by Michelle Thomas
“Follow your breath. Follow your breath… Oh God, my heart is open to you. Come sit in my heart.” If you’re not comfortable with the word God, it doesn’t matter… “Oh, glorious future, my heart is open to you… All that is divine, my heart is open to you… All that is love, peace, comfort, grace, joy. My heart is open to you. Come sit in my heart.”
You might expect to hear these words at the gathering of some religious cult. You may not expect to encounter them on Oprah Winfrey’s website.
“The universe is waiting, willing, joyfully, gloriously, to support you.… The universe is not interested in your struggles and your pain and your sorrow. It wants you to be joyful.”
Oprah Winfrey – chat show host, actor, writer, guru – has many noble goals, quite a few of which she has achieved through grim fortitude and the strength of her charismatic personality. Through her daytime television show, her magazine, her book clubs, her altruistic institutions and her own writing, she has instigated charities that have changed thousands of lives, educated hordes of (mainly) women about literature and the value of books and has spread a message of self-determination and self-respect.
There is much to applaud in this woman. But there is also much to question.
Over the considerable number of years that she has dominated daytime TV, Oprah has developed a spiritual outlook that she shares freely. The extent of her reach and the influence of her worldview should not be under-estimated. That worldview is an amalgam of New Age, self-help and quasi-Christian philosophies that result in an inherently self-centred religion – you are the most important person in the world, and you must learn to forgive/love/respect yourself.
I don’t want to play down the good things Oprah Winfrey has done – most celebrities, let alone mere mortals, don’t use their wealth to feed the hungry or teach children to read. But when the message of hope that underlies her actions centres on ‘me, me, me’, we’re left with no one but ourselves to save us from our struggles. After all, ‘the universe’, apparently, isn’t interested.
