unto you.’ Good health will be added. Financial security will be added. Love will be added. He will lead you in all truth concerning your natural and spirit man. There is no area left untouched when God is the center.
This page is not to encourage you to get thin, it is to encourage you to be all God has called you to be. And as my good friend, Oprah Winfrey put it, life is about using your being to further your doing. So lets strengthen and build our being so that we are of good use to our source, Jesus Christ.
B. Landi
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