Oprah Winfrey delivers 2015 "Harry's Last Lecture" at Stanford University

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Stanford University.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you and good evening.
I am Professor Harry Elam, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate
Education at Stanford.
And on behalf of the president and the provost,
I welcome you to tonight's very special Rathbun
Lecture with our featured speaker, Miss Oprah Winfrey.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, I got to tell you that you're in for a special treat.
She spoke to students this afternoon,
and the generosity, the commitment, the concern
she had in terms of the issues she
spoke about touched all of us there
and will touch you tonight.
The Harry and Amelia Rathbun Fund
for Exploring What Leads to a Meaningful Life
was made possible by an endowment established in 2006
by the Foundation for Global Community, which
was directed by the Rathbuns' son, Richard Rathbun.
"Harry's Last Lecture," as it's affectionately been called,
is the title tonight.
And a s someone named Harry, I think it's a great name.
The Rathbun Fund supports the mission
of the Office of Religious Life by helping students and others
discover and reflect upon issues of meaning and purpose
during their time of potentially monumental growth in character
and spirit here at college.
In this day and age, when students
are driven by the pace of technology
and the pressures to achieve, the increasing
concerns over employment after college,
it is all the more important to have time to reflect,
the space to think, not only about yourself
but about the great world around you.
The Rathbun Fund has created both a timeless and timely
opportunity to help Stanford deepen the student
experience with a focus on thoughtful inquiry,
the pursuit of ethical engagement,
and a dedication to making the world a better place to live.
And now to tell you more about the Rathbun Lecture
and to introduce tonight's esteemed speaker,
it is my pleasure to introduce the Dean of Religious Life, Dr.
Jane Shaw.
[APPLAUSE]
Welcome to Memorial Church, this extraordinary sacred space
that Jane Stanford put at the heart of our campus,
and welcome to the 2015 Rathbun Lecture.
All that we do here in this space,
in the circle, which is our interfaith space,
and at Windhover, our recently opened contemplation center,
is designed to explore together as a body,
as a community what it means to lead a meaningful life.
In our work as the office for religious life,
we encourage members of this university
to explore both spirituality and religion.
We support the working out of ethical values
and we host discussions, arts events, and of course, worship,
all designed to help us think and practice a meaningful life.
The Harry and Amelia Rathbun Fund
for exploring what leads to such a meaningful life
generously supports much of our work.
It was made possible by an endowment established in 2006
by the Foundation for Global Community.
The centerpiece is this visiting fellow program,
which brings notable, experienced, and wise people
to campus each year.
It is our pleasure this evening to welcome and thank the board
members and participants in the Foundation for Global
Community, many of whom are here with us tonight
and some may be watching at home.
And in particular, we warmly welcome Harry and Amelia's son,
Richard Rathbun, his wife Lacey, and their two children, Ryan
and Milo.
We're so delighted you could join us tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
And now, it is my very great pleasure,
and of course, my privilege, to introduce the Rathbun visiting
fellow for 2015, Oprah Winfrey.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
She has to have a little more of an introduction
than that, because she had so many accomplishments.
She's known to us as the talk show
host, who changed the very nature of interviewing
on her show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ran for 25 years.
She's known to us as a brilliant actor,
who especially starred in films such as The Color
Purple and The Butler.
She has Harpo Productions and produced
the extraordinary film, Selma.
She's the founder of O Magazine, which
has 16 million readers throughout the world.
She is an acclaimed author herself,
with a passion for reading, who has, through her book club,
encouraged so many others to discover
the pleasure of imaginatively entering the worlds of others
through books.
She's won many awards for all her incredible work,
including many Emmys and most recently the Presidential Medal
of Freedom.
She's an exceptionally generous philanthropist
who has founded a girls' school in South Africa.
Miss Winfrey's accomplishments are many,
and she would say that they all emerged
from her deep sense of spirit and her spiritual life.
So she is with us tonight here to give us
the Rathbun Lecture as one of the great spiritual leaders
of our time.
She encourages millions to explore what it
means to have a spiritual life.
And that, she's told us today, is her very, very favorite
thing to do.
You can catch her having probing conversations
with other spiritual leaders on Sunday mornings
on her Super Soul Sunday television program.
You can read her wisdom in her most recent book,
What I Know for Sure.
