Spiritual life coach Iyanla Vanzant sat down with The Breakfast Club to chat about the upcoming season of “Iyanla Fix My Life.” OWN is also launching a podcast version of the award-winning series, set to debut June 18 on Apple Podcasts.
During her conversation with The Breakfast Club hosts, Vanzant noted that DMX is her most memorable guest, and she also explained why she refused to work with embattled singer R. Kelly.
Check out highlights from the interview below via MadameNoire.’
https://twitter.com/IyanlaVanzant/status/1136271456768221184
Working with DMX
My experience is that he’s not ready. He’s not ready for me. He’s not ready to do the work. And so I don’t want a repeat of the challenges we had before when he wasn’t ready. It’s just not fair to him and it’s not fair to me.
If a man is that age and still not ready, will he ever be right?
Yeah, yeah he can. You can’t go into surgery and tell the doctor how to do it. You can’t go in and say, ‘Cut me this way. Stitch me that way.’ You have to go in with a level of trust and openness and willingness. And I think for men, particularly, coming to me a woman, the ego gets in the way. And since men aren’t really programmed, conditioned and processed about who to process their feelings, when I hit that nerve, the man is coming for me the woman…The first thing that comes out is shame or embarrassment and then the ego jumps out and then they’re coming for me as the woman.
A white person is going to do it and it’s going to be raves. NBC, CBS, Fox, they would never look at it until they put a White person on there. I remember when I did the Iyanla talk show, the producers told me ‘Nobody wants to see you dancing. Nobody wants to see any music.’ Then here come Ellen. I remember when they told me, ‘You can’t say that to me. Nobody wants to watch people solving problems all the time.’
Charlamagne: Ok, Dr. Phil.
Five years, they’ll put a White person on the network doing this. And it’ll be a hit.
On R. Kelly
I’m very clear about mental imbalance when I see it. I’m very clear about distortion in energy when I see it. Not that I won’t work with it but you’ve got to own it. And I’m very clear when somebody’s coming to me to tell their story, not to get healing. I don’t process stories. I do the healing and I don’t think he was ready. He’s still in denial. Just the mere fact that he was making demands of how he wanted this thing to happen. And I’m like, ‘I ain’t on that committee brother.’
Angela Yee: What kind of demands did he make?
Iyanla: I’m not coming to you, you come to me. Iyanla Vanzant ain’t coming to you boo. Not because I’m Iyanla Vanzant but because doctors don’t make house calls anymore. And he needed emergency triage at this point.
See what else she had to say in the YouTube video above.
