Oprah’s Life-Changing Lessons: How to Hear and Trust Your Intuition, Find Your Purpose, and Live Your Best Life Now! (pt 2)

The world will drown out your intuition. God speaks first in the whisper. It first gives you just a little hmm. And if you can learn to trust yourself, it means you can handle anything.

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Jamie, you're so inspiring, Jamie Kern Lima.

So many people struggle with feeling not enough, like they feel like they've had too many setbacks or too many failures. Or they don't have what it takes to defy the odds in their life. And they want to live their best life, but they so often end up doubting themselves out of their own destiny. For you, you were born in poverty, in apartheid, Mississippi, to a teenage mom who had no education. You endured sexual and physical abuse, and in your career, endured naysayers like different people that just didn't think you had what it takes.

You were demoted from the Evening News, and yet you defied the odds. You right now are referred to as the most influential and powerful woman in the world, as the greatest living teacher in the world, titan icon. All of those things, Oprah, how have you defied the odds and embraced your worth?

I know for sure that it is my spiritual grounding and my belief from the beginning that I was God's child and my perception, conception. Ideas about what God is have certainly expanded over the years. As I became an adult and as I questioned what I was taught in terms of dogma and religion specifically. But my firm faith in the power that created the stars and allows us to revolve around the sun every day, recognizing that I come from that. That's the Creator that made the planets and expanded the cosmos and created this universe beyond anything we can even imagine. Which is why, I believe, when you take your last breath, you're just gonna be in awe, you're gonna be so shocked, you're gonna be so surprised.

Death is gonna be quite the surprise. Well, knowing that I come from that, I've always known that I came from that, even though my idea of what that is has expanded over the years. And because I truly am grounded in the source. And have been since I was four years old that I can have a cognitive memory of knowing that there's something bigger than me. At work here, watching my grandmother on the back porch, no running water, no electricity, and so we used to have to clean our clothes.

My grandmother would wash them in this big iron pot, and there was this long pole she would use to pull up the sheets and the clothes. And one evening, I was watching from the screened-in back porch of our shotgun house. And she said, "'oh Gail, you better watch me now. "'cause one day you're gonna have to learn "'how to do this for yourself. And I remember the clothespins on her dress and I remember the moisture from her breath.

So it must've been cold in Mississippi and I had the distinct feeling that, hmm, no, I'm not, I'm not. This is not gonna be my life. I don't know what my life is gonna be, but I know that I'm not gonna be doing this.

But I also had sense enough not to say it out loud. And I felt that this presence of God that my grandmother had caused me to, had instructed me from a young age to always pray on my knees, and I still pray on my knees. I was just sharing with some friends the other day that I still get on my knees and pray, and I was so exhausted the other night.

And I was like, Oh God, okay, thank you so much for this, and I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna get up. It's almost like a superstition now.

God doesn't hear the prayer unless I actually get on your knees, get on my knees. And so I know that that's really not true. But it's a thing my grandmother said to me. For as long as you are able to bow, you bow on your knees. And so that's just been a habit that I've cultivated over the years.

No matter how many tequila shots, no matter how tired I get on my knees. And so it is a grounding in knowing. And I think what you are offering in your new, beautiful book, worthy is the opportunity for people to be grounded in their own knowing. Well, I was grounded in the knowing that I came from something bigger than myself. And I grew up reading about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer.

And so I am very, very conscious that my ancestry, even though at the time I wasn't connected to know that. I was born as the great grandchild of former slaves.

I have always been connected to that which has come before me. And I feel a synergy and an energy with the past that continues to propel me into the future. And so my grounding comes from knowing that I'm never alone. And so I will have to say I'm excited for your book. I believe that it's one of the most needed tools on the planet Earth right now. Because one of the things that I've seen in all of my thousands of interviews is that. The mean-spiritedness, the sadness, the jealousy, the hatred comes from a sense of not feeling worthy.

And I am blessed to say that I have never felt that, because I've always felt that I was God's child and fully worthy. I've never had a moment of believing that anything I achieved I did not deserve, because I know that it was always God's hand in it. Again, I am in awe of the space that God has created for me and the achievements that I've been able to make as a result of being connected to that source.

But they were all really in the kind of same God was up there, Santa Claus was up there out there at the North Pole somewhere.

And so it was a very limited idea, but I still believe that. This God with the long white beard and Jesus, who looked like the calendar that we all had in our churches, with the crown of thorns on his head. And I remember once I was someplace and Gail and I were looking at a documentary that somebody had done and it was about the sculptor. And she was saying, What is that? I said, No, I think it's Jesus, and she said, No, cause Jesus doesn't look like that.

His beard isn't like that. So, I mean, we're also indoctrinated by the images that we were given that God looks like this or Jesus. Well, nobody has seen the face of God or knows what that is. But my concept was very narrow at that age, but I could feel distinctly that there was something going on. The second time I felt that was after I was moved from my grandmother, I lived with her for the first six years of my life.

And then when I moved to Milwaukee and suddenly no explanation of why. You are no longer with your grandmother, you're now moving to live with your mother, whom I did not know, had no memory of her.