You can engage in deep learning in her life class
as it goes on tour around the country.
But this evening, we are fortunate, we are blessed,
and we are truly grateful that she will be speaking to us
about what leads to a meaningful life.
Distinguished guests, students, faculty, staff,
Miss Oprah Winfrey.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
That was great.
Hi, y'all.
Woo!
[APPLAUSE CONTINUE]
Y'all just don't even know what this means to me to be standing
in this hall.
In 1970, before you were you even
a thought in the mind of God or in the seed of your parents,
I was in an oratorical contest as a junior at East High
School.
And the great victory for us as a state champions
was to have our national championship here at Stanford
in this very church.
[CROWD AWING]
And as I stand her today, I lost the contest,
but I won the prize.
[CROWD CHEERING]
Wow, I know, I came in today and I went, oh my gosh, I made it.
Dean Shaw, that introduction moves me,
because one of my goals as a human being
has been to evolve to the point of being
a student in the spiritual realm enough
that I could be able to bestow some
of my knowledge, the information I've gathered over the years
from thousands of interviews in such a way
that I could call myself a teacher.
And I dared not call myself a teacher until hearing it
from you, and because you have said I'm a teacher
and you are here at Stanford, I believe you.
I'm going to take that.
So thank you.
It's been an amazing day here with you all.
First of all, I have one of my South African daughters,
I have 20 girls in college in the United States
and one of them, [? Shadai, ?] is here at Stanford.
[APPLAUSE]
And she's a sophomore.
And we came to Stanford I think late 2011 or early 2012,
I can't remember.
I remember landing on the campus with her
and we didn't know if she was going to get in yet.
As we got into the car and we're pulling away she said,
Momma O, these are my people.
And I can understand why.
Just being here in the presence of such energetic,
stimulated brilliance makes us all want to be better.
So I wish I could have gone to this school
and I'm thrilled that I have one of my daughters
who does go to this school.
I love everything that happens here in the bubble.
And I'm really excited, really excited to be
a part of the Harry Rathbun Lecture Series,
because I have spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
and thousands hours talking to spiritual leaders and teachers,
and not just spiritual leaders and teachers
who have been deemed so, but thousands of people who came
from levels of dysfunction, who came from levels of pain, who
were suffering, who were challenged in their progression
in trying to be the best human beings they could be.
And they allowed themselves the opportunity
to come on our show, The Oprah Winfrey Show
and share their stories.
I am one who believes in the sharing of stories.
I believe in the process of sharing, period,
because I know that all life gets better when you share it.
And those thousands of people who
have been guests on the show and many of them
were also audience members have been my greatest teachers.
And I would say that one of my gifts,
and it's everybody's job to know what your gift is.
So when I talk about my gift I'm not bragging, it's just fact.
It's just a fact, it's a gift.
Hey, he, ha, yes.
One of my gifts that I've had since I
was a little girl growing up in Mississippi,
being raised on a tiny little acre farm with my grandmother,
is that I knew how to pay attention.
I was a great observer of life.
And I grew up believing that I was, indeed, for sure,
God's child.
It's because every Sunday I sat in our little church
down the road, a dirt road from where my grandmother lived,
no running water, no electricity.
I was saying this to my great niece who's eight the other day
and she said, it sounds like Little House on the Prairie.
And I go, it kind of was.
No running water, no electricity, but the church
is down the road from us, and we could hear the singing
as I was getting dressed for Sunday school.
And I'd always sit on the left hand side,
the left pew in the second row.
And I would listen to the preacher preach about the Lord,
thy God is a loving God, and sometimes
he would say the Lord thy God is a jealous God.
But most important, I heard him say, you are God's child
and through God all things are possible.
And I literally took him at his word, so that by the time
I had to leave my grandmother because she became ill
and I was sent to live in Milwaukee with my mother who
had other children, I got beat up on the playground
because when people would ask me, who's your daddy?
I would say, Jesus is my daddy.
Sometimes he's my brother, and God is my father.
But what I now know and have learned that my view of God,
although I call that God in a box
and although my vision of God has expanded
to be inclusive of all things.
All, all, God is all, God is law,
God is all, in all things, not just the guy sitting up
with the beard.
And now that that view of God has expanded,
I still understand how important it was for a little colored
girl-- we weren't even black yet,
not to mention African American--
you know what I mean, Harry.
