Archive for the ‘Personal Growth’ Category
Dr. Wayne Dyer has always believed in following your passionate life purpose. He himself took a big chance to find his life purpose when he left his tenured teaching position at St. John’s University in New York to spend his time pitching his first book—Your Erroneous Zones. Here’s the story of that risky move as he explains it in his memoir, I Can See Clearly Now:
New York, 1977
My world has changed dramatically since I made the decision to go it alone as a self-employed writer. I have spent the past year working full-time to promote my first book for the general public, Your Erroneous Zones.
On a joint conference call with my agent, Artie Pine, and my editor, Paul Fargis, I am told that there are two pieces of news that are going to blow me away. Continue Reading
“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”
— Buckminster Fuller
Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is. Perhaps you created something absolutely astonishing and you even amazed yourself. Then there are the moments when you make exactly the right shot in a round of golf or a tennis match and you realize with immense pleasure what you’ve just accomplished. You are a genius.
There is no such thing as luck or accidents in this purposeful universe. Not only is everything connected to everything else, but no one is excluded from the universal Source called intention. And genius, since it’s a characteristic of the universal Source, must be universal, which means that it’s Continue Reading
The Start the New You Now ultimate webinar is 7 days of inspiration and guidance all in one place. Hay House is bringing you over 50 hours of enlightening conversations from top teachers. Learn from our personal-growth experts on topics ranging from diet & health to motivation, meditation and organization. Whatever your personal goals are, our experts are here to guide you to improve all areas of your life – now’s the time to get started! Join us from January 11th to 17th to listen to all of these conversations for FREE. It takes place right in front of your computer or mobile device, click here for the full lineup. Continue Reading
We are so proud to introduce to you the first-ever Hay House Global Online World Summit, premiering June 1st to 10th, 2013.
Join over 100 World-Renowned Teachers, including Dr. Wayne Dyer in this FREE Online Event as they share their stories, powerful exercises and advice on how to live your best life!
As a special Thank You to the Wayne Dyer online community, and to celebrate the tradition of learning and sharing, Hay House has created a new, free, online event just for you: the Hay House World Summit.
Listen in June 1st-June 10th to over 100 hours of incredible wisdom as our experts share their stories, powerful exercises and practical advice on how to live your best life. Popular self-help authors and visionary teachers from an array of fields will sit down for enlightening conversations hosted by industry professionals and fellow authors.
Check out who’s joining in the conversation. Click here for the full schedule and daily happenings! Continue Reading
One of the most common questions people ask me is some variation on: How can I overcome fear and take a chance? A caller to my radio show, for example, couldn’t decide whether to take a job in a new city. It was a good job, but it would require him to leave his life-long home. We all fear change and the risks it carries, but I have to say that everything significant I’ve ever experienced has involved change. Our soul wants to expand and grow. When we stay with the familiar, just because it is familiar, we are responding to a fear of failure that doesn’t support our growth.
I suggest you consider a radical idea. What if there is no such thing as failure? Failing is a judgment that we humans place on a given action. Rather than judgment, substitute this attitude: You cannot fail, you can only produce results. Then the most important question to ask yourself is, “What do you do with the results you produce?” It is better to jump in and experience life than to stand on the sidelines fearing that something might go wrong.
Consider for a moment what your original nature is like. As an infant, before you were ever subjected to the conditioning that leads you away from risks for fear of failing, your nature was programmed to learn how to walk. For a while you just laid down, then your nature said, “Sit,” and you did. Then your nature commanded, “Crawl,” and you obeyed. Continue Reading
It’s all perfect…and so are you!
I love it when Louise Hay talks about how she discovered her own wisdom. As an abused child who didn’t have the support she needed to finish high school, she grew up with the notion that she wasn’t very smart. Looking at her today, it’s impossible not to smile at such a misguided idea. She discovered to her amazement and delight that she was smart indeed and capable of learning anything she needed and wanted to know—and of teaching others how to appreciate their own self-worth, too. Are you someone with the same ingrained notion that Louise had to heal from? Continue Reading
When teachers and parents ask what they can do to help young people get off to a healthy start in life, I say, “Set a good example.” Let your respect and love be seen and felt. It works for children just as it does for all of us. Everything depends on what you believe about yourself. If you want to change your life, you have to change your self-concept. If you want to move to a higher place, you need to change your belief about what is possible for you and elevate your beliefs about yourself. Young people are forming their self-image every day—based largely on the examples of self-respect and self-esteem they see in the important people in their lives. What they believe about themselves and their lives is shaped by what they see and feel. We can make sure they see love.