And I remember walking into the home where my mother was boarding with this woman, who was a woman. Mrs. Miller, who could pass for white? And I remember that's the first time I ever remember distinctly feeling like.

This is about the color of my skin, and I never remember having a thought about race before that, but this is about the color of my skin. That Mrs Miller didn't want me to sleep in the house, and so I had to sleep out in the little foyer porch. And it was a defining moment for my mother.

It is the defining mother wound for me. Because it's the moment when Mrs Miller said, Well, we don't have no room in here for her. And my mother didn't say I'll make room in my bedroom. So I had a half sister who was light skinned, and Mrs Miller adored her.

And I thought, Oh, it's because of the color of my skin that I'm not living and my mother didn't stand up for me. So the moment that I was forced to be out in the it was covered, so it wasn't like I was outside. But it wasn't in the house. It was before you got in the house, a little porch foyer like, and it was, there were no curtains on the window, and it was just a street.

And I had never been in a big city, I'd been living in the country on a dirt road with pine trees. And I was really, really frightened. Those first nights, I could cry thinking about it.

And I remember praying to God to protect me and to send me an angel to protect me, and I named the angel Melinda. And I would always, before I would like, pull the covers over my head, over the little porch at night. Pray for Melinda to come and watch over me and ask God to please let Melinda be there to watch me. So I felt the presence of something greater than myself, I was searching for it in a physical form.

And I realized at that age that I'm gonna this is going to be my life. I'm gonna have to do this by myself because I cannot count on my mother to stand up for me.

And I think I felt that I couldn't consciously articulate it, but I certainly knew that. That was a moment where she should have said, No, she comes into my room, I'm gonna make room for her, yeah.

Do you feel like you hear your? Do you feel like God talks to you through your intuition, and do you feel like that's what was happening? A power greater than yourself comes through in your intuition.

If you are discerning enough to separate the thoughts from the feeling of. Because when God speaks, it's actually calm, it's not rushed, it's not worried, it's not bothered. It is a distinct calmness that you feel. For me, I feel it more than I hear it. Sometimes when it's really bad, I hear it, when it's like, don't do that, I can hear it.

It will literally wake me up at night.

Anytime I've ever gone against it, I've been in deep trouble.

God is trying to. The universal force of life is always speaking and breathing through you. And so you have to get still enough, removed enough, disconnected enough from the world to actually know what you are feeling. And anytime you're going around asking everybody else, What should I do? what should I do? what should I do? what should I do? It means the real response is for you to get still and ask yourself that question, and just to stay still until the answer comes. And the answer may come in multiple ways. I mean, you may be looking at something on TV, or somebody says something, or you hear something, or you pass something.

The answer comes, the answer always comes, there isn't a question to be asked that there isn't an answer for.

I am obedient to the call and responsive to the answer. And when you can put yourself in alignment with that, I don't care who you are, what your circumstances are. You will be led to the rock that is higher than thou. It's also one of my favorite Bible verses, Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. And so it is really about doing the work on yourself, and the work is always the spiritual work, it's always the spiritual work.

And I think what you said is so powerful. The egg gets still and a lot of people say, I can't hear my intuition, and I think,-.

And it's really God speaks first in the whisper, and it's so subtle. It's like people who end up in relationships that are unhealthy for them.

Most people in unhealthy relationships. And I know that there are kajillions of you listening to me right now, wherever you are, in the space of that relationship not being good for you.

If it's not been good, you have known for a long time, it wasn't good.

Because it's been whispering to you from the very beginning. You don't end up in a relationship and all of a sudden it goes bad. It starts to show itself to you early on, with the smallest of things.

Will you share, Oprah? The whisper, the brick, the whole wall crashing down. Yeah, the whole wall.

And I'd say, why won't you just say God? He said. I think it has so many connotations for different people around the world that he always used to say, the forces, the forces are with me.

So when the life forces divine energy, God, whatever title you want to give, that which is greater than ourself running all of this stuff.

Speaks it first, gives you just a little hmm, and a whisper is really a hmm. So when I'm speaking about relationships in particular, it's you're with somebody and you think, hmm, that's odd, or, hmm. That door wasn't open normally, but now it's open. So the first time, I started thinking about this and articulating it in from the whisper.

The brick, the brick wall, and then the tsunami is. Gavin Debecker actually wrote a book called The Gift, and he tells the story in the beginning of the book about. A girl comes home to her three-story flat and the door is open, normally not open. she says. Hmm, that door's normally not open. Out from under the stairs comes a guy. Hmm, she's afraid.

He says, Don't be afraid, I can see you're afraid, don't be afraid.

Can I help you with your groceries? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's okay, I can do it. He goes, Oh, no, no, I can see you need help. let me help you. He goes, Ah, don't worry, I have sisters.

I have sisters and I would never do anything, because, listen, if anybody did anything to my sister, I don't know what I'd do to them. Blah, blah, blah. And so she lets him help her upstairs with the groceries, he gets to the third floor. When she puts the key in the door, kicks the door in and rapes her, abuses her and tries to kill her, and she manages to escape.