A little colored girl in Mississippi
for whom there was no vision of hope or possibility,
my grandmother's greatest desire for me
as she had been a maid and her mother
before her had been a maid, her greatest desire
was that I would grow up one day and be able to do the same.
And she wished for me that I would be able to.
And she used to say, I hope you get some good white folks
when you grow up.
I hope you get good white folks who treat you good.
So my grandmother had no idea of the life that I now lead,
with good white folks who are working for me.
She just wouldn't get it.
[CHEERING]
She wouldn't get it.
She wouldn't get it, but somehow I think she must know.
And she's up around in the spirit realm saying,
Lord, have mercy.
I didn't see it.
But I now know that having that belief system, that something
greater than me was in charge of my destiny, of my fate,
that it wasn't just me alone having to survive for myself
is the thing, is the value, is the rock that has sustained me.
So my vision, my perception, my understanding
of what it means to be a universal citizen
has grown as I came to understand
Acts 17:28, my favorite Bible verse that says, "in God I move
and breathe and have my being."
So my every attempt in life has been,
since I was a little girl, to be in that space
that I call God, to literally live in the breath that is God.
To live in the breath and allow the breath
to breathe me as God.
And that is the reason I see I have
been able to manage fame, handle the success, grow in grace,
grow in the wisdom and glory that is offered by that space
that I know to be God, because in God I live and breathe,
I move and breathe, and I have my being.
In everything that I do and all that I am
comes up and out from the center of that
space, even when I didn't know what to call it.
So I have paid attention to my life,
because I understand that my life, just like your life,
is always speaking to you, where you are, in the language,
with the people, with the circumstances and experiences
that you can understand and interpret
if you are willing to see that always life, God
is speaking to you.
Now it took me a while to actually really get this
and to understand it, but once I did
I started paying attention to everything.
And one of the reasons why I can now
accept the fact that I can offer my gatherings of information
and wisdom and call myself a spiritual teacher,
is that every single person who ever came on my show-- and I
hear there was like 37,000 guess I've
talked to-- a lot of them came from dysfunction
and a lot of them wouldn't appear to be teachers,
but every one of them had something
to say that was meaningful and valuable
and that I could use to grow myself
into the best of myself, which is what all of our jobs are.
Your number one job is to become more of yourself
and to grow yourself into the best of yourself.
And so I had a lot of great teachers, as we all do.
I mean, old boyfriends are some of the best teachers.
Woo, boy I got a doctorate degree from one.
I'll tell you about that later.
But I was doing an Oprah Show about a decade ago.
One of my greatest teachers was a man named John Diaz.
We were doing a show called "Would You Survive"?
And on Tuesday October 31, in 2000,
Singapore Airlines flight 006, a Boeing 747 from Taipei to Los
Angeles took off with 179 souls aboard.
Four crew and 79 passengers perished in that flight,
a total of 83 fatalities.
There was a Typhoon rolling through at the time,
and the plane went down the wrong runway.
Now what's interesting, John Diaz was on that plane,
and he had had several, several, several indications-- which
I'll talk about later-- whispers that he
shouldn't have gotten on the plane, but he did anyway.
He got on the plane and he managed
to be one of the survivors.
And on the Oprah Show I was asking him,
do you think it was-- what do you think it was that you
were one of the survivors?
And I said, do you think it was your position on the plane?
Because he was in first class and he was sitting on the right
next to an exit door.
He said, yes, I think it might have
been the position of the plane, and also my quick thinking,
he says.
And the fact that I didn't stop moving.
So I said, you don't believe?
You're not a religious man?
You don't believe that there was some kind
of divine intervention going on there?
He goes, no, I'm not a religious person.
I do not believe it was anything divine.
I don't believe that.
I did see, he said, as I got knocked back into the plane,
that it looked like Dante's Inferno
with people strapped into their seats and just burning.
And it seemed a bit to me, as I turned and looked backwards,
like there was a light coming out of the tops of their heads.
I guess you could call it an aura was leaving their bodies.
And some lights were brighter than others.
It changed, he said, it changed me.
It gave me a new kind of spirituality,
in a sense, that I now believe somehow, I don't know how,
but life continues on somehow through that light.
And I thought, you know, I'm not a religious man,
but I thought the brightness and dimness of the auras
are how one lives one's life, so to speak.
