Happiness Becomes You

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First edition published by Atria Books, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2020

This edition published by Thorsons 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text © Tina Turner 2020

Excerpt from “Let Go Let God” reprinted courtesy of Amy Sky and Olivia Newton-John

Excerpt from “Woodstock” reprinted courtesy of Joni Mitchell

All Japanese calligraphy images reprinted courtesy of Taro Gold

Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover illustration © Vera Tammen/Trunk Archive

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Tina Turner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008398637

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008398644

Version 2020-11-12

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DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to you … in honor of your unseen efforts to triumph over each problem life sends your way.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: Nature’s Welcome

CHAPTER TWO: The Worlds Within Us

CHAPTER THREE: Anthem of Angels

CHAPTER FOUR: Stand Up for Your Life

CHAPTER FIVE: Changing Poison into Medicine

CHAPTER SIX: A Revolution of the Heart

CHAPTER SEVEN: Beyond Singing

CHAPTER EIGHT: Homecoming

Afterword

Glossary

Bibliography

Photo Section

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Other Books By

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Wherever I go, I’m touched when people tell me how inspired they are by my life story, by the challenges I’ve overcome during my eight decades on this planet.

I’m a survivor by nature, but I’ve had help, and I don’t mean success, or money, although I’ve been blessed with both. The help that has been essential to my well-being, my joy, and my resilience is my spiritual life.

That’s a big statement, easy to say, harder to explain. But here, in Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good, it is my greatest pleasure to share with you the story of my spiritual journey.

I always wanted to be a teacher, but I believed I should wait for the moment when I had something important to say, when I was sure how to offer real wisdom.

That time is now.

As I write these words, we’re in the midst of the worst pandemic of the last hundred years. From this tragedy, many of us have mourned the loss of loved ones, while many more have sadly lost their livelihoods. My heart aches as I stand with you in this new, uncertain landscape.

Even if you’re among the rare few who avoided the direct impact of this calamity, we all know that no one gets through life without facing adversity. More than ever, I believe we must choose hope, and use our difficulties to move ourselves onward and upward.

I’ve reflected a lot about adversity over the past decade while I battled a series of severe health crises that nearly killed me. Through it all, I had many opportunities to review my life and ask myself some tough questions.

How did I overcome so many serious problems? You might know the list, and it’s long—an unhappy childhood, abandonment, an abusive marriage, a stalled career, financial ruin, the premature death of family members, and multiple illnesses.

There were so many external circumstances and forces I couldn’t change or control, but my life-altering revelation was that I could change my way of responding to these challenges. The most valuable help comes from within, and peace comes when individuals work on becoming their better selves. I started that work in my thirties, when I discovered the transformative power of spirituality.

Spirituality isn’t tied to any one religion or philosophy. It isn’t the property of a priesthood or clergy. Spirituality is a personal awakening and relationship with our Mother Earth and the universe that increases openness and positivity.

My awakening began five decades ago through my practice and study of Buddhist teachings. Sharing the story of this most precious part of my life with you is a long-cherished dream. This book carries my personal guidance on how to create lasting happiness. It explains spiritual truths I’ve learned on my unlikely path to joy, from childhood to today.

Here, I reveal my greatest untold life lessons, deepest realizations, and beloved ancient principles to help you recharge your soul.

I offer you these insights so you’ll have the tools to overcome your own obstacles—even if your challenges seem as impossible as those I’ve faced—and achieve your own dreams, so that you may become truly happy. I want you to open up your heart and mind, refresh your spirit with new hope, courage, and compassion, and change the world by changing your life.

Let me show you all the wonderful ways that Happiness Becomes You.

TINA TURNER

May 3, 2020

Chapter One

NATURE’S WELCOME

Thank you for being you, exactly as you are. Thank you for the tapestry of your life experiences, which have led you to read these words I’ve written just for you.

Thank you for opening this book, so I may share with you the spiritual lessons I’ve learned through more than eighty years of living.

Each of us is born, I believe, with a unique mission, a purpose in life that only we can fulfill. We are linked by a shared responsibility: to help our human family grow kinder and happier.