And he has that story in the beginning of the book, because he's saying the first no was the answer, the first no. And the reason, she continued, is because of this thing that women in particular have. They think they need to apologize and think that the person's gonna think that you're not a nice person. But the first whisper actually was, Hmm, that's odd.

That door's open. Hmm, that's odd. There's a guy in here and now he wants to help me up the stairs. And by the time you get up the stairs, you're in full blown brick wall tsunami mode. And so if you look at your life and all the things that have happened in your life that you didn't pay attention to. Almost nobody gets it out of nowhere.

Almost nobody. I don't know an instance where it comes out of nowhere, and so I for many years was a brick person. It wasn't until so. The whisper's always offering you the message to bring a message to you, it's saying, listen.

If you don't listen to the message that the Whisper's trying to give you. The next thing you get is a brick upside your head, and by the time you get the brick, you're in full blown problem mode. You now got a problem you've got to fix because you didn't listen to the message and you don't fix the problem. You already see, it's a problem.

You see we're not talking anymore, you see that we're distanced in the relationship, you see that things aren't going the way. You're gonna have a full blown disaster soon. And that is the way it works, that is the way it works.

If you look back at your life, you can say, Oh God, I should have caught it in the whisper. I certainly should have caught it with that. Brick. Most people are brick people. Mm-hmm. That once it becomes a problem, you're like, Oh, okay, what can I do?

What can I do? What can I do? If you don't do something and you just let that ride? It turns into the tsunami.

You don't recognize it because it's disguised itself, but it keeps coming and keeps showing up until you actually get it.

For me, it is me sitting in the space that God has dreamed for me, and me being obedient to the call and responsive to the answer. That's how it got to me.

Let me use this as a tool for something that's bigger than me, bigger than my own personality. Show me how that was my intention, and I became even clearer and more focused on the intention as the show grew. And so it was always out of doing a sense of good in the world.

When I realized I wasn't doing good in the world when I interviewed the Skinheads in KKK. And you've heard me tell the story of that moment. The woman we were doing, a man who had cheated on his wife. And the producers were so proud of themselves that they had the wife and the girlfriend on at the same time. And they had agreed to come on national television live. And he humiliated his wife on television in front of all of us and said to his wife, she's pregnant. Well, what you don't know is she's pregnant. And the audience gasped, I gasped.

I was so hurt and to this day, it is one of the most shameful things I was ever a part of. And I said to my producers afterwards, This will never happen to me or this show again. We're not doing this.

Nobody should ever be in a position to ever be humiliated in my name.

And they were like, Okay, so we won't do that, so what are we going to do? So we're going to sit down and we're going to figure out literally how we can use this show as a force for good. They were like, Well, we just can't sit around doing good, good things all the time, people don't want to just see goodness all the time.

Oh yeah, well, you can have conflict, and you can have drama, and you can have struggle, you can have all those things. But the heart of what we're doing has to come from a space that you want to shine the light and not bring darkness into anybody's space or sphere. And that is why the show was so successful. Because it was in 1989 that I sat down and had a whole big conference weekend, with everybody saying, this is what we're going to do.

Now, let's try to come up with ideas that are in alignment with intention. I started explaining to them what I thought intention was based on. The book that I'd read by Gary Zukav, Seed of the Soul. And people were confused about what does it mean? So I got to do a show and I got to have an intention behind it, and not just booking the guests.

You know, that's where that. Well, what if it's just it's Brad Pitt? Okay? And what is the intention behind Brad Pitt? Well, okay, we got to sit there for an hour. Why am I doing it? And then I remember, Terry Golder said, Because it's Brad Pitt.

Okay, that I accept that I accept, but I will say that intention moment changed for me the course of my life, understanding intention. What Gary Zukav meant and seed of the soul by it. It stopped me from being the greatest.

Doormat dishrag, people pleaser.

What is my intention for this?

For applying for this job, or for maybe making a change in their life, or for having a goal or a dream. Because a lot of people have a vision of what they want, but then they often don't know why they want it. And so they kind of just give up too easy because they don't have that intention to lean on, or they go off course.

You're going to get what you believe and what you intend. And so when there's a huge difference between being in vibrational alignment with that which you're trying to attract. You can't attract the thing if you are in resistance to the thing, you can't attract the thing. If there's any belief whatsoever that you can't have it, you can't attract it. If deep down inside there's the fear that you won't get it.

You have to be open and alignment, but it is happening, whether you can see that or not. And if you are vibrationally not aligned with the thing that you're asking for, it will not come.

To your journey through people pleasing. You talk about not being able to say no until you were 40 and just where you are now. Tuning into vibrational energy and space. And I've been with you in different places where sometimes I glance over. And I can just feel like you're just taking in the energy and you're just not in a hurry, probably because the vibration feels right.

And just how is that evolution? Because there's so many people going, how do I feel those things, how do I get to that place? I want a higher expression of myself in my life and I'm trying to figure out how to get there. How to tune into it, how to feel it, and then how to listen to it, trust it and live the answer that I'm feeling.

