January 01, 2019
Recorded Live, Listen to this inspiring and empowering interview with Serena Dyer Pisoni-Author, Featured Wellness Speaker, Mother of 3, and Daughter of the Late Dr. Wayne Dyer. Hear about Serena’s unique upbringing focused on self-awareness and following her intuition, Learn about her first experience with transcendental meditation at the age of five and how she practices today, Discover the reasons behind writing a book with her father and why they chose that title, Find out how she maintains balance in her life today and learn more about her newest program called Finding Your Worth in a World Full of Judgement’ and her upcoming book.
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Right below, you will find the transcript of this video.
Transcript:
(00:00) – Dr. Michele Burklund: Okay. Hi everyone, I am Dr. Michele Burklund and this is our Living Well series where we interview amazing people in different areas of health and wellness and give you the tools and education to live a healthy life. And today we have Serena Dyer Pisoni with us. Thank you so much for joining us.
(00:18) – Serena Dyer Pisoni: Thank you for having me.
(00:20) – DB: I know you’re quite busy as a mother of three, so thank you [chuckle] for taking this time. I’m going to read your background now, so let me know if you wanna add anything as we go. Serena Dyer is an author, mother of three, a featured speaker at spiritual and wellness events, and the daughter of the late Dr. Wayne Dyer. Serena is a contributor to several publications, where she shares stories on varying subjects including meditation, travel, spiritual journey in life with her brothers and sisters.
(00:52) – DB: Serena co-authored a book with her father, titled Don’t die with the Music Still in You, about her experience growing up with spiritual parents, and based on her perspective of her father’s wisdom, and provides the readers a glimpse into life, how life was like growing up with seven brothers and sisters, and Dr. Wayne Dyer as a father, too. She is a featured speaker at spiritual motivational and wellness events around the United States. Her subject matter covers a wide range of topics, but she always seeks to share her personal spiritual perspective in a way that encourages introspection and personal growth. While completing her master’s degree at the University of Miami, Serena was moved by startling statistics concerning the global tragedy of human trafficking. Although most of her work is done privately, Serena does add her voice to raise awareness via the charity Stop Child Trafficking, and she currently resides in South Florida with her husband, Matt, and her three kids.
(01:58) – SP: Yep, yeah. I didn’t write that, but it’s very flattering to hear.
(02:04) – DB: Good. And we’ll get into more in kind of what you’re doing now, of course besides being a very busy mom of three children. The first question I want to ask you is about your childhood. And I don’t remember where I read it, whether it was in your book or in a different interview, but you talked about learning meditation, and you even said you… With Deepak Chopra, you called him Uncle Deepak. You had this very interesting childhood where you developed all these skills and personal development at such a young age, or had those seeds planted then. So tell us about this experience that you had.
(02:48) – SP: I did not learn meditation with Deepak. I would just jokingly refer to Deepak, but we absolutely had exposure to a lot of spiritual teachers, different religious and spiritual philosophies, different traditions. I had many, many memories of being on Maui and having a day of lunch with our monk friends and doing meditation and laughing. And none of us when we were children could ever keep a straight face. It would always just turn into… As soon as they started chanting we would just start laughing. As much as we tried not to, that would make it worse. And then they would laugh, and it would just become a great, really fun day.
(03:30) – SP: But yeah, when I was five, my parents brought a bunch of my brothers and sisters and I to a woman on Maui to learn transcendental meditation. But truth be told, I really didn’t practice it, and I really didn’t… I was grateful to have received like a mantra and to have the tools and know how to do it, but I really didn’t start getting into actual meditation until I was in my early 20s. Other than that, I would say that for me, like one of the biggest things I did was pray, and that’s probably because I went to a Christian school just because it was a good school in the area. And for me, I learned at a young age about prayer, so it was comforting to me to almost have a conversation with God. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that, as they say, if prayer is you talking to God, then meditation is God talking to you. And I think that as I got older I was definitely seeking that wisdom rather than just wanting to unload all of my childish concerns and thoughts and gratitude. So I really didn’t start practicing meditation until I got to be an adult.
(04:41) – DB: Okay. So what interesting experiences did you have growing up besides going into meditation, maybe seeing your father meditate or. Tell us about your experience of the childhood you had a little bit. And also, this is a lot of the inspiration behind you writing the book, too, so tell us a little bit about the book then and experiences.
(05:12) – SP: Yeah, so I didn’t always know that I had a really unique upbringing. Both my parents… My mom is just as spiritual, if not even more so than my father, she was often the teacher for him. And my mom used to… As you said, I have seven brothers and sisters, and five of us were born in eight years. And as far back as I can remember, my mom who is the most devoted mother, still is, and grandmother now to 15, almost, one’s on the way, my sister’s having a baby, 15 grandchildren. And she would put a sign on her door, on her bedroom door, every single day, and it said, “Mom is in meditation, do not disturb.” And everyday for 30 minutes as children, we knew that unless we were bleeding, or it was like a true disaster, we did not disturb. And we had to figure it out. The older ones helped with the younger ones, but it was never an issue. And it was because meditation was so important to my mom, and we grew up seeing that and having that understanding that this was just her sacred time, and we all respected that.
