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I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.
I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present, your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.
Chapter 1, the seeds. Your life isn't about a big break.
It's about taking one significant life transforming step at a time.
August 14, 1978. It was a Monday.
My first day working on a Baltimore talk show called People Are Talking.
It was also the last day I had a job.
Up until then I'd been a news anchor and reporter.
I knew I was not my authentic self in those jobs, and my bosses certainly made no secret of their feelings.
They told me I was the wrong color.
I was the wrong size that I showed too much emotion.
I've always said that the best part about that experience was meeting my best friend Gail, who was a production assistant at the same television station.
I could feel I was misplaced.
Even though the six o'clock news was a time slot most young journalist, Covett, I was never fully comfortable in that seat.
When I look back at the tapes, I can still hear the pretend anchor voice I used on air.
It wasn't until I was unceremoniously demoted to co-host of People Are Talking that I experienced the first spark of what it means to become fully alive.
During the show, I interviewed Tom Carvelle, the Carvelle ice cream man, and the actor who played Benny on all my children.
Not exactly glamorous, but as we talked, I felt lit up from the inside like I had come home to myself.
When the hour ended, there was a sense of knowing, resonating within my heart, and radiating to the hairs on the back of my neck.
My entire body told me this was what I was supposed to do.
As a reporter, I had been exhausted all the time.
I really had to drag myself many days into work.
But after one day on this local talk show, I was energized in a way that fueled every cell of my being.
There was no doubt that the seeds of what was to give my life meaning and purpose had been planted.
That day, my job ended and my calling began.
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Years later, the Oprah Winfrey show would achieve the level of success no one could have predicted.
It was an exhilarating experience, and yet another little kernel of knowing was revealing itself to me.
Even at the show's peak, I had a deep awareness that a supreme moment of destiny still awaited me.
That's why after 25 years, I trusted my instinct when it told me, this isn't it.
There's more. There's something else.
The show was my home. The audience was one of the great loves of my life, but I couldn't ignore the flicker of certainty telling me it was time to move on.
The years following the end of the show brought many unexpected possibilities, and I had some daunting moments when creating a new cable network own.
Stopping to consider my own advice of turning challenges into opportunities is what allowed me to move forward.
This is the lesson I hope you take away from this chapter.
Your life is not static.
Every decision, set back, or triumph, is an opportunity to identify the seeds of truth that make you the wondrous human being that you are.
I'm not talking just about what you do for a living.
When you pay attention to what feeds your energy, you move in the direction of the life for which you were intended.
Trust that the universe has a bigger, wider, deeper dream for you than you could ever imagine for yourself.
Growing up in the church, one of my favorite Bible parables was about the mustard seed.
If you have faith, even if it's as little as a mustard seed, you can move mountains.
Anything is possible. As a child listening from my seed in church, this brought me so much comfort just as it did when I was struggling as a reporter in Baltimore, and as it still does today.
The mustard seed is such a tiny speck of a thing.
I am emboldened by the belief that all I need is a mustard seed of faith, and no matter what, I'm going to be all right.
As you begin to identify the seeds of knowing along your own path, the first question to ask yourself is, what do I believe?
Do you believe that you are worthy of happiness, success, abundance, fulfillment, peace, joy, and love?
What I know for sure is you become what you believe.
Beginning with Su Maqid.
You say, the life of the soul evolves in grows as we move.
The process isn't a one-time experience, but a spiraling journey that we undertake throughout life.
Life is full of cocoons.
We die and are reborn again and again.
What did you mean by that?
I think life is a process of that.
You wake up, then you wake up some more.
You die to oneself, you're reborn.
It's an evolution of consciousness.
I mean, if you look at the way God created the world, it's always about a seed and a sprout and a flower and then it goes back to seed.
It's always about process and unfolding.
I think we're probably on a journey of greater and greater consciousness becoming more compassionate, more loving, and that is a lifelong spiraling process.
So you were having awakenings?
Awakening. Awakening.
I mean, you can describe them as cocoons.
I mean, you go into a cocoon and some new part of yourself emerges.
It's not that you leave one self behind.
It's an integration. All of these selves come together and create who you are eventually.
But, yeah, I've had many awakenings, many little deaths and rebirths in my life.
So it's interesting when you have come across the daily challenges of life, do you immediately go to prayer?
Do you go to that inner contemplative part of yourself?
Sometimes I do, but as I said, prayer is so large for me.
It's such an immense thing.
Taking a walk is often what I do.
You know, to walk along this corridor by the golf every day, that's a prayer, putting feet to it.
That feels like I'm getting in sync with something inside myself.