And so if you can't identify that, then you don't actually really know yourself if you can't say, well, I know. I really feel best in the bathroom with the toilet seat down, or I feel better when I am walking in the woods, or I feel best in my kitchen, or I feel really good in the shower. I feel wherever that space is for you.

Lean into that, lean into that, and this is what I know. The forces are trying to speak to us, trying to guide us. Everybody has them, I have hordes of them.

I have, oh my God, I have such a team on the other side.

Everybody has it.

And if you would only make yourself aware of it? It's like, anytime somebody dies, I always say when somebody has lived on Earth. And you knew them in the flesh, and they, particularly if it was a parent or somebody that you actually came from, their seed, their flesh. You now have an angel that you know and you can call by name. Because where are all, where's the energy of that person gone, and if that person loved you on earth?

Wherever the next realm is, that love never dies. And the spirit of that, particularly if you were if it was a parent or somebody close to you. That spirit still is with you, that spirit still abides with you and that person. I will tell you that my relationship with my mother is deeper, stronger, grander, sweeter than it ever was on Earth. Because the spirit of her isn't attached to all the ego and all of the competition and all of the things of the flesh.

And so her love that can abide with me is just pure. And that is true for all of us. If you're open to attune to it, so.

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If you're an overthinker, you're constantly living in a state of what if? Running through every possible scenario. Worried about what someone else says or thinks? And struggling to really hear your inner voice and feel like you can trust yourself the first time. So many of us constantly repeat these patterns of overthinking and worry, staying stuck in cycles that really don't serve us. If this is you and you want a free, proven process to break the cycle. So you can stop overthinking in its tracks and start learning to trust yourself to your core, I've created a guide for you that you can download in an instant for free. It's called How to Stop Overthinking and Start Learning to Trust Yourself. In it. We go step by step on how to stop overthinking in its tracks. So you can finally believe in yourself and know your worth as you make clear, confident decisions.

If you're ready to stop overthinking and stop your spiraling thoughts in their tracks, you can grab your free guide to Stop Overthinking and Learn to Trust Yourself at Jamiekernlima.

Com slash resources or click the link in the show notes below. And now more of this incredible conversation with Oprah.

And so, and also my relationship with my father, very different, very much more comforting and nonjudgmental. And proud in a way that he really, he now knows, he now actually knows. Because I think when both of my parents were here on Earth, they were. They understood the illusion of what it meant to be Oprah Winfrey, but not until they passed on did they understand what this really meant.

He later saw her and asked, You know, because she looked pregnant, Hey Renita, are you pregnant? She denied it. This was October, so I would have been conceived, probably what? April, May. And she wrote him a letter saying, You have a child, she needs clothes, which is my mother's way. Send money.

After I was born. So he said he got a letter in February saying you have a girl, send money.

So there was never that connection, and I was always, as a child, trying to figure out who I was supposed to love. So when I was with my father, I wasn't supposed to love my mother. My mother was always saying, your father doesn't do anything to help, but my father came to get me when I was third grade.

I think I was seven years old at the time and getting ready to go into the third grade. And I lived with him and my stepmother for third and fourth grade, and then went back to Milwaukee. Because my mother insisted that I come back to live with her, and that was a really tough life.

And that's when the abuse, sexual abuse started. But the bottom line to answer your question. My father accepted responsibility for me after my mother had said no, she wasn't pregnant. The word is that she was trying to get someone else to marry her, the word is. For many years. I was told my father wasn't my father because my mother was also with somebody else prominent in town. But when I was told that, it didn't matter one bit to me.

I was an adult already doing the Oprah show and somebody said, You know, that's not really your father, your father is this guy, and I said, I don't care. It doesn't matter to me because Vernon Winfrey stepped up and said, I will take responsibility for this child.

Because he had had sex with my mother one time, so he's that kind of man.

And when they brought me to Nashville as a little girl.

Third and fourth grade, I'd skipped the second grade, I could read like a champion, but I didn't know one thing about math. And my stepmother spent the entire summer of my eighth year grilling me with those. You know, multiplication table cards, because you're going into the third grade and you've got to know your multiplication table. So I so disliked her because my first introduction was. You got to go to the library, you got to check out five books, you got to learn your multiplication tables in one summer. So I think I got up to Nineses by the third grade.

Everybody else was just starting anyway. So I had that kind of relationship. And my mother had said, when you go into that house, you better not call her mother. So I'm in a house and I don't even know what to say. For a year, I didn't call her anything because I didn't want to upset my mother.

So living in that kind of trying to please my mother, who was in Milwaukee and wouldn't have known what I called her. But you better not call her mother, so I ended up calling her mama Zelma.

And my mother didn't like that, so when I went back to live with her, I started calling. She greeted me in a peach robe, and for years, I called her peach because of the peach robe. So as not to upset my mother, but to answer your question.

I thought my father saw me in terms of.

I wouldn't have had the life that I have had, my father not taken me from my mother.

And I think that no question about it had. I stayed in Milwaukee with my mother on the course that I was on, being sexually abused and then sexually promiscuous, and then all that comes from that. I would have been dead, I would have had the dream that I could have been something more and would have been tormented because I was not.

Because I would not have known how, because life circumstances would have just spiraled me down.