I first learned about the workings of the universe from my daily experiences growing up in Nutbush, Tennessee, a small rural town. I loved spending time outside, running through the fields, looking up at the heavenly bodies in the sky, spending time with animals—domestic and wild ones—and listening to the sounds of nature.

Even as a little girl, I sensed an unseen universal force as I walked through the wide-open pastures each day. Communing with nature taught me to trust my intuition, which always seemed to know the way home when I was lost, the best branch on a tree for swinging, or where a treacherous rock was hidden in a stream.

I learned to listen to my heart, which taught me that you and I are connected to each other and everything else on this planet. We are joined together by the mysterious nature of life itself, the fundamental creative energy of the universe.

In this complicated world of ours, where contradictions abound, we find breathtaking beauty in the most unlikely places. The brightest rainbows appear after the heaviest of storm clouds. Magnificent butterflies emerge from the drabbest cocoons. And the most beautiful lotus flowers bloom from the deepest and thickest mud.

Why do you suppose life works this way?

Perhaps those rainbows, butterflies, and lotus flowers are meant to remind us that our world is a mystical work of art—a universal canvas upon which we all paint our stories, day by day, through the brushstrokes of our thoughts, words, and deeds.

Even though I’ve felt it instinctively since childhood, it wasn’t until I was in my early thirties that I began to consciously see life in this way. I’m not sure if the nine-year-old me handpicking cotton in Tennessee specifically dreamed of a day when the forty-nine-year-old me would be shaking hands with the Queen of England. Yet, on some deep level, even that far-fetched dream was always within the field of my imagination.

Who would have expected any extraordinary outcome from a farm girl like me, born between the final days of the Great Depression and the first days of World War II? Nevertheless, my life’s path has truly been like a lotus flower, blooming over and over again, against all odds, emerging stronger each time.

No matter where you’re born or who your parents are, it seems to me that we all start out with a mixture of circumstances, with both darkness and light. Some of us experience more of one than the other. And I believe there is an inextricable link between us and our ancestors, that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that encountering adversity, as I have, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s what we make of it, how we use it to shape ourselves and our futures, that ultimately determines our success and happiness.

The thicker the mud, the stronger the lotus that blooms from it, rising above the muck to reach the sun. The same is true for people. I know, because I did it. And I know you can, too.

How did I do it? That’s what I want to tell you.

My hometown of Nutbush is nestled along the honeysuckle-lined roads of West Tennessee’s Haywood County. Haywood was and still is a quiet agricultural area with deep religious roots. It is home to Tennessee’s oldest Jewish synagogue, built in 1882, as well as the places where members of my family have long worshipped, the Spring Hill Baptist Church and the Woodlawn Baptist Church, both founded by an emancipated slave named Hardin Smith. Secretly educated by a plantation owner’s wife, Smith grew up to become a respected preacher and established the congregation that became the Woodlawn Baptist Church, where my grandfather and father later served as deacons.

Thanks to Reverend Smith’s emphasis on education, by the turn of the twentieth century, our county had the highest literacy rate among the Black population of Tennessee. One of the schools Reverend Smith founded for Black children became Carver High School, which I attended. He also organized Black musicians and singers, providing opportunities for them to perform, and laid the foundation for the region’s strong musical traditions, from which I later benefited.

I arrived at the end of 1939, safely delivered in a windowless basement relegated to “colored” women’s maternity at the county hospital. My parents named me Anna Mae, the only name I was known by until adulthood.

My father, Richard Bullock, was the managing sharecropper for a white family called the Poindexters. We had our own four-room home and an acre-size garden filled with vegetables, next to the Poindexters’ home and farm.

White folk rarely welcomed Black people to their homes, but my older sister, Alline, and I were often invited to enjoy lemonade and snacks with the Poindexters. It was only when they had other white people around that we knew we couldn’t go in.

Racism was common, and like many southern counties during the mid-twentieth century, ours was not immune to violence. The year after I was born, Tennessee’s last known lynching happened not far from our home.

A man named Elbert Williams was one of our area’s first civil rights organizers. In 1940, Mr. Williams tried to register Black voters—a right that had long been denied. He soon paid the ultimate price for that brave act. One horrible night, he was abducted from his home by a sheriff and a gang of other white men who brutally ended his life.

Mr. Williams’s murder silenced the civil rights movement in our county for two decades.