So that's one of the major things that really has changed
with me since then, he says.
I want to live my life so my aura, when it leaves,
is one of the brightest ones.
I got chills when he said that.
So much so, nothing to do but go to commercial.
We'll be right back.
What do you say after that?
I want to live my life so when my aura leaves
it's very bright.
That's one of those moments that happens
and you know that it's bigger than a show about survivors.
Because I always knew that when I am moved,
at least a million other people might be too.
Because if I can feel it and there
are 20 million people watching around the world,
it means that somebody else also felt and heard the same thing.
That's what connection is.
So I thought a lot about that, and thought about it obviously
in thinking about and preparing to talk to you all today.
About how does one lead a meaningful life?
Because ultimately, isn't that what we all want?
We want to lead a life so that however we
transition people can say, wow, that was a bright one, that
was a bright light.
First of all, I think that it comes
from a deep sense of awareness about who you are
and why you're here.
It comes from being in touch with,
on a regular basis, the appreciation
and the holy gratitude that should fill each of our hearts
on a regular basis, just knowing what a privilege
it is to be here and to be human.
Close your eyes for a moment, will you please?
And breath with me.
Just close your eyes.
And if you will put your thumb to your middle finger
and gather your other fingers around.
And lets feel the vibration and pulse of your personal energy
as you take three deep breaths with me.
Inhale, and as you exhale just feel the vibration, energy,
blood pulsating through your body, through you.
And another inhale.
[EXHALING]
And another inhale.
[INHALING]
[EXHALING]
And keep your eyes closed.
And let's just think about this day,
this day that you have been graced to breathe
in and out thousands of times.
This day, where many of those breaths were taken for granted,
you just expected the next one to come.
But the truth is, there's no guarantees
that the next one comes.
This day, how you started your day,
what your thoughts were this morning.
How you've carried yourself through this day,
how you've been allowed to have encounters and experiences,
some challenging, some more life enhancing that
push you forward another day of being here on the planet
Earth as a human being.
Let's just think about that.
After all you've been through in this day
alone and the many days in years past, how you got here
to this prestigious, esteemed university, the choices you've
made that have brought you to this day.
Open your heart and quietly, to yourself,
say the only prayer that's ever needed.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're still here and you get another chance this day
to do better and be better, another chance to become more
who you were created, and what you were created to fulfill.
Thank you.
Amen.
Open your eyes.
That's how it starts.
That is the foundation for meaning
and purpose in your life is to bring yourself back
to your breath.
In all situations, in all ways, in all challenges,
to know that the value of just still being here matters.
It's really big that you're here.
It's really big, because everybody here
has been called from the ethers to do the will,
to fulfill the highest expression of yourself
as a human being, and to do that in truth.
How do you do that?
Well, I think you let every step you take move you
in the direction of the one thing
all religions can agree on, and that is love.
In all the conversations I've had
with so many people over the years who
run the gamut of all kinds of emotions
and emotional dysfunctions, I've come
to understand that what Marianne Williamson said is true.
There's really only two emotions that count,
and that's love and that's fear.
And in all of you are movements through life
you're either moving in the direction of one or the other.
In order to have a meaningful life you have to choose love.
And not the schmaltzy, daltzy kind of love,
but the kind of love that really counts,
the kind of love that when everything else is going wrong
and nobody even knows you're choosing it you choose love.
The kind of love that says I'm here for you, no matter what,
you choose love.
The kind of love that means you make
the right decision, even when you know the other person
is wrong.
You choose love, because love is not just-- It's a verb,
and it's everything that represent kindness, and grace,
and harmony, and corporation, and reverence for life.
So when you choose when you're in a situation where
you are mad, you are mad, and you
know they are wrong, if you can go
to that space of the breath, in God I move and breathe and have
my being, and make the choice just
to move a little closer in the direction of that which
is going to bring you grace, that which is going to honor
yourself, and by honoring yourself you can't help
but honor the other person.
I've learned to choose love over fear, to choose love and peace
rather than choosing to be right.
That was a big lesson for me.
Do you want peace, do you want love,
or do you want to be right?
For a little while I was like, I'd rather be right.
Rather be right with a little bit of love.
I am a Christian, I grew up Christian,
raised in the church all day long on Sundays.