And I would have tried to hold on to God, and I would have been a church going woman, and I'd have been a praying woman, I'd have been all of that. But not understanding how, choice after choice, after bad, choice after bad choice had caused me to spiral. Because that is where I was headed at 14. I didn't have this realization until last year or two years ago, when I was working on What Happened to You with Bruce Perry the book.

And writing about my grandmother and leaving my grandmother, and all that time, all these years. For more than 60 years, I've carried the why did I have to leave my grandmother? What a terrible thing to separate me from my grandmother. I realized for the first time in writing that book that the reason that happened is to get me out of Mississippi. That it was God's intervention in my life to get me out of the apartheid state. Because it happened just before I was supposed to start school.

And I was such an impressionable child. I would like imitate. Anybody that came into the house. I would, you know, really responded to authority from being, you know, whipped all the time and, you know, told to behave a certain way. So if I had been raised in a segregated Mississippi, in a school where white teachers or Black teachers were in any way telling me that I was less than I would not have grown up. Feeling worthy, that would have wiped the worthiness that I now so hold as my position of power in life.

I would not have had it.

And when he presented to me, to Steven Spielberg and to Scott Sanders two years ago as one of the directors for this film. Having never done anything before like this, only his own $40,000 film.

And I said to him just yesterday, I said, all those crayons and all that paper where you thought I can't be like the other kids. I don't have the paint sets that they do, I don't have the drawing boards that they do, I don't have the access that they do. All that drawing with all those little crayons. None of it was lost.

And so for everybody, for everything you've ever done, is preparing you for all that you're meant to do and meant to be. Nothing's lost, nothing's wasted. And I think about all the trials that I have been through. Every single thing that happened opened up an aperture of empathy for me later on, to feel for other people. It made me a better interviewer.

It made me a better person, it made me a better woman, it made me a better friend, and so nothing is lost.

Two questions for you on that. Do you think for someone who does not believe in a power greater than themselves, that they can feel fully worthy and that they can live the highest expression of themselves?

You can't. In 1985, when I went to do the first original color purple. One of the things I wrote in my journal was God helped me to have a life surrounded by beautiful things. This is 1985, I was just working on, then it was still called AM Chicago. But I just, I had this sense of desire and yearning for beauty.

I had a desire and yearning to be surrounded by beauty, beautiful things, beautiful collaborations, the sense of creativity, the sense of.

God smiling on you. So when you're sitting there, looking at a bowl of flowers or even a bowl of lemons or branches beautifully arranged in a vase, you're looking at God smiling on you. You're looking at the presence of nature, the presence of the life force being offered to you as a gift. And so I had a yearning for that. My heart and soul seeks that.

And I recognize that I miss beauty if I'm not around it, so I don't. Mine is not a spirit or a personality that functions well in chaos. Some people thrive in it, some people need the noise and the stuff and the thing. Mine is not a spirit that does well with that.

And so I think to that, who is it? That said, to my own self, be true, to know yourself and to know what it is. The greatest people think. It's about getting the job and getting the position and getting this thing and all that it's gonna make you worthy. What makes you worthy is to turn inward and to seek within and connect to the thing that is the source of you.

However, you define that.

And now I see that Bible verse as Delight thyself in the Lord, Delight thyself in goodness, Delight thyself in kindness, Delight thyself in grace, Delight thyself in forgiveness.

Delight thyself in all the things that the Lord is, delight thyself in that. Lean into that and you will receive the desires of your heart. Delight, because delight is actually my favorite word on earth delight. It doesn't say be happy or even be joyous.

It means delight in it you are lifted by it, delight in that which is good and gracious and kind and beautiful and bountiful, and you will receive the desires of your heart. It's where your focus lies.

So I'm just telling you, what really is so disturbing to me, Jamie, is that this is such an ego-focused world. Now, everybody is focused on what's gonna make them look good instead of what actually is good for them. And there is a huge difference, there's a huge difference in what you're presenting versus what you really are.

And so the focus on what you really are to turn inward to what you really are, is what brings you. All the things you get, all the external when you've really worked on the internal.

And you started talking about mindfulness, and people freaked out.

She thinks she's God, what are you doing?

That was hurtful, but I stayed on the path.

Yeah.

So I understood that because I was. I was so into it that I was expanding my own vision and ideas about what mindfulness and spirituality could be. I was learning it and so excited about learning it that I also wanted to teach it. And I could feel it having its impact in my life. And as you know, I believe life is better when you share it. And so I naturally just wanted to bring that to the audience. Like, Oh my God guys, let me tell you what happens if you get still.

Yeah, this is what happens if you give yourself a moment just to. And also because I was paying attention to the audience to the point where every.

Every audience member. For 10 years I was signing autographs and just never looking up, just signing, signing, signing and not liking it one bit. And then one day I couldn't do it because of a doctor's appointment, and I said, You know, I'm gonna stop doing it. Because I have so much more energy. And then I started to do the thing that I now advise everybody else to do ask the question, What do I want?

I don't wanna sign autographs, I signed autographs for 10 years with every audience member and I didn't wanna do it. And then one day I asked myself the question, What do I want? Well, I would really rather just talk to people. I'd really rather just sit and have a conversation after every show and ask people, Why did you come?

