“Knowing” Dr. Wayne Dyer

Did you ever have a crush on a movie star or rock singer?  Did you imagine meeting them and making a connection?  Well, I have to confess that I had a dream of a special encounter with Dr. Wayne Dyer.  I even planned it all out.  I found out where he did his regular Bikram yoga practice on Maui and checked his travel schedule, so I knew he would be on Maui when I would be there celebrating my sixtieth birthday.  As it turned out there was a hurricane in Hawaii and my trip to Maui was cancelled, so the meticulously planned Polynesian rendezvous never took place.

For those of you who don’t know who Wayne Dyer was or about his work, he was an American self-help and spiritual author and a motivational speaker.  His first book, Your Erroneous Zones, is one of the best-selling books of all time, with an estimated 100 million copies sold to date.  He wrote more than forty spiritual books and I devoured them all.  He died in 2015 in Maui at the age of 75.

So, what was my fascination with Wayne Dyer?   He was from Michigan and so am I.  He lived in the Detroit area and taught at Mercy High School where I attended catechism classes.  I later taught high school.  He was a tennis player and so was I.  We both religiously practiced Bikram hot yoga for years.  We both had an affinity for St. Francis and both visited Assisi, Italy.  He had a large family with eight children and I was raised as one of six.  Our last names both start with “D” and “Di”anne and “Dy”er have a commonality.  He lived on Maui and I had lived on Kauai and Oahu for several years.  Okay, so I am really stretching, but isn’t that what we do with our super heroes?

I “followed” (before Instagram and Facebook) Wayne for thirty years and had all his cassette tapes, CDs, books, and DVDs.  I knew the names of his eight children.  I watched all his PBS television specials and movies.  I loved how he said that your body is just the garage where you park your soul.  My favorite quote of his is, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

You can imagine my delight when I recently discovered his two youngest daughters, Saje and Serena, wrote a book about their famous dad’s transition to the other side and the signs they have had from him.  It’s very appropriately titled, The Knowing.  I had a knowing that I was going to love it and I did!

This is what Amazon says:

The daughters of beloved teacher Wayne Dyer share their ever-evolving understanding of their father’s timeless teachings.

“This book is our song for our father and for everyone, because we’re all born with a Knowing―an inner compass, the quiet urgings of our soul that guide us. It is through giving love, offering kindness, and paying attention that we can return to our Knowing.”
―Saje Dyer and Serena Dyer Pisoni

To millions of readers around the world, Dr. Wayne Dyer was the beloved “Father of Motivation”―but to Serena, Saje, and their six siblings, he was simply “Dad.” When he died suddenly in 2015, the sisters were blindsided by grief and felt unprepared to navigate life’s challenges and conflicts without his guidance.

The experience launched them on an adventure from loss to understanding as they came to realize and metabolize their father’s teachings with a new urgency, intimacy, and power as they applied them to their lives. As their journey unfolded, they realized their father’s wisdom―“The Knowing”―was embedded in their DNA … as it is for all of us.

“We didn’t discover The Knowing,” write the authors. “We simply returned to it.”

In The Knowing, Saje and Serena share how they recommitted to the teachings of their father and, in doing so, created their own evolution of his principles that they teach today. They share the 11 lessons that cracked them open and sparked their own spiritual journey, including:

• Parented in Pure Love―the joys, surprises, and gifts of growing up in the Dyer family
• How the Soul Remembers―how to become a host for miracles instead of a hostage to circumstance
• Take Your Shoes Off―bringing stillness to the mind to open your heart to guidance
• The Geometry of Forgiveness―change your life and the lives around you with a simple prayer
• Especially Love―how to always return to love, kindness, and receptivity

The Knowing is a book for seekers young and old, for fans of Wayne Dyer’s work and newcomers alike. Here is a profound and loving guide to lead you back―in crisis, in joy, or in this present moment―to the wellspring of wisdom that always dwells within.”

For me, the book was masterful.  “The girls” captured the essence of their father’s teachings from their own perspectives as young mothers.  It was a refreshing and poignant refresher course in how to live your best life while loaded with timeless quotes and spiritual parenting tips.  I listened to the audio book first and then bought the hardcover and discovered a touching foreward from the girls’ mother about just “knowing.”

The first chapter of my unfolding book is called Knowing, after the first stage of healing your grief, which is Knowing.  Knowing that we are energy and energy cannot die.  I deliberated over naming the chapter Believing or Knowing, because I cannot unequivocally prove my knowing.  But… I “know” it, so I am sticking with it!

I may not have had an actual physical encounter with Dr. Wayne Dyer, but I am looking forward to a spiritual one!

I think it fitting that I close this episode with my favorite prayer and the prayer that is in the book that Wayne’s daughter Skye would sing at his live events – The Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord make Me an instrument of Your peace
Where there is hatred let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness joy.
O Divine master grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood, as to understand.
To be loved. as to love
For it’s in giving that we receive
And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it’s in dying that we are born…
To eternal life.