'Pay Attention to Your Life,' Says Oprah (VIDEO)

"Why didn't you pay attention to your life?" That's the question Oprah says she wanted to ask guests "at least a thousand times" over 25 years on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

"There are many things that happen in life that are beyond our control: natural disasters, death, unexplained events," she says in this clip from "Oprah's Lifeclass." "But there are also many, many, many things in life which we can control and become out of control because you're just not paying attention. You are sleepwalking through your life."

Oprah says that to wake up, you need to start listening to the whispers in your life. "Life whispers to you all the time," she says. "Your life is speaking to you all around, from the time you wake up in the morning, in every single experience that's coming into your personal space. All of those experiences are speaking to you. They're telling you something about your life and about your circumstances.

"It whispers, and if you don't get the whisper, the whisper gets louder," she continues. "If you don't get the whisper when it gets louder, I call it like a little pebble -- a little thump -- upside the head... The pebble or the thump upside the head usually [means] it's gone into a problem."

If you don't pay attention to the problem, says Oprah, the pebble then becomes like a brick. "The brick upside your head is a crisis," she says. "[If] you don't pay attention to the brick upside your head, the crisis turns into a disaster and the whole house -- brick wall -- comes falling down."

"Oprah's Lifeclass" airs on OWN.