How did you get here, who did you come with, what's going on in your life? And that is another level of when the show took off. Because that audience speaking to them every day about what was going on in their lives for 45 minutes after every show. Oh, my producers would be crazy.

Like, Oh God, would you let the audience go, cause we gotta get another audience in here? And I would do that twice a day, just listening to people. Where'd you come from? Tennessee? Oh, we're from Nashville.

We're from Rhode Island, we came from Australia. And listening to what was going on in their lives and women started to say that they were looking for something more, I could hear them saying.

We did everything we're supposed to do, we went to college, we did all the things. And now I feel like there's something, there's gotta be something more. So I said to the producers, there's something to this, something more, let's figure out what that is.

Let's start asking the question for them and trying to come up with the answers of what people are looking for. And that is how remembering your spirit, connecting to sense of mindfulness, we were talking mindfulness, remembering your spirit, intention, meditation. All of that at a time where people thought I was out of my mind.

All right, we got some purple mics, we got a whole lot of purple up in here.

I feel that the color purple circle for me is.

It's transcendent. I mean, I just can't even believe this happened to me in this lifetime, as you've heard me say. From the moment I read the book, July 1982, it was a Sunday. I got up, went back to the bookstore, bought multiple other books, gave them out. The moment I opened the book and the first lines are, Dear God, I'm 14 years old.

I've always been a good girl. That's my story. Please explain what's happening to me. That's my story, and I could not believe that there are words on a page that are reflecting my story.

Somebody knows my story at 14.

I couldn't believe it, I just couldn't believe it. First of all those of you who are listening, you just have to imagine a world in 1982. There are no Black shows.

There are no Black images, there are no Black role models, there are no Black magazine covers, there are no. There's nothing that reflects you in the world. You go to work and come, and you never see a billboard or a bus back of a bus, nothing that looks like you.

I think maybe Good Times was on or something like that, or all in the family. God bless Norman Lear. But you are not being reflected on a regular basis in your work, in any environment whatsoever. And so to pick up a book, which I loved, books. The only other story I had read that had come close to reflecting me was Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing, and I read that at 15..

So in 1982, when I read this, I was now 28 years old and there is my story on a page. I didn't know what to think. So that's why I went back to the bookstore and got all the other copies and passed them out to friends. And then I hear that there's gonna be a movie.

And that whole process of how do I find a way to get in a movie? I don't know one single thing about movies or anybody in the movies. I then, six months later, get a call. Quincy Jones was in Chicago.

And happened to be coming out of the shower and saw me on AM Chicago. He had taken the red eye now what would have happened had he not taken the red eye? What had happened if he had already spent the night and been in the room? I mean, so all those forces.

I get a call saying, come and audition, I audition. I don't hear anything. For two and a half months. When I call the casting agent, he says. Real actresses have auditioned for this part. Do you know who just left my office?

AlFRe Woodard Don't you call me? I'll call you. Ruben Cannon, who just the other day called and asked for tickets for the premiere, that same guy, that same guy.

And didn't I get him tickets to the premiere? So anyway, I go to this fat farm because I am devastated and I know that. It's because I'm overweight. And I'm praying on the track, and I'm crying and crying and crying and hoping that I can release it. Because months have now passed, I've been shamed on the Tonight Show by Joan Rivers. I have my first appearance on the Tonight Show.

They pre-interview you before. So we're supposed to be talking about the great success of this little talk show in Chicago that's beating Phil Donahue. And Joan Rivers. Turns to me and she says, Tell me, why are you so fat?

On national television and I don't know what to do with that, I just am like, Oh, I just love potato chips, Joan. I just say, no, seriously, shame on you, shame on you, she says on national television on the Tonight show. My first appearance.

So I agreed with Joan Rivers that I would, she says. I'll let you come back. If you lose 15 pounds, you need to lose 15 pounds, she says to me on national television. And I accepted, I accept that I should be shamed because.

How dare me be sitting up here on the Tonight show? And I had agreed that I was gonna go away and lose 15 pounds?

And of course, I didn't lose the 15 pounds I went and ate my way to another 10 pounds. So that by the time I got the call for color purple, by the time I called to say, you know, have you heard anything? After the audition, I thought, Okay, I didn't get it because I was overweight.

And that's why I left and I went to this health retreat, which they were at the time. They call them fat farms. It's not me calling it. And I was on the track trying to release the Let Me Let It go because this is I'm obsessed with it. And I started singing, I surrender all, I surrender all all to Thee, my blessed Savior.

I surrender all over and over and over and over and over again, I sang that song and prayed and cried.

And when I'd stop and say, Okay, I can let it go, I hadn't let it go.

I prayed and cried some more until I could bless Alfre Woodard with the role. Because I know I thought, there's no way I'm gonna get it, he said. Alfre Woodard left his office, There's no way. And I wanted to be able to see the movie, but I wanna be able to see the movie and not be upset that I didn't get it.

So God helped me. Bless Alfre Woodard.