Anything that takes me to that interior place, that true self.
Tim's story. I love the choice of the word mighty.
Yes, because sometimes we don't feel mighty.
Yeah. But we are a mighty person in the making.
A masterpiece in progress, a miracle in motion.
Although you may have had many mistakes in your past, God still has a great plan for your future.
If you'll do things his way, if you let him, he will mold you into a vessel of honor.
Love that vessel of honor for his purposes.
Yes. He will breathe life into you and change you.
I love that. A vessel of honor.
Yes. And I'd never heard that phrase before.
And that you really are a miracle in motion.
Motion is movement. So we're not there yet, but we're in motion.
At all times, we are all going through recovery and discovery at the same time.
Some people stop their lives because I'm in recovery.
I just went through all this and I'm in recovery.
But you should be in recovery and discovery.
I love where you say too, that we should not waste our failures.
Right. Right. There's a lesson in every one of those failures.
But the great thing about it is that we could fail forward.
We could fail forward. It's not final because of these mistakes.
Dr. Sheffali Sabari. I believe all of life is a process of evolution.
What does that mean? Evolution means that we're always reaching toward, holding on to the vine, which will take us out of this jungle of confusion.
What is the confusion? We have forgotten there was some big forgetting that occurred at some point in our history that made us believe that we were separate from this oneness that surrounds us.
There was this big epiphany forgetting.
Yeah. Right. That we are one with God.
So we have forgotten that.
And our entire life now becomes a quest to reclaim that.
We are constantly evolving.
We are, whether we like to recognize it or not, even the most unconscious person against their greatest will, they are on a process to evolve.
Life gives us opportunity after opportunity to ask yourself, is this my true self or am I living the inauthentic self becoming conscious means to recognize when that moment arrives.
And it's coming and it's coming and it's coming.
Now children, why do I talk about children as being the ushers of this greater evolution?
Because they are the most conscious.
They're the most untainted.
They're still the closest to that remembering.
And we're all seduced to keep forgetting.
But yet there is a will in us all the spiritual seekers, the truth seekers, the light bears to go back to that place.
So becoming conscious is to recognize the moments that life offers you, which is really on a daily basis and with children on a moment to moment basis, to start reclaiming who you once were.
The most authentic side of us, which remembers that we are one with this divinity.
Pastor A.R. Bernard, you mentioned that the calling happens long before you even knew God.
Do you believe that everybody has a calling?
Absolutely. And that calling is being designed for you by all of the experiences in your life.
Yeah, the Prophet Jeremiah began to look at his own deficiencies when he got the calling.
And he saw his youthfulness.
He saw his inability to articulate and communicate well.
And the scripture says that, before I formed you in your mother's womb, I knew you and called you to be a prophet to the nations.
So here this man has been called by God.
He has a whole life designed and laid out before him that he knows nothing about.
Now he has to trust the one who designed that life for him.
How do we open ourselves to that calling?
How can we be more open to hear and more open to find the path that is our calling?
First, we have to believe that we do have a purpose.
It goes back to that eternity in their hearts.
Every person has a purpose.
Every individual has a purpose.
And when we begin to think that way, we will appreciate the sacredness of all life.
And not be destructive to any aspect of life.
Who respect people better?
Yes. And you know what I think it's so fascinating is that I believe that is true.
But I think a lot of people get purpose confused with fame or notoriety for purpose.
Yeah. Yeah. They think, well, if it's my purpose, then I should know what that is.
And everybody else should also know what that is.
And I should be known for whatever that purpose is, right?
I think we've lost a bit of that now.
We're lost in that. Well, let's well put by you and insightful because too often people think purpose is static.
Yeah. It's that one thing for which I was born.
Yeah. But what happens if you achieve that at age 27, you have no reason to live beyond the correct purpose is not static purpose is dynamic.
Woo. That's good. Purpose continues to be applied throughout your life.
What your gifts, your talents and abilities that are given to you by God, that remains consistent throughout your life.
But how you apply that changes as you live life from one level to another and you go through stages of life.
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Barbara Brown Taylor. You're a priest to author professor.
Do you think we can have more than one calling?
I do. Anyone who's a parent and works outside the home has a couple of callings.
You're calling. You don't have to worry about what you're calling is if you're a parent because that is definitely the big one.
Yeah, you're by vocational.
Whatever you do is doing that.
You're absolutely right.
And so I have relational callings.
I have professional callings.
I have a number of different callings and I also think it's possible to be called away from things I have been called two in the past.
But I've been powerfully called two some things and just as powerfully called away from them.
So I think that's important too.
There are goodbyes as well as hellos in our callings.
