Iyanla Vanzant is back with her first book in seven years. Her new full-length book introduces the practice of spiritual hygiene.
In Spiritual Hygiene: A Practical Path for Clean Living, Inner Authority, and Divine, the Fix My Life staple transforms readers’ path of remembering, restoring, and realigning their inner temple.
Inspired by the life and death of Iyanla’s daughter, Nisa, and her own personal healing journey, this book teaches that just as we tend to our physical hygiene, our mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness also requires conscious daily care and sacred maintenance. In conjunction with the book’s release, she returns to OWN with a new iteration of Fix My Life. On Inside the Fix, Iyanla revisits 12 of the show’s most popular and impactful episodes, giving new commentary and viewers a chance to travel along with her and help heal themselves via downloadable journal prompts.
Ahead of the new year, Blavity spoke with Iyanla about her new book and what spiritual hygiene really means.
The last time we spoke, we talked about you stepping away from television for a while, and as you put it, not to focus on entertainment, but inner-tainment, and you have stayed booked and busy. You took part in the Tonight’s Conversation Live fall tour. I actually attended the DC show. How was it for you being on the tour with the panel of other experts in their fields, while having to navigate helping others and also hearing the opinions and advice given by some of your other fellow panelists?
I think Tonight’s Conversation is lovely. For me, it’s a younger market, and to see the up-and-coming teachers and speakers, it’s really a good thing. And focusing on relationships because that is one of the pitfalls of our human experience—our relationship with one another. So I’m glad that there’s something centered on there. And as you know, a wide variety of approaches were taken. And I was the OG on the panel. So I thought it was really a great opportunity and very needed.
It was definitely a social conversation starter. There was a lot of social media buzz about it. That was how I found out about the tour. Even though you said that many of the panelists were of the younger generation, when I went to the show, there was a mixture of people. There were people in their 20s all the way up to their 70s. I think it was like a multi-generational experience. What did you take from that in terms of who attended the shows?
That we all have the same issues. And even though the larger majority wants to keep us separated, and we don’t necessarily talk to each other—we’ll talk about each other—but that diversity in the audience speaks to the fact that we’re all in the same boat. And we’re all trying to get the same information. I thought it was beautiful that there was such a wide breadth of ages and genders and races. That’s what made it so beautiful. I think that’s what we need more of right now.
Now you have a new book that’s part memoir and part guide for readers. It’s your first book in seven years, and it’s all about spiritual hygiene. I personally love the title of the book. If you could, how would you define spiritual hygiene?
Spiritual hygiene is the daily clearing of your insides. The way you clear your outsides—you brush your teeth. But do you cleanse your heart? You comb your hair, but do you strengthen your spirit? So spiritual hygiene, just like it would be physical hygiene, it’s how we keep our insides clean daily—and not just when we have a crisis or a breakup or a financial situation. It’s about what we can do daily to keep our insides clean and release the congestion, the smog, and the clutter that we’ve accumulated over the years.
Now, there are a few principles in the book about what it takes to achieve spiritual hygiene, or at least get on that journey, because as you just explained, this is something that builds over time and should be a daily practice. You talk about releasing toxic emotional patterns, developing boundaries, understanding what your traumas are, reconnecting with your purpose and being intentional about it, embracing sorrow and learning how to thrive despite what life throws our way. Is there one common thread out of the ones that you lay out in the book that you find to be the most common?
Self-awareness. Be aware of who you are, what you do, why you do it, how you do it, and the results you get as a result. Self-awareness. So many of us are unaware of who we are and what we do and why we do it. And it’s either a habit or addiction or just unconsciousness. We’re not present with ourselves. We’re so busy reaching out. And what spiritual hygiene does is it turns your light within so that you can see and recognize and understand, “OK, this is what I’m feeling. OK, this is what I’m doing. This is how I’m doing. Why am I doing that? And what am I feeling when I’m doing it? And how do I feel after I do it? And what is the result it’s getting me?”