And I cried and prayed some more, and then the moment I felt the release, the moment I felt the release. A woman comes running out and she says, There's a phone call for you.

And that phone call from Steven Spielberg saying, I hear you're at a fat farm. If you lose a pound, you could lose this part.

The fact that it happened in the instant, the instant I'd know I let it go, was the greatest life lesson I have ever received. Because I physically felt the release, and I saw that the second I did that, it changed. The second, I stopped resisting, the second, I stopped wondering, the second, I stopped putting myself in the fear space and said, it is well.

Use me how you choose to use me. I thought this was the answer, but now I see it's not. I'm willing to be open to wherever you take me. The instant I did that, I saw that woman, and so that became my grounding, teaching for the rest of my life and career.

Do everything you can, work as hard as you can, and then let it go. Give it to God, give it to the universe, let it be an offering. Do not resist.

Do not resist, do not push against it, let it go. And that was the great teaching, that was the great teaching that ruled every decision going forward.

Do what you have to do, let it go, do what you have to do, let it go. No attachment, have no attachment to the outcome. And then when I lost track of that lesson, I got it again.

The hard way I worked on Beloved for 10 years was attached to the outcome. Went into major depression afterwards. And why did I go into depression? Because of my attachment, not because the movie failed, because my attachment to it? Succeeding.

Because the work was the work. I loved every minute of the work, the process of the work, everything that I offered, I still loved that. I wouldn't change a thing. When I was offered an opportunity to change it, I said, No, I'm not gonna change it.

They said, Well, it's screening this way and people don't. I thought I'm not gonna change it. So what was I attached to? I was attached to it being something that I wanted it to be versus what it really was. And so I learned from that experience, back to your question, I learned from that experience after beloved.

Never do anything with the attachment to how people are gonna receive it. Let the joy of doing it, let the joy of the process of the work and putting the work out into the world be your reward. And however people receive it, that becomes the bonus. But the work and the art, you wouldn't change anything about that. The real joy is in the offering.

All my life I had to fight.

And that line I did in the first take.

And I did it from the space of knowing.

A girl child ain't safe in a world full of mens, which is the last line, because a girl child ain't safe in a world full of mens. And I know that to be so true and that was a great day for me.

That was really a great day for me. The best scene for me was the dinner table scene, which takes a long time because you got all those actors at the table. But that's the day I actually became an actress. I think, because I only had one line, and then the rest of it, I ad-libbed, I mean, the line was how you doing, Miss Sophia.

And she's supposed to nod and say, doing all right. And then Steven said, Tell us how you felt in the store when Miss Celie came to see you, tell us. And so I just started rocking and ad-libbing and saying, The day I seen you in that store, I know there was a God, I know there was a. So, I mean, let me just say this.

The color purple. Aside from the fact that it taught me to surrender in all of my work and life, and to live a surrendered to God existence. So imagine that when you see me walking, you see a woman who surrendered her life to the higher power. So I'm stepping out on moonbeams and stars, I am literally walking in the light because I have lived a surrendered life.

How the hell else do I get from Mississippi to Montecito as your next door neighbor? It just isn't possible without that, okay?

So it taught me that to live a surrendered life. Don't you dream the dream? Let God dream the dream for you, and you step into the dream.

You ask, God, what is the dream? what is your dream? For me? Because I'm open to go where you lead, and so it led me here, right across the fence from you. Number two. Watching Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones and Alice Walker every day.

Beasts in that creative, collaborative space.

I want this feeling every day.

I never want to feel like.

That I want to always feel like, even if I didn't get paid, I would be doing it. I had to give up my entire contract's vacation in order to do the film, so I had a contract for three years. My first year, I was only getting two weeks of vacation, the movie required me to be on set for two months.

The only way I could negotiate to continue to do the movie. Because my bosses at ABC at the time at AM Chicago were like, you better get your ass back here.

And I said, I will give up my entire vacation for the entire contract, I will never take another vacation. If you'd let me finish this movie. And at the end of that deal.

My attorney said, You never want to be in that position again, and I said, I never want to be in that position. I don't want to be in that position again. And I had gone for audition for the final audition to Universal Studios, and I met with Steven Spielberg, he's the one that told me that I had the part.

He has a company called Amblin, he owned himself with Amblin Studios. Every movie, you see Steven Spielberg's, you see the Amblin, and you see the Little Boy, and you see the moon and the whole thing. It never occurred to me. You could own yourself.

It never even occurred to me a person could own themselves. That gave me the idea that I could own myself. Giving up three years of my vacation said I never want to be in that position again, and that is how I came to own myself.

You needed to be the truth, but I couldn't figure out how do you act and also tell the truth at the same time? And there was a really critical scene where he had asked me to cry and I couldn't cry, and then I cried all night. And then Adolf Caesar, who played The Old Mister, came to my door because he could hear me through the walls and said, God damn it. What's all this noise? And I said, Steven Spielberg asked me to cry and I couldn't cry. And I know that he's gonna throw me off the movie because this is the second time. And he said, You have to learn to give yourself over to the character, let the character take control.

You stop fighting it, it's not you. You surrender, surrender, which I got, surrender to the character, let the character take control, and if she wants to cry, she'll cry.

