“All of life is about growing to your own personal best.
All of life is about growing to greatness.”- Oprah

Everybody has a story…and lessons to teach.  This week, Oprah continues her Master Class and shares her lessons in her OWN Master Class – Part 2.  In part one of this series with Oprah, she shares with us her early years….as a child and as a young girl and what divine lessons came from her struggles and her perseverance.  With each story, Oprah opens herself up so that we, in turn, might open ourselves up for a gift…a gift of seeing something that we can take into our own lives to help us live our best lives. 

These are my notes taken carefully…through tears and lessons.  We are not alone. We are in this teacher’s class together.  There are no accidents.  Let’s begin the class.

Grow to Greatness

• “Life is about growth and change.  When you are no longer doing that – that is your whisper.  That is your whisper that ‘I am suppose to do something else. I am interested in seeing what the rest of the world has to offer me.’”
• “I never lived with a plan…because I always believed, do you best and something will show up for yourself.”
• Your plan may show up at any moment.  Be open to receive it.  Oprah tells how someone saw her work in Baltimore on someone else’s resume real.  She was called in for an interview and was told that day, “We want to hire you.”  There are no accidents.
• Listen to YOUR OWN inner voice.  “You’re going to die on the vine,” she was told by her then boss in Baltimore when she told him that she as moving to Chicago – the land of Phil Donohue.  But she knew…it’s time to go…and she moved to Chicago. 
• Understand that things happen for a reason – January 1^st was her first day on the air.  “We beat Phil Donahue first day out!” Oprah tells us.  “WOW…I knew something was up when January 2^nd, I went out on the street and every single person in that block knew my name and pronounced it.  After that first week, no one called it AM Chicago…they would say, “Have you seen the Oprah show?” …and by July, it was renamed to The Oprah Show.”
• “The heart that I brought was what people felt and my ability to be myself…”
• The lesson:  “Anybody pretending to be anything other than who you are…you will never, ever reach your personal potential. You cannot do it.”

Surrender…

• What you want vs. what you get – “People doubt that your thoughts create reality for you.  It doesn’t if you are just sitting around thinking ‘I want something.’ It doesn’t. But there is no question if the energy and the vibrational frequency is correct – is insync with what is to come your way – that there is a space that you create that allows that to happen…and nothing more than The Color Purple explains that to me. That’s what made a believer out of me.”
• The Color Purple is Oprah’s Rainbow – Important to her journey and her life, Oprah tells her story.  “I read a review on a Sunday morning,” she says.  She slipped her coat on over her pajamas and went and bought the book.  She started reading it in the bookstore and realized, “That is my story…” She went home, finished the book the same day and was back at the same bookstore, buying all of the copies before closing time.  The next day, Oprah started handing out her extra copies to people at work…or anywhere.  This may have been a preview of the book clubs to come, but it was definitely her way of saying, “books can change your life.” When she heard that they were doing a movie, she started telling people, “I’m going to be in that movie.”  She tells of her audition….they wanted her to read for Sophia and she was so excited. “Not only am I reading but I am reading for a major role!” Oprah says.  “And she’s married to Harpo.  That is Oprah spelled backwards.  If that is not a sign from Jesus himself…I never saw a sign bigger than that.” But after hearing nothing…and months and months of waiting, Oprah called the casting director who told her, “You don’t call me.  What are you calling me for? I call you…and we have REAL actresses auditioning for this part.  Alfre Woodard just let my office.  She’s a real actress.”  So, she says she hung up the phone and new that she wasn’t going to get the part.  She said, “I thought this was a God trick. ‘Well, God, what did you do that for? Why did you take me to the audition….and then I’m not going to get it?’  So, she decides she didn’t get the part because she was fat….and went off to a fat farm.  She says, “As I was running around a track by myself on a cold rainy Wisconsin day, I start praying to God out loud. ‘I don’t get it, I really don’t get it God but I know you do. I don’t know if this is some kind of joke what you are doing to me, but I thought you wanted me to have this part.  And I want to be in the space where I can thank you for the opportunity but I can’t now. I can’t…it’s too hard. Please help me let it go. Please help me to let it go.’  And I start to sing spontaneously, ‘I surrender all.  I surrender all.  All to thee my blessessed savior. I surrender all.’”  Oprah says, “I sang and I prayed and I sang and I prayed until I was able to say, ‘You’re going to be alright.”  At first I thought… “but I’m not going to be able to go see the movie…you can’t see the movie, but you’ll be alright.’ So Oprah says, she kept praying…until she was able to feel like, ‘I am going to go see the movie…and I will be able to bless Alfre Woodard in that role and I’ll be able to say ‘it’s a good thing you got it’ …I wanted to be able to have that kind of peace….my life will go on and I will not be bitter and I will not be angry and I will not hold that and I will not feel that for the rest of my life ‘she got it and I didn’t’…I want to have that kind of peace.”

  Oprah tells us, after this surrendering and having her moment, as soon as she felt that release and that moment of peace, someone came running out to the track where she was and told her that she had a phone call from Steven Spielberg, who was calling to tell her, “I hear you are at a fat farm. If you lose a pound, you could lose this part.”

• See REAL when it happens – “One of the fundamental turning points in my life was The Color Purple – nothing has had a greater impact on me…spiritually, emotionally, psychologically…in determining my path.  It literally changed my faith…because I could see it…it was real.”
• “God can dream a bigger dream than you could ever dream for yourself. When you worked as hard and done as much and strived and tried and given and pled and bargained and hoped, surrender. When you have done all that you can do and there is nothing left that you can do, give it up. Give it up to that thing that is greater than yourself. And let it then, become a part of the flow.”
• Live in the space of letting go – “I have never wanted anything as badly and as hard as much as The Color Purple.  The wanting and the surrendering of it is what taught me to live in the space of letting go.” 
• “When I ask, “what should I do? Should I do this?” the bigger question is “what would you – God, the Universe – have me do?”