You speak a lot, and you teach a lot about patterns, pathologies, and breaking cycles, and I know for a lot of people, no matter where you are, where you come from, 2025 was a really, really hard year for a lot of people. And according to numerology, 2025 is a universal nine year in numerology, which talks about the year of breaking cycles and patterns that no longer serve us, ending relationships and the like. It was a year designed to be a time for deep reflection and personal growth. Would you say that from your work, from this year, with your tour, with the book, and what you’ve seen through the people that you’ve touched, and obviously what is going on in the world that you see every single day, would you say that that’s proven to be true?
Oh, absolutely. And that’s why Spiritual Hygiene is coming out right now at the beginning of the year. Things had to end. You can’t build a new structure if you’re holding on to the old foundation. And so many of us had cracks in our foundation and mold and moss and mildew in our foundation—of our minds, of our lives. All of the people that thought they’d be in a good government job until they retired, where are they at now? And then what do they need to do to get back on track? And how do they define themselves beyond that good government job? Or those people who were committed to, let’s say for example, DEI or whatever it was, that has just kind of been swatted away. How do you regroup? Where do you get that guidance? Where do you get that direction? All of that you can get within. It’s about your inner authority so that you can live clean and be free to express who you are. 2025 was a difficult year for many, but that’s what it was designed to be—so that we start new. And not reaching out, but reaching in.
I also love that Fix My Life is returning, in a different capacity, obviously. And in this iteration, you’ll be reflecting on your most memorable and impactful episodes with some updated commentary as you reflect on those fixes—or non-fixes, maybe—that you took part of. How did you go about choosing which episodes to include? Because all of them are amazing to me. So how did you go about making the selections?
We took the 12 highest-rated shows because we figured most people were more familiar with them. We look back on the Six Brown Chicks, Miss Bonnie. The only one we didn’t bring into the fold this time around was Jay Williams, the father with the 34 kids. And that was a conscious choice because the kids are older now and to reveal that kind of stuff disrupts their life. So we were conscious of what we were choosing, and also choosing shows that reflect what’s going on in the world today. So that as we go through the show, we’re looking at it as it was, but now I’m bringing in commentary and saying, “Wait a minute, this is what it looks like on the surface, but this is what’s going on beneath the surface, and how does this apply to you?” That’s what we do with the Inside the Fix.
We look at the show. We explain what’s going on beneath the surface. This isn’t just about a woman who weighs 600 pounds and hasn’t been outside. This isn’t just about a man slapping his wife around. This isn’t just about six Black women fighting on social media. That’s not what this is about. This is what it’s about: How does this apply to you? Where is this in your life?
Every show has a worksheet. People can go and download it. And they get the lesson, they get the fix. They get reflection questions so that people can see this isn’t about entertainment only. And those shows were done almost 12 years ago.
I like that, because it can be used as journal prompts as we enter into 2026 and we get this refresh. Obviously, people are going to want you to do a reboot now. What would you say to that? There’s a lot of fixing still to be done, and some of your former subjects have yet to achieve good spiritual hygiene themselves. So what would you say to people who are going to watch these episodes and want more outside of the downloadable documents you’re giving us?
Well, they have to talk to OWN about wanting more. When they asked me to do this, I was very clear. I said I will do it, if we can do it this way. This isn’t just about doing television anymore. It’s 555,000 channels. This is about healing. This is about reconciliation. This is about giving people something that they can use in their day-to-day living experience to change how we approach our living.
The first thing we do is Six Brown Chicks because these were six women who used the social media platform. They had a breakdown and the platform came down. But in today’s world, if they did what they did back then, it would have been a fight. It would have been canceling people. It would have been all kinds of things today. So I talk about that: Here’s another approach to doing it. We don’t always have to jump out and attack and cancel and do those kinds of things because we are embracing some pretty bad behaviors out here.