And if she doesn't wanna cry, not even Spielberg can make her cry. And that was my greatest acting lesson, and I was released after that day. And not quite as fearful of Steven, but he never really talked to me or really. And I remember filming the scene in town where Sofia hits the mayor and is thrown into jail. Taken off my coat, going to Steven, saying I won't be here the next two days because I'm going to sign my contract for my talk show. And he says, What is that?

And I said, Oh, I'm gonna be doing a talk show. He goes like, radio or what is it? and I said, No, it's like real TV.

And people say, I'm gonna be famous, but I don't know it's gonna be like Donahue, but only it's gonna be me. And he said, Okay, well, when will you be back? I'll be back on Monday, but I wouldn't sign the contract. My name was not on the poster because I wasn't, but I said, and I'd said to him, You know, I think people are saying I'm gonna be famous, but you should probably put my name on the poster.

He says, Your name can't go on the poster, name can't go on the poster that's already negotiated.

I think it's.

I think the universe, if the universe could be disappointed, would be disappointed, I think the universe. I mean, I was just thinking recently that it's human beings aren't doing such a good job right now. We as human beings are losing this battle of our own humanity. And it's really sad because you can see that it's lost to the egos. It's all about this sense of living externally and thinking that your value is in something that is outside of yourself.

To everything is done to me is already done to him.

So you don't even have to worry about your enemies. Because whatever they're thinking that, so mean spirit and so on. The energy of that is coming back to them all the time, all the time. And you don't even have to do anything about it. So that is the truth. Everything you even try to do to me is already done to you.

And I can't imagine what I say, in so many ways, and strongly believe, is that the lessons of the purple of the color, purple of forgiveness. Mostly, finding your own identity, discovering who you really are, that's what it's about, discovering who you really are. In connection with the life force that we call God, that Celie calls God.

And that is timeless, that is forever. Not even AI can change it. That the heart of knowing who you are and what you have to offer the world. Because, ultimately, coming back to worthy, what Celie's discovery is a journey to worthiness, yes, from the beginning to the end, is she finds her worthiness, she finds her value. And that path of self-discovery, of self-realization, of coming into the grace and giving herself the graciousness. To thrive and not just survive as a victim is what the story is all about.

And that will endure forever and I think gonna be more needed than ever. I think technology and social media and all of the stuff and the things and the busyness of life cloud over how sad and lonely people really are. There's a lot of deep loneliness and sadness and disconnection. And it's why your book, Worthy, is so valuable at this particular time, because all the stuff that people are putting out there.

In the way that it's being put out, they can't feel the worthiness, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it.

You can see it.

Your process for discernment is so clear, I think.

And.

I was like, Okay, well, do you even know what you're asking me?

And when I look at the work that you're doing in the world, I think when you say you wanted to do a talk show. I think it's because obviously, I've been a model for that and I've been a model for how you can do it really well. May I say, we did that thing?

But what you really want is a platform in order to speak to the world, to help the world to know itself better. And in whatever form that shows itself, and so it happens to be now this form, at some point it may be another form. But I can feel that, I can feel the truth of that, the earnestness of that, the sincerity of that, and I wanted to support that.

Thank you, and that is why I said, yes.

The Jamie Kern-Lima show is your show, and let's spread the word and be a force for good together. And make sure you subscribe to the Jamie Kern-Lima Show. And click the notifications button so that you'll be the very first to know when there's a new episode. I just want to say, thank you so much for joining me today and before you go, I want to share some words with you. That couldn't be more true.

You right now, exactly as you are, are enough and fully worthy. You are worthy of your greatest hopes, your wildest dreams and all the unconditional love in the world. And it's an honor to welcome you to each episode, Jamie Kern-Lima show here. I hope you'll come as you are and heal where you need. Blossom what you choose, journey toward your calling and stay as long as you'd like. Because you belong here. You are worthy, you are loved, you are love and I love you.

Who you spend time around is so important, as energy is contagious, and so is self-belief. And I'd love to hang out with you even more, especially if you could use an extra dose of inspiration. Which is exactly why I've created my free weekly newsletter that's also a love letter to you, delivered straight to your inbox each and every Tuesday morning from me. If you haven't signed up, to make sure that you get it each week, just go to jamiekernlima..com to make sure you're on the list. And you'll get your One-on-one with Jamie weekly newsletter and get ready to believe in you. If you're tired of hearing the bad news every single day and need some inspiration, some tips, tools, joy and love hitting your inbox, I'm Your girl, subscribe at jamiekernlima..com or in the link in the show notes.

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I hope you enjoyed this episode and conversation together and I am so grateful to be on this journey with you. And did you know? For every episode of the Jamie Kern Lima show, there are a set of special prompt questions just for you to help you on your journey of aha moments and revelations in your own life from each episode. Make sure you join my free email newsletter at jamiekernlima..com to get them sent to you each week. And each episode is meant to be evergreen and packed with timeless life lessons, so you can go back and listen to past episodes you perhaps haven't heard yet. As we are going on this incredible journey of building self-worth and living our best lives together.