Sunday school in the morning, church in the afternoon,
Bible school at night, prayer service Wednesday night,
choir practice.
I grew up in the church.
I would say I don't go to church as much anymore.
My church is nature from me.
My church is my life.
I experience church in every encounter
with every person I try to have church.
And I try to live my life from the tenant
of the law, the third law of motion in physics.
If I had only one wise offering for you it would be this one.
The third law of motion and all the laws
of the universe actually, are, in my mind, divine laws.
And my favorite is the third law,
which says for every action there is
an equal and opposite reaction.
There are lots of different religions and philosophies
that call this other things.
In this country sometimes we call it the golden rule.
What I know for sure is, it doesn't
matter what you do unto others, it's already done unto you.
So anybody who's seen the movie The Color Purple,
there's a line in there when Miss Celie leaves and she
says to Mr., everything you done to me--
and she holds her two fingers-- already done to you.
That's the third law of motion.
Newton didn't know that Celie was
going to articulate it that way, but everything
you done to me, already done to you.
So that is the tenant that rules my entire life.
And before the third law of motion,
which says every action there's an equal and opposite reaction,
before there's even the thought or the action
there is the intention for the thought.
And if there's one force field that rules and dominates
the meaning of life for me, it is living my life
with a pure sense of intention.
Now this came to me because I used
to be one of those people who had the disease to please.
I said yes many times when I knew
I should've been saying no, and then I would be mad at myself
for saying yes.
Anybody ever done that?
You say yes, then you mad when they come back again.
Because when you say yes when you really mean no,
people follow the intention of the yes.
Because why do you say yes?
You say yes because you don't want the person
to be upset with you.
They're not.
You don't want the person to be angry,
you want the person to think you're nice.
They do.
And that is why they keep coming back.
I couldn't understand it.
I just gave you some money, and now you are back.
Oh, that's because I didn't really state the truth
and so now you think me giving you
the money meant I wanted to give you the money
and that's why you're back asking me for some more.
So I tested this principle of intention
when I first came to discover it in Gary Zukav's book
Seed of the Soul.
I say, I'm going to see if that intention thing will work
for this disease to please, because people are always
bothering me.
So this is what I learned through intention,
nothing is showing up in your life
that you didn't order there.
If it's there, it's there because you needed to see it.
So I have a big life, and things show up for me in big ways.
So one day Stevie Wonder calls me.
I'm not name dropping, it's true, he called me.
No brag, just fact.
It was Stevie, an he didn't call to say
he loved me either, he was calling because he wanted
something, but that's OK.
And I, at the time, this was early on.
Because when I first started making money and it was
my salary or my earnings were published all over the place.
I mean the first year I was like, really?
Did I make that much money?
Oh, my god.
It was very difficult for me to figure out
where my boundaries were, because I'd grown up
poor and didn't have anything.
So it's easy when you don't have anything and people ask you
for money.
And they say I need $500, and you say, I don't have it,
because I'm just trying to get my rent paid.
It's harder when you're multi-billion dollar salary is
now in the paper, and you get a lot of friends and cousins
you didn't have before.
So how do you set boundaries for yourself?
I was having trouble setting boundaries for myself
for even strangers.
People would show up at my door in Chicago
and say, Oprah, I left my husband, please help me.
And I would, because she knows I have it.
So, don't try that now though, OK.
Don't try that now, I figured it out!
So what I learned is that oh, the reason why people
keep showing up is because my intention is to make them
think that I'm such a nice person that you can ask me
for anything.
You can get me to do anything.
I'm going to say yes, I'm going to say yes.
So when Stevie called me this time
I thought I'd try out my first no on Stevie.
Let's start big.
He wanted me to donate some money to a charity,
and I didn't want to donate to the charity,
because I have my own charities and I
care about a lot of people.
But the problem is when you have money everybody thinks you just
want to give to everything.
So every letter I ever get starts with, we
know you love the children.
Yes, I do love the children, but somebody else
is going to have to help the children.
So I said to Stevie, I said to Stevie no.
And as a person who has that disease to please I
was waiting for him then to say, I
will never speak to you again.
I will never call you.
I will never sing a song for you.
And he didn't, he just said OK.
OK?
OK?
It's OK?
He said, OK, check you later.
And what I learned from that is, many times you will
have angst and worry about things
and put yourself in a state, like someone
said this morning because her phone went off
they were mortified.