I sometimes saw that sheriff, still on duty despite his crimes. People didn’t talk about it. Things like that simply weren’t discussed. There was a fragile calm among the segregated citizens of Haywood County that no one wanted to disturb.

Although racism was rampant, I had more immediate things to worry about, starting with the early realization that my parents couldn’t stand each other. They fought constantly, locked in a hopeless battle neither could win. Their unhappiness cast a long shadow over my childhood.

What an endless chain of unhappiness prejudice forges.

—LENA HORNE

•

“Love thy neighbor” is a precept which could transform the world if it were universally practiced.

—MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE

My mother, Zelma, was affectionate with my sister, but it was different for me. I knew I was the child my mother never wanted. That’s a heavy burden for a little girl to bear.

My parents tried to get away from Nutbush a number of times, hoping that a change of scenery would give them a new life, and they left their young daughters behind. When I was only three, they went to work at a military base in Knoxville, more than 350 miles away. We didn’t have a phone, so we had no contact while they were gone. It would have felt closer if they had moved to the moon, since at least I could see the moon.

Though my mother was always emotionally distant from me, her side of the family was warm and caring. I adored my fun-loving grandmother, Mama Georgie, and my cousin Margaret, who was three years older than me. Margaret became my first mentor, best friend, and soul sister, and in some ways she was even a mother figure—including having “the talk” with me as I entered adolescence, the only person who did.

When my parents went away, they sent Alline to live with Mama Georgie and left me with the other side of our family, my paternal grandparents, Mama Roxanna and Papa Alex, who were strict and somber Bible-thumping folks. It was agony for me. I was high-spirited and playful. I loved to run in the fields, get down in the dirt, yell to my friends, dance through the house, let my hair fly free. Not one bit of my natural rambunctiousness was allowed in their house.

Mama Roxanna forced me to go to church, and my lack of enthusiasm was compounded by the sweltering heat inside the building. There was no air-conditioning, of course, and it was baffling to my young mind that everyone got all dressed up just to go sit in a hot oven and listen to someone lecture. I never understood what the preacher was talking about, since no one bothered to explain it to the children. For me, sitting there, drenched in sweat, it was just a tedious exercise in boredom.

At one point, my parents let us visit them in Knoxville. While we were there, we attended a Pentecostal church, which was a very different experience from our subdued Baptist church. The “sanctified” church could get wild and turned out to be much more enjoyable for me. People would sometimes “get the Spirit” and start yelling, dancing, and singing in the aisles. It was definitely action packed, which was more my style. I’d join right in, singing and dancing.

One day I got so carried away that I danced right out of my skirt. Some folks would even fall down and go into convulsions. I just figured they must have gotten too excited. Although the Pentecostal experience didn’t resonate with me any more than the quieter Baptist services, it was a real spectacle. And it was fun!

Back home, Baptist Sunday school became obligatory. Sometimes it was pleasant because it was nice to be with other children. But when I finally got old enough to join the choir, that was my sweet spot. I was eight or nine, and the youngest singer in the group. The rest were teenagers. Even at that young age, I had the biggest voice in the choir and would often be chosen to sing a solo. Since we had no telephone at home, I had learned to broadcast my voice to friends and neighbors without hurting my vocal cords, which helped my voice grow strong, a talent that came in handy later in my life.

My parents returned to Nutbush when I was five, so I was freed from the stifling environment at my relatives’ place. But our home wasn’t much better because my parents were still fighting tooth and nail.

Whenever they’d go at each other, I’d run out of the house to find a quiet place to calm my heart. Sitting by a stream, I’d watch dragonflies hover over the water, swoop onto the surface to quench their thirst, then zoom off, disappearing as quickly as they had appeared.

I daydreamed about growing my own wings so I could fly off to a happier place—a home where nobody fought and I could be loved for being myself.

That was just a dream. When I was eleven, my mother left for the last time and never came back. She moved to St. Louis. Never sent a single letter. Nothing. I waited for the mail to come each day, hoping she would remember me, but I didn’t see her again until Mama Georgie’s funeral, more than five years later.

Soon after I turned thirteen, my father also left. His destination was Detroit.

Go within every day and find the inner strength so that the world won’t blow your candle out.

