Manifesting Wayne Dyer

By Mary Grace McCord

The Human Potential Foundation, along with Clayton College of Natural Health, is hosting Wayne Dyer's upcoming May 11 lecture in Birmingham, a benefit performance for the Foundation. Human Potential recently launched its PALS program - Potential Achieved Living Sober - to provide group housing and therapy for women in early recovery from substance abuse. PALS is modeled after the successful Metro Atlanta Recovery Residences, MARR. Dyer candidly admits to battling his own demons. While not physically addicted to alcohol or other drugs, he says their “recreational presence” compromised his quality of life for many years. He has now been alcohol- and drug-free for 20 years.

Your Erroneous Zones, the first of Wayne Dyer's 17 self-help books, was a 1970s best seller on how to recognize

and dismiss preconceived or ill-conceived notions that hold us back. And his newest work, due out this fall, is There's A Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. Dyer granted this transcontinental telephone interview with Aquarius:

A: What constitutes rehabilitation from any unhealthy addiction?

WD: Choosing to consciously live your life based on the notion that there are no justified resentments. Addictions often result from resentments held inside and owned. 'By God, I am entitled to this pain. It is mine.' But what you think about expands. If you dwell on resentments that you consider justified, they grow like cancer. Substance abuse becomes a predictable escape.

A: Your own father was an alcoholic who deserted a family of three small children...

WD: ...and he was also my greatest teacher. Growing up in Detroit orphanages I was immersed in opportunities to learn self-sufficiency at an early age. Of course, so were all the other children around me. It's just that I was already aware, by age 10, that whatever happened to me, my own destiny was right in my very own little hands and in nobody else's. That's a liberating realization at any age.

Being resourceful built my confidence and not only that, when I put on my little “Oliver” act I was so darn cute that doors opened constantly (laughs). Seriously, I can tell you that I cultivated a deep inner knowing, early on; a calm faith that God was with me, and everything would be okay.

Now the deep healing would come later, from a grown-up sense of release. One day I decided there would be no more justified resentment. The day I stood at my father's grave and meant it when I said, “I send you love; I know you did the best you could,” at that instant I became free of the pointless drama of asking “what if” and of feeling victimized by something I could've never controlled anyway.