Over a phone, I said?
Really?
You will put yourself in a state when the other person really
isn't even thinking about you.
So learning that I could specifically
determine for myself what the boundaries were for me,
what I wanted to do, give my money, give my time,
give of my service, to who I wanted
to give it to when I did, that I get to make that decision.
And just because you get 100 requests a week
doesn't mean you have to try to fulfill all of that.
Just because you have all of these demands on your time
and on you doesn't mean that you have to say yes.
You get to decide, because you're
the master of your fate, the captain of your soul,
as William Ernest Henley said in Invictus.
And understanding that really changed the meaning of my life
in that I was no longer driven by what other people wanted
me to do, but took charge of my own destiny,
making choices based upon what do I feel
is the next right move for me.
So being able to go continuously to that space,
that I called the power station of God, universal energy,
the Divine flow.
Being able to tap into the space where you
and all of life and me and all of you
in this room, all beings, all things are connected.
We had a meditation this morning where we talked
about entering that space.
That space is real.
You cannot, in my opinion, have a meaningful life without
a life of self reflection, of spiritual and moral inquiry,
and knowing who you are and why you are truly here,
spiritual self reflection, to understand who you are and why
you are here.
And when you understand the depths of that
and you allow yourself to tap into the space of that which
is the force, the universal energy, the Divine flow,
and you do that with a sense of authenticity that only you can,
that only your energy can bring, you
become untouchable in whatever it is you choose to do.
So one of the reasons I believe that I've
been able to be so successful is because during the years where
we had fierce competition from other shows and other people
I would always say to my producers,
you can't run their race, you can only run yours.
And you really can only run what you're doing.
You can't even worry about your own fellow produces,
you can only run your own race.
That lesson that Glinda the Good Witch
gives to the Wicked Witch of the West when she says, go away,
you have no power here, that's a powerful lesson.
Because I have seen over the years in so many interviews
and even in my real life experiences,
people losing their power because you're
giving your power to other people.
You lose your power when you try to take control
of somebody else's energy, because you
have no power in any energy field other than that
which is your own.
And your real job in life is to figure out
how do you master your field.
How do you do that?
By consistently choosing love, by living
in the space of gratitude, and knowing
that that power that you feel from time to time
comes from a source that is greater than yourself.
Because nobody gets out of here alone, nobody.
Nobody is making it alone.
And when you are trusting when you are afraid,
when you are sad, when you are unable to make a decision, when
you are challenged, when you are moving in the direction of all
that which is fearful, it's because you're
trusting in your own power.
I couldn't get here by my little baby ego self.
When you look at where I've come from,
a little town, apartheid town in Kosciusko,
Mississippi in 1957 where there were
more lynchings of black man per capita than any place
else in the world, where you had to be off the streets,
literally, when white people walked down the streets.
Where there was no vision or hope for you
as a black man or black woman, other than being a domestic
or teaching in the colored school.
And my ability to step into literally the flow and grace
that I called God is what has gotten me here.
And I consistently mine that, because having a spiritual life
isn't something that you can attain because you already
are a spiritual life.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, "we are spiritual beings having
a human experience."
I know this to be true.
So it's not like you can go out seeking a spiritual life,
you already are one.
And the real job is for you to become
aware of the soul's calling and the spirit that resides
in, above, around, and through you,
and be about the business of fulfilling that.
There is no one else in creation like you.
There's nobody like you.
And what you've come to do and what you have to offer
is like no other, even if they're all
doing the same thing.
I met a bunch of people today majoring in human biology.
I go, woo, a lot of human biologist
coming out of Stanford.
A lot of great ones.
And although everybody's in the same class doing
very similar things, no one brings
the level of uniqueness and authenticity
that you can bring.
Nobody does it like you.
And understanding that what you have to offer,
what you've come to give to the planet
is your gift, your offering in a way that nobody else can
and how much that matters.
It matters to you, it matters to the people
that you love, and matters to our planet that you are here.
It's just, you know, it's a miracle.
It's a miracle that we get to be here.
And when I think of my life and the fact
that nobody really kind of wanted me in the beginning.
My father had sex with my mother one time.
Can you imagine?
That's a powerful seed.
Woo, honey child.
But one time, one time.
And he wasn't in love with her.