Of all the beliefs that each one of us own, none is more important than the ones we have about ourselves. Our beliefs about ourselves are the single most telling factors in determining our success and happiness in life. A child’s self-image is a direct result of the kind of reinforcement he or she receives on a daily basis. Do they have the confidence that they can successfully complete any task before they attempt it? Do they feel good about the way they look? Do they feel intelligent? Do they think of themselves as worthy?
As you think the self-esteem of children, keep in mind that the barriers we erect to our own growth and happiness almost always are internal barriers. The lack of love in a person’s life is the internal fear that he or she does not deserve love. The absence of achievement is most often due to a genuine belief that one could never achieve at a high level. The absence of happiness stems from Continue Reading
The amazing wisdom of the Tao offers us principles for parenting if we look at the way Lao-tzu describes our power to lead by example. The 65th verse of the Tao Te Ching advises us to live by staying simple-hearted, “Content with an ordinary life, you can show all people the way back to their own true nature.” Being open to the guidance of your own true nature will free others to do the same. And “when they know they do not know, people can find their own way.” Parenting shouldn’t mean imposing rules or impressing others with your supposed intelligence and superiority. Refuse to convey superiority. Show others how to live from the Tao perspective by being willing to admit that you don’t know what’s best for them, nor do you even know with any degree of certainty how your own life should go. Let other people know that you’re willing to ask for guidance. Show them that you’re not “in charge,” either of them or of what happens to you. Allow them to see a man or woman who’s humble, lives peacefully in the cycles of life, and stays simple-hearted.
Be willing to say to those in your charge, “I don’t know.” This phrase is a symbol of strength rather than weakness, so use it freely. When you teach others to do the same, they’ll begin to allow their highest selves to be guided by the Great Way. Keep in mind that nature never forces anything to grow, but is silently and invisibly ever present. Do the same to the best of your ability by not forcing yourself and your ideas on anyone (with sensible precautions for those too young or too immature to take on adult responsibilities).
Practice keeping your life simple and uncomplicated. Model this behavior for those you feel obliged to lead. Don’t “pole-vault over mouse turds”—dispose of those rodent droppings with a simple tissue and dump them into the garbage! Keep it simple. Spend a day without the label of “parent” or “boss” and put yourself on an equal footing with those who usually look to you for direction. Think of yourself as one of those you lead—in fact, pretend that you are him or her for a day. I’ve found that when I practice this with my children, they respond according to their best and true nature. For example, when I simply say to my teenage daughter, “I know that you’re perfectly capable of being responsible and sensible while I’m out of town, and I love that about you,” I remove the “authoritarian parent” label and treat her the way I’d want to be treated. When this becomes the norm, it’s obvious that Lao-tzu is correct: “The simplest pattern is the clearest” when showing people the way to their own true nature.
A recent caller to my radio show began by telling me what a terrible guy he was— addicted to procrastination. He said he was paralyzed and couldn’t do any of the things he wanted to do. Of course, I immediately thought, don’t believe everything you think! Isn’t procrastination really just an illusion? You can stop putting pressure on yourself. You don’t have to do any of those things you’re worried about. The evidence is that you haven’t done them and you’re still here, aren’t you? If you really wanted to do something, wouldn’t you simply do it? Procrastination is one of those excuses, born of fear, that we use to keep ourselves stuck.
