Iyanla Vanzant

Rev. Dr. Iyanla Vanzant is one of the most powerful voices in spiritual healing of the past three decades — the woman Oprah Winfrey has called "the most powerful spiritual healer, fixer, teacher, on the planet," and whom millions simply call "Auntie." Her authority was not learned from books; it was earned in fire. Born Rhonda Eva Harris in the back of a Brooklyn taxi in 1953, she lost her mother to breast cancer at two, survived childhood abuse in the relatives' homes where she was raised, became a teenage mother, and endured an abusive marriage until 1980, when she walked out with her three children and began again from nothing. What followed is one of the great transformation stories in American life: welfare to college, college to law school, a career as a public defender — and then, in 1983, initiation as a priestess in the Yoruba tradition, receiving the name Iyanla, "great mother," and with it her true vocation. Her books turned her hard-won wisdom into lifelines for millions. Acts of Faith (1993) became a devotional classic, In the Meantime hit #1 on the New York Times list, and titles like One Day My Soul Just Opened Up, Yesterday, I Cried, and Peace from Broken Pieces — written from the shattering loss of her daughter Gemmia — carried her signature blend of New Thought principle, Yoruba-rooted spirituality, and unflinching honesty. Six of her seventeen books have reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, selling more than ten million copies in twenty-three languages. On television, her journey wove through Oprah's world — from beloved 1990s regular, through a famous parting of ways, to one of TV's most moving reconciliations — culminating in Iyanla: Fix My Life, the OWN network's #1 unscripted hit, where for nine seasons she sat with broken families and public figures alike and taught a nation her method: stop performing, tell the truth, and "do the work." Beyond the cameras, Vanzant has spent decades training healers through the Inner Visions Institute for Spiritual Development, which she co-founded, certifying coaches and ministers in the spiritual technology she has refined across a lifetime. A four-time NAACP Image Award winner, she teaches that our wounds are not our identity, that the patterns we inherit can end with us, and that forgiveness — of others and of ourselves — is the master key. For anyone who has survived what should have broken them and wonders whether wholeness is still possible, Iyanla Vanzant is living, thundering proof that it is.