He said she was wearing a poodle skirt
and he wanted to know what was up under there,
and she showed him by an oak tree.
Now I got a yard full of oaks, I know
that's where it all started.
And to think that something as random as my mother's
poodle skirt and my father walking out
the door at the time.
She'd had her eye on him for a while, so she was working it.
To think that something as random
as that would create a little Negro child in Mississippi who
grew up and had, and has had, and continues
to have the opportunities that I've had.
I can assure that is nothing but grace.
It's grace.
It's grace because I was allowed to step into the flow of it
and let it carry me to this moment.
And I'm not telling you what to believe or who to believe
or what to call it, but there is no full life,
no fulfilled, meaningful, sustainably joyful life
without a connection to the spirit.
I haven't seen it happen.
And the way for sustainability is through practice.
You must have a spiritual practice.
What is yours?
Well, for some people it is going to church, that's
where they nurture themselves.
I believe that creativity, artful expression, prayer,
conscious kindness, empathy, consistent compassion,
gratitude, all spiritual practices
in the way of becoming more of who you are.
So I started a gratitude journal,
I mean, I was journaling since actually I
was standing here in 1970.
I actually have in my journal about visiting
Stanford and what it meant to come here as an orator.
And for years all of my journals were
filled with he don't love me, I can't
believe she did that to me, and this is what happened today.
And about the late '80s someone introduced the idea
of a gratitude journal to me.
Gratitude journaling has become a spiritual practice that
leads to an enhanced, a more enhanced and meaningful life,
and you can start it today.
And you can, I guarantee, if you did it
for a week you would see a difference.
Because every day, and I'll do it when I go home,
five things I write down that I am grateful for
or that brought me joy or opened my heart space.
And by practicing gratitude, what
you realize is, is that you wake up
in the morning thinking about, what are those five
things going to be?
Because some days there's only three.
And then you have to take a breath, inhale,
that's one, exhale, that's two.
OK, I made my five, that's all I got today.
So practicing gratitude in a way that
allows you to take stock of your life,
that's why it's a spiritual practice, because you're now
taking stock of your life.
You're assessing where you are spiritually.
And in order to maintain a sense of growing yourself forward
it requires also being in a place of knowing
that after you've done all then you can-- there's
a wonderful song by Donnie McClurkin, it says,
you just stand.
There comes a time in everybody's life
when you've actually done all that you can do
and you really want something so badly
but it still isn't coming forward for you in a way
that you feel that it should.
I know that what is for you will come to you.
I know that for sure.
And I know that many times, when it appears that something
is happening to you, it is always, always happening
for you to strengthen you.
Because my definition of power is
strength over time-- strength, times strength, times
strength, times strength.
So I'll leave you with my favorite story.
I said this today about The Color Purple.
It's one of my favorite stories because it
changed the meaning of my life and changed
the trajectory of my life.
First of all, when I was doing The Color Purple I had just
come to Chicago and started a show called A.M. Chicago.
And I had asked my bosses for the time off,
and I needed two months to do The Color Purple.
And they said to me, you don't have two months,
your contract says you only get two weeks a year.
So in order for us to give you the time off,
you're going to have to give up your remaining
time on your contract to do The Color Purple.
I wanted to do it so badly that I said, all right,
I'll give up the next five years of my contract
in order to do it.
What happened was after The Color Purple, after I filmed
The Color Purple and The Oprah Show was
so successful, becoming so successful-- it was actually
still called A.M. Chicago-- the bosses at my channel
wanted to renegotiate the contract.
And my lawyer at the time said, remember The Color Purple.
You never want to be in a position where something is
that important to you to do, and you can't do it
because the boss says you can't.
You want to be able to own yourself and make
your own decisions about what's important to you to do,
and that was something that was really important to you.
So the fact that I had not been allowed the time for The Color
Purple is the reason why I made the decision to take the risk
to own my own show.
And that has made all the difference
in the trajectory of my career.
But let me try to shorten this Color Purple
story because it changed the trajectory of my life.
I wanted to be in The Color Purple
more than anything I've ever wanted my life.
I read the book on a Sunday.
I got up, went back to the bookstore,
got every other copy of the book.
I passed it out to everybody I knew.
I was clearly obsessed about The Color Purple.
People see me coming go, here she comes,
talking about The Color Purple.