Intention is everything

• “I have known for a very long time that I am a blessed person….and that who much is given, much is also required.”
• “Intention rules your life and determines the outcome”
• “I bet on myself…and it was the best bet I ever made. With the success of AM Chicago, Oprah’s attorney at the time told her, “You should OWN yourself…don’t’ take a salary…what you want is to invest in yourself and that is what I did.” 
• The power you have can change people’s lives – Oprah tells us that the intention that she had for the show was to use it “as a vehicle for making a difference in people lives and to allow them to become more of themselves and to let people understand that there is a flow- a vibe – a connection – that we are all interconnected in the human experience which makes us the human family.”
• Running your own race – What about the competition? Oprah says that she realized early that there would always be competition… “so it’s just time to step up your game…The way you step up your game is not to worry about the other guy. In any situation, you cannot control the other guy. You only have the control over yourself.  It’s like running your own race.  The energy it takes to look back and see where the other guys are takes energy away from you and if there too close, it scares you.  Don’t waste your time and energy looking back at the other guy. It’s not about the other guy.  It’s about what you do. You just need run that race as hard as you can. You need to give it everything you’ve got all the time for yourself. For yourself.

You become what you believe

• “In the beginning….I was just like everyone else in television…I was happy to get the job.”  Then it changed…Oprah talks about the early years of The Oprah Sow and “confrontational television” and amazing ratings.  But there was a moment that it changed for her.  In the late 80’s, Oprah talks about her “Ah-ha” moment during an interview with some skinheads and about segregation. “I recognized that I wasn’t helping anybody and that this is a platform, this isn’t just a tv show….I think I’m exposing them for their hatred, but I realize that all of the people that agree with them are going, ‘yeah.’” and they are using the platform as well.  Oprah says, “That’s when it hit me…I think I’m doing one thing…” but what she was doing was “following the path of least resistance…”
• Do what is right for you – At this time is when Oprah says she made a decision “that I am going to take a higher road because I cannot live with myself.  I would not be able to live with myself.” Once I made that decision, my whole life changed.  I did whatever is best going to serve the viewer and serve me in the chair… I’m going to talk to people who I feel can make a difference….I’m not going to waste my time doing anything else…”

You are not alone…

• “I think that my gift is relating to people…and understanding that I am not watching the viewer…but that I AM the viewer. I have the power and the courage to ask the questions that I do and to be as intrusive or not because I am not asking them based on my own curiosity but based on what the viewer wants, thinks, needs…”
• Your story may be my story…Oprah talks of interviewing a woman in Baltimore and shaking at the end of the interview, thinking “that is my story too,” and wanting to tell the woman after the interview that she understood and make that connection.  It was not until Chicago, that she shared with everyone her own story. Oprah says on this show, “I was raped by a relative…one of the hardest things in life to do it to confront your own molester and with that pain, often comes healing.”  She says that she told her story because she was hoping that it would do for her guest what that experience in Baltimore did for her by saying, “you are not alone.” 
• Words have power…more power than you might realize – She says, “Not knowing it was going to open up the flood gates of everybody else saying, ‘it happened to me.’ And that taught me a great lesson – that taught me that we are not alone.”
• “You are not your path you are not all the things that happened to you.  You are the possibility of what can be.”
• Please Listen…. “Ultimately we all want the same thing – We want to know that we matter.  We want to know that we were heard and that what we had to say meant something.  Did you hear me and did what I say mean anything to you?”

Stay True to Your Calling

• Your OWN Therapy – Oprah tells us that she had the most tumultuous childhood… “and I would have to say the Oprah Show cured me…I didn’t get cured until my 40’s did I actually get healed of that experience.”
• ‘I’ve never had a days therapy but the show has been the greatest therapy and the greatest teacher and it has taught me to be a teacher.”
• “I THINK that there is a great mystery that none of us will really fully get until we take the last breath…I believe it will all become very clear in the last breath.”  Oprah talks of a guest that had lost her son after a year of illness.  “In the last moment’s she crawled into bed with him and as he was dying, his last words were, ‘Oh mom, it was so easy.’  And closed his eyes and died.”  Oprah says this was another goose bumps moment for her…thinking, ‘why did I struggle so hard? It was so easy.’”

The Flow

• For everything there is a balance – What I know is…you’ve got to take responsibility for the space hold here and understand that for the 3^rd law of motion – which says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – that is my religion. That is the fundamental construct of my reliegion.  And by that, I mean that I know that every thot that I think, every thot that I have, that moves into action is going to create an opposite reaction. So, everything I put out in the world is going to come back. It’s the golden rule on steroids. Its true that as you do unto others, they will do unto you? mum ummm.   It’s already done.”
• You Are Energy “There is a flow – there’s an energy field in the flow – that is also happening with us human beings.  We just haven’t figured what that is yet or how to channel it.”
• “You’re either in flow or out of it. If you are in flow…it’s like flowing with the stream. And the flow is in direct proportion to the center of yourself where God abides…where universal energy abides….where the divine abides.”
• Own your OWN Authentic Power – The answer to the question, “How far from your center are you? is exactly how far out of sync you are in your life.” Oprah tells us, “Gary Zukav calls this “authentic power…when your personality comes to serve the energy of your soul – that is authentic power.”
• “It doesn’t matter how much money you have…how much power you have….all of that changes…all of that changes…but what is real and what is lasting is who you are and what you are meant to bring.”

Oprah ends our class with one parting question:   “What is the gift you were meant to give?” and reminds us that “nobody can take that away from you.”  What is your gift?  And how will you take these lessons into your own life? 

From today’s lesson, I have been reminded that I am not alone…and neither are you.