Let’s say that you now want to push past the illusion and get started. First, forgive yourself for doubting that you can achieve whatever you set out to accomplish. Give thanks for the wonderful gifts you are now ready to share with the world. According to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, acknowledged as one of the true giants of creativity, the way to get something done is to start it. The act of beginning an enterprise, no matter how small a beginning it is, ignites power. We’ve all had a brush or two with procrastination, but the story doesn’t end there. I have used such helpful tactics as putting a date on the calendar when my task will be completed, “assigning” myself to sit at my desk until the job is done, Continue Reading
I consider Ralph Waldo Emerson one of my greatest teachers even though he passed on well over a century ago. Emerson was the founder of the Transcendental movement in America; his philosophy emphasized the all-pervading spirit of the universe, wherein God existed everywhere. To understand the greatness of Emerson, it is important to remember that during his period of history, spiritual guidance was the exclusive domain of the established religions. Emerson was challenging the dogma and rhetoric of traditional religion. In perhaps his best-known and most frequently quoted essay, “Self-Reliance,” this provocative American author examined the basic tenets of what it means to be your own person. I can still remember the impact that the essays “Self-Reliance” and “On the Necessity of Civil Disobedience”—by Emerson’s contemporary Henry David Thoreau—had on me when I was a seventeen-year-old high school student.
People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules. The rules are not reasons to live a certain way. It is the integrity of your own mind that you must first consult if you are ever to experience this quality of self-reliance. This lesson applies to all areas of your life, from making decisions for yourself about how you spend your free time, to how you will dress, to what you will eat, to how you will raise your children. Don’t let the voices within you grow faint and inaudible in favor of that societal conspiracy. Be yourself and run your life by what you know to be right and in harmony with your spiritual essence. That is, by the integrity of your own mind. Continue Reading
Perhaps the greatest lessons of my life have revolved around the slogan of the recovery movement: “Let Go and Let God”—a notion that involves relinquishing ego’s attachment to, or fear of, something. The single most pronounced attachment for most of us during the morning of our lives is the attachment to being right! There’s nothing ego loves more than to be right, which makes it an important and satisfying attachment to practice letting go of.
I seriously doubt that there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t engaged in arguing about trivial matters that turned into disagreements, which had a net effect of following a road of self-righteous anger. And all of it probably seemed to be for no reason other than the need, the desire, to be right! Eventually we may look back with wistful amusement, realizing now that our fear of actually being wrong was so strong then that another person’s opinion could energize this unwanted feeling. Ego’s strategy was to be right no matter what, a highly successful maneuver that effectively distracted us from genuine purpose. Letting go of an attachment to being right can be a fairly simple exercise.
So how can you choose to let go and let God, in a quest to eliminate an attachment to being right? You can handle it with these simple words spoken to another—You’re right about that. It stems from a soulful decision you make that when given the choice between being right and being kind—you’ll always choose to be kind. Saying “you’re right about that” will gradually open the entry point to a road that leads through letting go and letting God to experiencing a more significant life.
Part of the meaning we gain by letting go is a movement toward real contentment. Most stress in our lives results from hanging on to beliefs that keep us striving for more, because ego stubbornly believes we need it. When we make the shift away from attachment, the influence of our ego fades. We replace attachment with contentment. Chasing and striving—and then becoming attached to what we chased after—is a source of anxiety that feeds Ambition, but it won’t satisfy the need for Meaning at our soul level.
Are there any life problems that seem beyond our power to overcome? Let’s think about that for a minute. In the face of life-threatening problems like alcoholism and drug addiction, excuses for feeling powerless like “It’s too difficult,” “It’s too big,” and “I’m not strong enough,” might spring to mind. Yet we know people who have beaten even these deadly and crippling problems. Two years ago, I had dinner in New York with Patti Davis, daughter of President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. Patti had just published an essay on Newsweek’s “My Turn” page about her struggle with cocaine addiction and how grateful she would have been for the rehabilitation programs that celebrities today so often treat with utter disrespect. It’s one of the most honest essays I’ve ever read. At our dinner, Patti was celebrating five years of freedom from drugs. She acknowledged how powerful the comfort and pleasure of cocaine had been in her life, but she knew she would never go back to using it. How did she manage to stop? It wasn’t a reluctance to continue disappointing herself or her parents that finally made the difference. She stopped because she no longer wanted to disappoint God, that highest part of herself that all of us share as our connection to the Divine. We all have a place of well-being, bliss, joy, and perfection within us. We are called to be there and from that empowering place we can reach out as Patti has done to help others find it, too. With God, nothing is impossible, and when we align with Spirit, no excuses are needed.
Namaste,
Wayne