Wayne Dyer at I Can Do It Tampa 2009 - Part 1

Often, when we've been anticipating something for a very long time, the actual receiving of it seems kind of a letdown.  We tend to build things up in our head to such a high level of expectation that no mere mortal can ever hope to deliver.  Sometimes, though, the reality turns out to be even better than we could have ever imagined.  Wayne Dyer gave the opening keynote at Louise Hay's I Can Do It Conference in Tampa, November 20, 2009.  I've been dreaming about hearing him speak live for many years.  I was not disappointed.

He opened by challenging each of us to help raise the collective consciousness of our world.  In order to do that, he explained, we must change the concept we have of our Self.  All in life -- relationships, finances, everything -- is a function of our self-image.  If we want to make our world a better place, we must change our beliefs about who we are and what is possible for us.


Dyer pointed out that the reason he has been so successful is that he KNOWS that whatever he focuses his attention on will come true.  That knowledge is an intrinsic part of his self-image.  Every single thing that we say and do is reverberating out there in the world all the time.  Just because the effect is not immediate, doesn't mean it is not happening and that its results may ultimately be very profound.  He told a story about being in Manila and reading a touching newspaper account about a man who had recently been inspired to action by a book that Dyer had written decades ago.  Words have power, and they linger. Use them wisely.

We have all come here to fulfill a dharma.  Each of us has a mission to fulfill, and that mission calls us to action, and never lets go.  Herman Melville's Moby Dick is the story of a man fulfilling his dharma.  In that book, Melville writes:

“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.”  — Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. 58

Our mission, our dharma, is to find that insular Tahiti within our own heart, and to make it real.

In order to make that happen, we must first get control of our attitude.  Outside of his home in Maui, Dyer has a sign which he can see every time he leaves his house.  It says "Attitude is Everything -- So Pick a Good One."  As a spiritual teacher, he has another saying that has served him well:  "Don't send your ducks to eagle school."  Ducks, he explains, wander around always quacking and complaining, walking in their own crap, with an eternally negative attitude.  Eagles, on the other hand, soar above the crowd.  Before we can really begin to learn to walk a spiritual path, we must first learn to keep a positive attitude.  To raise our consciousness, to raise the consciousness of our planet, what we believe about who we are and what we can do must be set at a very high level.

The word dharma is a Sanskrit word meaning mission.  There is something that each of us came into this world to do.  Every single thing that appears in this universe has a dharma.  A rose has a dharma, only unlike us humans, it doesn't get confused about it.  We tend to get sidetracked from our dharma when we turn our lives and our power over to other people.  We let them pull us away from our calling, and we get busy fulfilling other people's expectations of us rather than doing what we have come here to do.

Dyer's early life in an orphanage taught him a lot about self-reliance.  Everything that we need to fulfill our dharma will be handed to us by the experiences that we have had.  All of the bad things that have happened to us, have happened to prepare us to fulfill our own personal dharma.  By realizing this, we can come to a place where we can have a sense of gratitude for those early bad experiences.  Let us be thankful for our falls, because they bring on the spiritual advances that we make in life.  If we look back on the worst tragedies that have befallen us, we can learn to see the spiritual growth that came out of those events.

When we come into this world with a big dharma, we will undoubtedly encounter large obstacles in life.  Learn to cherish them.

Just as Dyer has learned to be grateful for what he learned during his early years in the orphanage, he has also learned to look on his many years of drinking and taking drugs as one of his greatest gifts. Without that experience he would never have learned the things that he knows now.  Similarly, his divorce, although painful, taught him to be more compassionate.  Some of his best writing has come out of his toughest times.

Now, Wayne Dyer has recently been diagnosed with leukemia, and must face another one of life's storms.  He is unafraid, because his entire life has prepared him for this.  Through his year-long study of the Tao Te Ching, he has learned to forgive the people and places of his past for the harm they have done him.  He realizes now that they were only fulfilling their own dharma.  For years he held resentment for his father, who left his mother and children when Dyer was still a toddler.  He now realizes that perhaps it was his father's dharma to have a son, and to then abandon that son so that he could grow up in difficult circumstances and then be prepared teach the entire world how to be self-reliant.  For that gift, he has finally learned to be grateful for his father's actions. 

From this moment on,

I send you love.  I forgive you.

You did what you knew to do based on the conditions of your life.

Let us learn to forgive ourselves and others who we hold to be responsible for the falls and the hardships, the hurts and the betrayals in our lives.  Those experiences were necessary to prepare us for the work that we must do here on this planet.  We each have a dharma to fulfill.  In order to begin, we must first learn to keep an attitude of gratitude toward all that life has brought our way.

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This Friday night lecture was filmed for a cinema event scheduled to occur in theaters near you on January 28 and February 4, 2010.  If you get a chance, I encourage you to watch it.

What I have given you here, today, is merely the introduction to Dyer's talk.  Tomorrow, I will transcribe the notes from the rest of the lecture, which come from Dyer's upcoming book, Wishes Fulfilled.