Oh, I love that. True. Because a calling doesn't have to be for a lifetime.
No, because we're constantly evolving.
You're constantly moving forward.
Right. And if it has to be for a lifetime, we're failing all the time, right?
Because we ditched that calling to pick up on another one.
Wow. How do you say we best hear the calling?
Oh, see, if I had a formula, here's what I think.
We can hear the calling.
There is a message. But it's folded into your life and it speaks to you in your language.
And so all I can say is don't ever give up hunting and listening because it will speak to you today.
And I highly resist formula and I highly resist, you know, three things or five pieces of advice because I just don't think lives act that way.
It's a sailboat ride. Oh, it is.
It is. So, so how can we hear the calling listen?
Yeah. Listen. Pay attention to your life and enjoy the smooth sales while they're up.
Yes. Yes. And then enjoy the storms if you live through them because they'll make the best stories later.
They'll make much better stories.
Oh, and it makes that smooth sail feel so good.
It does. It does. Where would we be?
Yeah. Without them all.
Elizabeth Gilbert. There are still just huge swaths of women who never got the memo that their lives belong to them.
And there's this instinct that they have that they needed permission slip from the principal's office for anything.
It said, you are allowed to ask yourself.
It's a really important question about your life.
You are allowed to take accountability and ownership for your own journey.
You're allowed to ask what serves you sometimes because I know you've been trained up to serve everyone, but you're allowed to turn that on yourself and honor your own life that you were given.
And I feel like it just got to people somehow that they hadn't quite put together.
They could do that. How do you know though that you're being called or something?
What are the signs? You get the question.
Here's the question. What have I come here to do with my life?
You tell me you never got that question.
That's the question that begins every single quest.
What have I come here to do with my life?
There's no one who hasn't had that question come to them.
That's the call. That's the call.
It's like, if you have a, you're just pretty not paying attention.
You're really not paying attention.
You're really watching Breaking Bad It for the morning and eating ice cream.
And you're really not listening.
You're not listening. Yeah, because everybody's gotten in one form or another.
Yeah. That's the call here to do with my life.
What have I come here to do with my life?
Now you can choose to ignore that question or you can pursue it.
And the pursuit is the beginning of the journey.
Gene Houston. I want people to really understand the power of love and loving.
I want people to look out at the world and say, I am a citizen of the most beautiful planet in the world.
I have been given this holy incarnation.
Extremely unlikely. I look at people and say, you know, don't put yourself down.
You won the ultimate Olympics.
You are the sperm and the ovum that made it.
It's sperm. The millions.
How we said that too. There they go.
There's millions. I think it is to have a deep appreciation of the life that one is given and the life of others and then to act accordingly in the depths of that appreciation.
To understand what Joseph Campbell said.
The privilege of a life.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
What is the soul? I believe that the soul is the essence of who and what we are.
I personally believe that it transcends our leaving this mortal coil.
I think in part it is also that great friend that I talked about that it comes with codes and possibilities and the next layers of who and what we may yet be.
It is often a pain in the neck because it says wake up.
It's time to wake up. Don't go to sleep.
I think it is also the lure of our becoming.
That's what I think the soul is.
Wow. I've got to take that in a minute.
The lure of our becoming.
Yes. How did you even come up with those words?
No one is talking to you.
The lure of our becoming.
The lure of our becoming.
Wow. That's fantastic.
And for me it is also part of the evolution of our becoming because we are coded.
We are coded in our cells but becoming we are coded in our hearts and we are God seeds becoming God's cells.
Carolyn Maze. If you have life you have purpose.
Okay. As an exercise on the aside if you have life you have purpose.
That's a good one. If you have life you have purpose.
And that is true of every one of the seven billion of us.
Totally. It can't be otherwise.
And this is why I absolutely love studying the work of the mystics because this is what's so extraordinary.
The tiniest, tiniest truth is the same at the big level.
If you have life one atom is as purposeful as our planet.
Wow. What is in one is in the whole.
Wow. It can't be otherwise.
It cannot. Deepak Chopra.
If you are rested, if your mind is in peace and if you full of love and compassion, if you come from being and then feeling and then self-reflection then things will synchronistically fall into place because that's how nature functions.
Like the seed. Yes. In every seed is the promise of thousands of forests which is exactly what dharbha means.
You have unique gifts. Focus on the gifts.
Don't focus on the weaknesses because there are other people who compliment your weaknesses and you compliment this.
Do you believe everyone has a gift?
Yes. Otherwise you wouldn't be here.
You wouldn't be here and that gift is when you're expressing yourself in that unique way and giving out your gifts you lose track of time.
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