Dr. Wayne Dyer, author and motivational speaker, passed away this weekend. Dyer was known to his fans as the “father of motivation” and was a prolific and internationally bestselling writer, penning over 40 books.

Dyer’s message was simple and was incorporated into much of his writing: Think good thoughts and good things will surely happen.

Rather than being afraid of death Dyer looked to it as a beginning of a new adventure.

I read Dyer’s hit Erroneous Zones and this book propelled me on a journey of self-discovery on a whole new dimension. Dyer made me come face-to-face with the fact that my thinking alone was the main contributing factor to all the anxiety I was suffering with at the time. The book also prompted me to realise that any battles I faced were simply a matter of perception and by changing this, I could ultimately change my reality.

For me, Dyer is one of the writers whose books I could read over and again and learn something new each time depending on how open my mind is to the words at the time.

Although I am a little skeptical of “self-help” books and motivational techniques, there is no denying that Dyer’s simple and direct approach absolutely shifts something within each time I read something he has written.

Sometimes his words have been hard to swallow as he directs us to change our focus from the outside world and point it directly within ourselves. I’ve often had to put down Dyer’s books to breathe and absorb what I’ve learned and sometimes it hasn’t been until days or months afterwards that I’ve realised the powerful effects of accepting some of the truths he delivers.

One particularly significant thing that Dyer said stuck with me and is something I regularly incorporate into my night:

“Take the last five minutes of your day and put your attention on everything that you would like to attract into your life: ‘I am well. I am healed. I am in perfect health. I am abundant. I am happy.’ Say those things to yourself. Then you’ll marinate for eight hours, and you’ll awaken and you’ll begin to attract the things that are in your subconscious mind.”

Here are some more of my favorite quotes from Dr. Dyer:

“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”

“With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.”

“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”

“We’ve been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can’t do, about what is impossible.”

“When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.”

“All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won’t succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.”

“I am realistic—I expect miracles.”

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

“We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.”

“You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.”

“Before speaking, consult your inner-truth barometer, and resist the temptation to tell people only what they want to hear.”

“Who we are is the part of us that is infinite, the part of us that never stops.”

Sadly on this same weekend we lost another of the world’s greats with the passing of the acclaimed author Oliver Sacks.

Although I am not as well versed with Sacks as I am with Dyer, I have come across his work many times and I cannot help being in awe at some of the thought-provoking messages he has delivered with his words.

Best known for his book Awakening, which was also made into an Oscar nominated movie, Sacks is, in my opinion, a genius who was a blessing to all those who his work has touched.

In an essay for The New York Times, Sacks wrote:

“I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

Here is a collection of inspiring and profound quotes by Oliver Sacks:

“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” ~ from La musique, le cerveau et nous

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.” ~ from Seeing Voices

“But who was more tragic, or who was more damned—the man who knew it, or the man who did not?” ~ from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.” ~ from Hallucinations

“We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.” ~ from On the Move: A Life

“Each of us, I had written, constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative.” ~ from On the Move: A Life

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.” ~ from Hallucinations

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Rest in peace to two men who will be greatly missed, though their work will live on in millions of people for many generations to come.

~

Relephant: 

To my teacher, Dr. Wayne Dyer, on his passing.

~

Author: Alex Myles

Editor: Travis May

Image: Flickr/BK