Retiring Into a New Life With The Tao Letting Go of Attachments - Dr. Wayne W. Dyer Below is an excerpt from my memoir, I Can See Clearly Now. It is May 11, 2005—the day after my 65th birthday. This is the traditional age at which I am supposed to retire and spend my remaining days sitting in an idyllic setting listening to the birds and contemplating my navel. My work is now supposed to be complete. I cannot even ponder the concept of retirement! Retire to what? Retire from what? A Calling To Do Something More I am feeling a strong inner push to make a significant change in my life, which I’ve never felt before. When I look around at the mountain of stuff that I’ve accumulated, I feel oddly that all of this stuff really owns me. It’s an empty feeling, and I feel trapped by it. If I choose to move, how am I going to get all of this stuff from here to where I want to go? I sit down in the blue leather chair where I’ve spent countless hours meditating over the past several years, and I ask for guidance. I have a calling to do something very big—something that will challenge me more than I have ever been challenged before. A 2,500-Year-Old Spiritual Text I have been staying in and out of Florida for the past four years and am still separated from my wife. I am not happy or healthy staying so close, and I know that it is time for me to begin writing again. Sitting in my blue chair meditating, I note a familiar figure repeatedly moving across my inner screen that triggers thoughts of having just reread the Tao Te Ching, 81 short verses offering spiritual awakening to those who study and live by its teachings. The 2,500-year-old spiritual text was given to me by my friend Stuart Wilde more than a decade ago. But the Tao has been coming up for me a lot lately, I realize. I just completed reading the book A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, and the Tao Te Ching is all over it. While in Las Vegas on a speaking engagement I joined friends at the Tao Restaurant, where the entire décor, including the menu, is a Taoist theme. I also remember Stuart telling me how much wisdom is in that little book, and how he encouraged me to study it in depth, frequently telling me that this was the wisest book ever written. Now I see an old man who is Asian in appearance, informing me that I am being called to begin living by the teachings of the Tao Te Ching, and that this will return some of my lost health and happiness. I come out of my deep meditation, and I have a certainty about what I must do. Letting Go of Attachments I recall how my wild and crazy mentor and friend Stuart once told me how he had left everything he owned behind just by closing the door and walking away from it. For years I thought of the paradox inherent in such a scene. Leaving everything seems so final, and besides there is such an attachment to a lifetime of accumulated stuff. On the other hand, there is such freedom in having nothing to hold one back—to move ahead unencumbered, to be as free as those birds I’m supposed to listen to now that I am of retirement age. I feel as if I am being directed to make this move to shed everything. I pick up the phone and call my personal assistant, Maya, who has worked for and with me for over a quarter of a century. I tell her to drive over to my garden apartment, which has served as my office and writing space for almost three decades. As she walks up the sidewalk, I hand her the key and say, “I want you to get rid of everything I own, and then I want you to put this place up for sale.” Maya is in shock. She tells me there must be 20,000 books in there. What should she do with all of the furniture? My clothes? My shoes? My framed mementoes on the walls? The photographs? The mountain of old tax records and personal papers? I tell her, “Here is the key; I am done here. I’ll tell my children that they have first choice on everything in there. The rest you are to dispose of. Give it all away.” She tries to talk sense into me, but I am adamant. I am letting go of all my attachments and heading to my writing space on Maui. I am being called to do something on the Tao Te Ching. I’m not sure what, but I know I am being told to let go, and let God. I can recall with crystal clarity the quantum moment when I came out of that deep meditation in my blue leather chair at my office the day after my 65th birthday. Something I had been thinking about in a vague sort of nonaction way became my absolute reality. The fear of making such a drastic change and letting go of so many attachments to so much stuff was gone in a moment that Zen Buddhists often refer to as satori, a word that means “seeing instantly into one’s true nature.” All doubt was removed and replaced with a certainty about what the next steps in my life were to be. When I handed Maya the key to my apartment and all of its contents, I spoke from an internal knowing, almost as if I was being directed to overcome all of my resistance and do what is associated with the recovery movement: Let go and let God. It was so clear that what I had to do was let go of the strong pull of the ego and allow Spirit, or the invisible Tao, to do what it knows how to do perfectly.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 01:00:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015