Remembering Dr. Wayne Dyer: Onto the Next Room.

 

By Sue Adair

 

“In the end, just three things matter:

How well we have lived.
How well we have loved.
How well we have learned to let go.”

~Jack Kornfield

I received a flurry of messages from my friends on Sunday night that Dr. Wayne Dyer had died.

Although we had never met him, we each felt we had lost a close friend.

Over the years, Dr. Dyer’s work has surfaced time and time again in my life with the uncanny ability to reach me with the exact message I need at the precise time I needed it. I often enjoyed listening to his audiobooks repeatedly, finding the timbre of his voice comforting.

Dr. Dyer’s self-made man life-path inspired many. He lived in orphanages in his early childhood and then enlisted in the Navy. Later, he completed his Doctor of Education degree and went on to become a high school counselor and a teacher.

But he always knew in his heart that he would become a writer and a public speaker.

Dr. Dyer’s first book, Your Erroneous Zones was published in 1976 when he was in his mid-thirties and sold an estimated 35 million copies, spending 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. After writing self-help books for many years, he felt the calling to move to writing about spirituality in the 1990’s. His spiritual writing was influenced by many great thinkers, including St. Francis of Assisi and Lao Tzu.

Dr. Dyer appeared on many television talk shows, he raised over $250 million dollars for public television, he traveled the world with a speaking engagement tour, he hosted a radio show and he appeared in the movie The Shift when he was in his mid-60’s and assisted many authors and coaches by promoting their careers.

Dr. Dyer said his true calling was to “teach love.”

And teach love he did.

He taught us what love is:

“Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.”

And what it is not:

“Fear is a big obstacle in the excuse catalogue. A Course in Miracles tells us that there are only two emotions we can experience: love and fear. If we can stay in a space of love, then fear is an impossibility.”

“Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”

He taught us how to love ourselves.

“Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.”

He taught us how to love each other.

“Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.”

He taught us that we are all basically love and that we come from love.

“We are not our bodies, our possessions, or our careers. Who we are is Divine Love and that is infinite.”

Thank you for showing us how a life can be lived so well, Dr. Dyer. Most of all, we thank you for loving us so well.

You even led us the to path to letting you go:

“Choose to see death as simply removing a garment or moving from one room to another. It’s merely a transition.”

 

Sue Adair successfully raised her four amazing children in the first half of her life, keeping her sanity working in the corporate world. The second half of her life is blue sky. Sue is a columnist for elephant journal and has been published at Tiny Buddha. Sue enjoys making things with her hands, especially spinning yarn, knitting and cooking. Her blog—uncomplicatedlife—is a travelogue for finding ease.

 

Photo: (source)

Editor: Dana Gornall

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