One Day My Soul Just Opened Up: 40 days and 40 nights towards spiritual strenght and personal growth by Iyanla Vanzant (an excerpt)

From Chapter One: Removing the Veil
At one point in my life, I really thought I had it all figured out. I was working in my dream career field. I had a decent home. I was in a solid relationship. My children were being normal teenagers. Then, one morning I woke up miserable. Nothing in particular had happened. Well, actually it had. Sometime during the night, when I was asleep, I decided to tell myself the truth. I hated my job. I was lonely living in a new city where I knew no one. I was dating a married man. And I felt like I had been a horrible mother, totally incapable of ever making up to my children for the years of insanity I had inflicted upon them. People looking from the outside in thought that I had really made it! Who was I to doubt them? I convinced myself through my daily motions that they were right.

The feelings of misery, confusion, and despair began to grow like an annoying fungus in my mind. My thinking was fuzzy. I was snapping at people. I had become professionally aggressive and competitive to the point of being combative. Each day, I would push myself to exhaustion so that no more truth could be, would be, revealed to me when I was sleeping. I clung to the relationship believing that if it ended, I would surely lose my mind. It did. And I did. I lost the mind that had kept me in denial for the better part of my life. I lost the mind that was so full of distortions, halftruths, and the ideas of others that it fed my misery like a ravenous dog. I lost the mind that was angry at my mother, hated my father, resented my brother, wanted to control everything and everybody in its midst that could in any way hurt me. At the time, I didn't realize what was going on. I thought I was having a string of bad luck. As I watched my life fall to pieces, I did what any mindless person would do. I got totally pissed off! It is called temporary insanity.

There is something strange that happens when you go insane . . . people help you stay there! There are those who recognize your anger and support you in it. You have told them your story. They know why you are mad. What do they do? They get mad right along with you. They help you rant and rave. They even go so far as to offer you a drink in the process. Then there are those who recognize your confusion. You've told them your story too. As a matter of fact, you have probably called them every day with twisting, turning updates that keep you in a state of rage and confusion. What do they do? They offer you suggestions. They tell you what to do and what to say. At the time, it all sounds good. However, when the time comes for you to do or say what they have told you, confusion reigns supreme, insanity surfaces, and you retreat into being PO'd.

Although I did not realize it at the time, I was lucky. There was one person in my life who immediately recognized my confusion, anger, and insanity. This very astute individual went so far as to detect an even greater vulnerability. Fear. The fear that I was losing control. Fear that other people would judge me. The fear that, for some reason I was not willing to explore or mention, I was being punished. More important, this person recognized that beneath it all there was a need for me to grow. A need for me to change. They knew that I had entered a sort of spiritual twilight zone where nothing made sense, but everything was making perfect sense. I was on a journey to a place that would require boldness of heart, strength of mind, and power of spirit. This person listened to the story, offering only one seemingly useless suggestion: "Remain open. There is something bigger than you know going on here." Well, la-de-da! What the heck was that supposed to mean?

I made it through that experience. Things got better, and then they fell apart again. I changed careers. I changed partners. I cut my hair and lost thirty-two pounds. Things got better, and then they fell apart again. In the process something wonderful happened. I picked up certain abilities, habits and practices that led me to the realization that things never really fall apart they simply change. Somehow, even when I felt as if I was about to lose my mind (again), I could hold on to the notion that everything is always as i should be. If I was to be insane, I would just be insane. Perhaps I was sleeping when I came into the one realization that continues to sustain me: "If you know who walks beside you, you can never be afraid!" I wish I knew the exact moment and time it happened because I would have had a party. now believe it was in that instant that my soul opened up and the spirit of the Divine entered my life.