3 life-altering lessons I learned from Dr. Wayne Dyer

“Have you lived 75 years? Or have you lived one year 75 times?”—Wayne Dyer

If you saw “American Hustle,” you know that Jennifer Lawrence’s character Rosalyn was reading and quoting from Wayne Dyer’s Power of Intention. Never mind that it didn’t actually come out until 2004, 20 some years AFTER the time period of the movie.

The part that WAS accurate is that Dr. Dyer was definitely writing books back then. He has been inspiring and uplifting us regular humanoids for a good four decades.

As I mentioned in E-Squared, I read his book, Your Erroneous Zones, back in college and have been a huge fan ever since.

Right now, I’m reading his latest, a memoir called I Can See Clearly Now. Even though I’m only halfway through, I’ve already picked up three important fileables for my stash of “things I want to remember.”

1. All of life is interconnected. In E-Cubed, I write a lot about synchronicity and how, once we open our minds, we notice that the universe is constantly conspiring in our favor. In 1959, when Wayne was hitchhiking home from a naval base in Maryland, 590 miles to his home in Detroit, he was dropped him off at a turnpike service area in the middle of Pennsylvania. It was 3 a.m., bitterly cold and another sailor, also hitchhiking, warned him not to stand outside too long. They were both bundled up beneath heavy coats and hats and once inside, Wayne realizes the other sailor is his brother Jim, hitchhiking home from Norfolk, Virginia. Coincidence? Or the workings of a universe who has his (and, of course, all of ours) back?

2. Your mind can heal your body. While stationed in Guam, Wayne developed a pilonidal cyst that caused a lot of soreness and swelling at the base of his spine. After witnessing the after-effects of other sailors’ surgeries, a sight that made him queasy, Wayne made an appointment with the head nurse and basically “lied,” telling her his cyst had disappeared. For the next several weeks, he took to heart a book he was reading called Psycho-Cybernetics. I love that Wayne is a reader like me and that he, too, has been greatly influenced by early authors. Written by Maxwell Maltz, a medical doctor, Psycho-Cybernetics touts the power of visualization. Wayne diligently practiced the principles and within four days, he healed himself. No more pilonidal cyst.

3.The universe works in mysterious and beneficent ways. While studying for his Ph.D, Wayne is given a book called The World of Psychology four hours before he’s scheduled to meet with his doctoral advisor. It was a thank you gift from a student’s mother who appreciated his talk at Mercy High School where he was a guidance counselor. When the book was presented, he’d already chosen a topic for his dissertation. But he felt a strong pull to immediately sit down and read one of the essays from that book. The essay, “Self-Actualizing People” by Abraham Maslow so rocked his world that he completely changed the topic of his dissertation–just hours before he was meant to commit. Needless to say, that serendipitous reading changed not only Wayne’s life, but the lives of the millions of us who have been inspired by his teaching ever since.

As he says in the book, “The laborers of fate were working overtime that September day in 1978. I had given that talk to the parents because the school principal was sick and asked me to fill in at the last minute. Had that not occurred, had the book not been given, had I not felt a strong compulsion to read that essay at that very moment, my entire life might have looked very different. I can see clearly now that these kinds of almost desperate callings are the work of something bigger than myself, but to which I am passionately connected. I have come to trust in the messages and synchronistic collaborations with fate.”

So thank you, Dr. Dyer, for being brave enough to follow your calling and, in the process, to pull the rest of us along with you.

I am forever indebted.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the soon-to-be-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.