Here she come again.
I literally would walk around with it in a backpack.
I see all these backpacks, y'all are loaded down here.
I would walk around with it in a backpack in case
I ran into somebody who hadn't read it.
And I'd say, oh, you haven't read it?
I have one right here.
And as life would have it, because you're always
drawing things to you, you're drawing energy to you.
Out of nowhere, supposedly, coincidence, no such thing.
But I get a call from a casting agent saying that they're
casting for this movie called The Color Purple,
this movie called Moon Song.
And I said, are you sure it's not The Color Purple?
And he said, no, it's called Moon Song.
Because at the time, Steven Spielberg
didn't want anybody to know he was shooting The Color Purple.
So I go and audition for the movie.
I can't believe that God has allowed this to happen,
because I am auditioning with a character named Harpo.
Do y'all know Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards?
I think that is a direct sign from Jesus.
But not only am I now auditioning,
I'm auditioning with somebody named Harpo, amazing.
When all I'd really asked God, I'd said, God please,
help me get in this movie.
Help me get in this movie.
I don't know anybody in the movies.
I'm in Chicago doing a show called A.M. Chicago.
I thought I could be script girl, best girl, best boy,
whatever, the last credit on the movie.
Bottom line is, a long time passed, I call up the agent
and the agent said, you don't call us, we call you,
and I didn't call you.
I hung up the phone.
I was so upset I decided to go to a fat farm,
and I'm going to lose the weight.
That's what they called them the time.
I'm going to the fat farm.
I'm going to starve myself because now all the weight is
caught up with me.
I know they hate me because I'm fat, I said.
I'm going to go and I'm going to lose weight,
and I'm going to try to release this obsession that I
have with The Color Purple.
I'm going to try to let that go.
Because now much time has passed.
And I am on the track, running around the track,
and I can hear my thighs rubbing together.
[FLOP, FLOP, FLOP]
And I start crying, because oh, gosh, now my thighs
are rubbing together and it's raining
and my hair is getting wet.
So I started to pray.
And I started, I'm praying and I'm crying.
And I'm asking God, actually God, please
help me let this go.
I'm obsessed, I want it.
Reuben Cannon had told me that real actresses had auditioned
for that part and then I wasn't a real actress,
and that Alfre Woodard had just left his office.
So I thought for sure Alfre Woodard's
going to get that part.
And I'm running around the track praying and crying.
And the way prayer works is, you can pray,
but if you don't release it, if you don't surrender it,
it goes nowhere, it's just you talking to yourself.
So I started singing this song.
Do you know this song? (SINGING) I
surrender all, I surrender all.
All to thee my blessed savior, I surrender all.
I sang and I prayed and I cried until I could release
the pain, the suffering of the rejection
that Reuben Cannon had caused be by telling me
that I don't call you.
And then I realized, oh, I'm still carrying it around
so I won't be able to go to see the movie so I'm
going to now pray that I can bless
Alfre Woodard in the movie.
Let me bless Alfre Woodard so I'll
be able to go see this movie.
I start singing again, I surrender all.
Please don't let me have now a grudge against Alfre
Woodard who took my movie.
Let me have peace in my heart about that.
So I pray, I pray, I pray until I'm singing, I surrender all,
a woman comes out and says to me that there's
a phone call for you.
And in that phone call I was told next day,
show up in Steven Spielberg's office,
and if you lose a pound you could lose this part.
So I stopped at the Dairy Queen.
[CROWD CHEERING]
But the point of this story is surrender.
And the point of the story is I thought
I could just be a script girl, best girl, whatever.
I was just happy to be anywhere in the film.
The point of this story is God can dream,
the universe can dream, your creation can dream,
the flow of your life can dream, has a bigger plan and a bigger
dream for you then you can ever even imagine for yourself.
When I finished The Color Purple Quincy Jones said to me baby,
your future is so bright it burns my eyes.
And I say the same thing to all of you.
You Stanford students with this amazing gift
to be at this institution and let your light
so shine, your brilliance.
Your future's so bright it burns my eyes.
The glory that the universe, God has in store for you
is unimaginable to you, you can't even imagine it.
You can't even imagine it.
If you will surrender that which is
yourself in alignment with the greater self
and allow yourself to become a part of the force of all.
Take your glory, it's waiting for you, and run with it.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]