—KATHERINE DUNHAM

•

Everyone has a gift for something, even if it is the gift of being a good friend.

—MARIAN ANDERSON

At first, my father made an effort to stay in touch, and he’d send a little money every now and then to help my relatives take care of me. But he never came back. I was a child with no parents and no real home.

Thankfully, I still had my cousin Margaret.

Margaret and I were each other’s sounding board and safe haven, sharing our dreams and confiding our secrets. When I was fourteen, she told me a secret I never expected to hear: She was pregnant. This news confused me, because Margaret was always so careful in her life. She was only seventeen and didn’t fool around with boys as much as some other girls did, and her biggest dream was to attend college.

She confided in me that she had decided a baby and college weren’t compatible, so she was determined to terminate the pregnancy. She didn’t know how, though, so she tried old-time home remedies, like drinking warm concoctions of black pepper, in vain attempts that only resulted in an upset stomach and a foul taste in her mouth.

Tragically, at the end of January 1954, just a week after she revealed her biggest secret to me, Margaret died in a terrible car accident.

I couldn’t believe it. Not my Margaret. The light of my life. I was devastated. Lost. Alone.

Death was something I hadn’t thought much about before Margaret’s passing. I had gone to Papa Alex’s funeral when I was eleven, but honestly, when I saw him lying still in the casket, he just looked like he was in a tranquil sleep.

Losing Margaret was very different. Nothing had ever struck me as hard.

I had witnessed the circle of life and death in nature, where plants and animals came and went in their own time. And I had heard about deaths in our community, young and old people, dying in all sorts of circumstances. But this time it was very personal.

After Margaret died, there was a lot of talk about God’s will. Our community was deeply Baptist, after all, and that was a natural response to the sudden tragedy that killed her and a few other young people, including my half sister Evelyn (my mother’s child from a previous relationship). Thinking about the mysteries of life and death, I didn’t have a problem with the concept of an underlying universal force. But the idea of a bearded old white man in space, monitoring activities here on Earth, felt unrelatable and just plain unreal.

I couldn’t verbalize my own vision of God then, as the vocabulary hadn’t come to me yet. But from the youngest age I can recall, I knew I could experience “Godliness” in Mother Nature. Something told me I had a piece of God in my heart, even if the traditional beliefs of my family and the way they practiced religion weren’t right for me. I wished they practiced what they preached and lived more positive lives.

After Margaret’s death especially, I knew I’d have to find my own way to carry on, to construct my own path to happiness.

I spent a lot of time outside, where I could think in peace. Nature was the only place where I always felt welcome and enjoyed a sense of belonging—my truest childhood home. Whether sitting in the garden at night staring up at a star-filled sky or lying in the noon shade of a tulip tree, watching butterflies glide by, I felt the healing force of love everywhere in nature, and I soaked it in.

I didn’t let my unstable family situation prevent me from finding enjoyment in the world around me. In those days, Nutbush and other areas north of Memphis were a mecca for local and traveling gospel, blues, and jazz musicians. They performed in our churches, cafés, and juke joints and became my first musical influences. I loved listening to all different types of music, and I did so every chance I got. We didn’t have a record player, but we always had a radio, and that was good enough for me.

I enjoyed singing in the church choir and occasionally performed with Mr. Bootsie Whitelow, a popular Nutbush native, and his String Band. During high school, my music teacher even had me learning to sing opera. I had other interests as well, and excelled at cheerleading, track, and basketball.

But most of all, I loved movies. Every chance I got, I’d go to our local movie theater, often memorizing scenes on the spot and reenacting them for my family when I got home. After I saw Little Women, I enjoyed acting out the scene where Jo and Amy (played by June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor) pretend to faint. One time, I did such a convincing job of falling lifeless to the floor that my sister got scared, thinking I’d actually passed out!

Fantasies about the silver screen often got me through difficult times. When I was working in the fields, picking cotton and strawberries in the oppressive heat, I would imagine a far-off paradise where I could live like the elegant movie stars did. I had no idea where this magical “Hollywood” was, but I knew, deep down inside, that I wasn’t destined to stay in the farmlands. Even then, I believed that my circumstances did not limit my possibilities. I knew that someday I’d find my way out into the world.