(06:15) – SP: And so I think that that was very unique. Both of my parents meditated my entire life, I mean, their entire lives basically, but it was really my mom who I saw do it day-to-day because she was the one who was home with us way more often. But I would say that as I got older, I realized that not everybody has parents that are as different, I would say, weird as mine. I think that one of the things that we grew up hearing over and over again was to always be in awe, rather than be in a state of attachment to things working out the way you believe they should be or you think they ought to go, but rather to just be in awe of what happens and to just trust that the universe is responding to you and has your back. And another thing that was really different was that my parents often talked about miracles, and because of who my father was, and what his career was, people would write to him all the time about like these, what we would call crazy coincidences that were happening in different people’s lives. He would say, “This is all perfectly in alignment.” That there’s no such thing as a coincidence, even the term coincidences, coincidence is derived from the mathematical term in Latin, that means when two angles fit together perfectly, they coincide.
(07:36) – SP: So it’s almost like we’ve taken a word to mean when two things fit together perfectly and we’ve changed the meaning and interpreted it to mean when two things fall together by chance, and it’s weird and crazy and cool. And he used to always say, “Be in a state of awe and look for the miracles that are unfolding everyday.” And he would tell us these stories about people that would write him letters and tell him about, just so crazy stories that happen in people’s lives that were really inspiring. And so I definitely grew up with this idea, with this belief that the universe is not against us or God is not against us. Whatever you feel comfortable calling it, but instead is working for us. And that when things happen, even if they are things that seem bad or painful or difficult to get through, oftentimes, they are situations that we signed up to experience because our soul came here to grow.
(08:32) – SP: And he used to say, and this is a big thing for children, I think to hear and to really grasp, but he used to say, “Take responsibility for everything that shows up in your life. There’s no such thing as blame. The biggest destroyer of human potential is the victim mentality. But when you step into your own power and recognize that you can you can take the reins, and that by choosing how you respond to situations, you are in control.” Now that doesn’t mean that everything that happens in your life is gonna be like what you want to have happened, right? But it’s this idea that if you cannot choose the situation that you’re in, you can choose how you respond and that makes all the difference in the world. And so I think that that was something that was very different. Like I never, ever had parents talking about blame, or it’s somebody else’s fault, or they’re the way they are because it’s their genetics, so their parent told them to be this way or their mom was mean and that’s why they have this excuse. It was like a very different, just a very different attitude toward personal growth, really.
(09:40) – DB: Yeah, which is amazing. I think that the majority of adults today are trying to get rid of all these limiting beliefs that their parents gave them, from, “You can’t do this, you should do this.” And you were given the opposite, you were given empowering beliefs and about taking responsibility for where you’re at, at a very young age. And I think that’s great to have that, as a seed planted. Even if you don’t totally grasp it at that point, it’s still in your mind and then you can go back to it later, too.
(10:15) – SP: Right. Yeah, it’s very empowering. It’s also very intimidating, because when you’re a child and you get a bad grade in a class, it’s easy to say and you want to say, “The teacher just doesn’t like me. It’s not my fault. She just doesn’t like me.” It’s easy to do that, like, “I got fired from my job because my boss is a jerk.” It’s easier to take that response or have that approach. It’s much more, I think it can be much more difficult to take responsibility, and at the same time, it’s much more freeing. And so that was sort of the idea behind so much of our childhood. And my dad used to say this little anecdote, and I’ll share it with you, which was that: There was three generation of women, and they were all in the kitchen, and they were making Easter dinner, and the one woman’s friend was there, and as the daughter went to put the ham in the oven, she sliced off the end of the ham before putting it in the oven. And the friend said, “Why do you slice off the end of the ham? Why don’t you just put the whole thing in the oven? Why do you cut off all that good meat?” And the woman said, “Well, that’s just what my mother always has done.” So she goes to the mother, and the mother says, “Well, that’s what my mother has always done. It’s just the way we do things.”
(11:32) – SP: So then she goes to the grandmother and she says, “Why do you slice off the end of the ham before you put it in the oven?” And the grandmother says, “Well, when I was a kid, it wouldn’t fit. The ham, this size, wouldn’t fit. So we had to slice it off.” So it’s like a joke almost that for three generations, they’re cutting off a third of the ham because three generations ago, the oven was too small to fit it. And it’s like a silly story, but I think it’s a great reference for a lot of what you said, the limiting beliefs that we unintentionally pass down to our children or our parents unintentionally passed down to us. And a lot of times these beliefs are something silly like you have to cut off the end of the ham, but in other ways they’re, “I’m overweight because it’s just my genes and no matter what I don’t have control over it,” or, “Depression runs in my family, and therefore, that’s why I’m depressed and I can’t do anything about it.” And I’m not saying those aren’t very real things that people deal with. I’ve definitely dealt with my own issues relating to gaining weight and losing weight and depression. But I think that when you look at somebody else and point the finger for why you are the way you are, you take away the power that you have to change and to grow. And I wouldn’t want anybody to have that power over me.
(12:55) – DB: Yeah. And I think that’s amazing and I think that’s just a good skill to start thinking about at that age, too, to have them instill it in that age, so then you can’t get away with anything either, you have to look at it. Your parents would look at things differently back then.
(13:10) – SP: Right.
(13:12) – DB: What I also really liked and I think it was in your book, was that your parents helped you trust your own desires, and to listen to your heart, to follow what is right for you. And I think that is such an amazing thing to happen, to follow your intuition and to listen to yourself at such a young age, to understand that power. So can you give us an example in your own life how this happened, or…
(13:43) – SP: I have told this story before, but I will share it here again and I’ll say it briefly. There was a period of time where I was in graduate school and I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I left, and I knew that if I was in school, my parents had made the generous offer to support me so that I could focus on school. And graduate school is coming to an end, and I was getting ready to graduate with my Masters, and so I decided I would apply to law school, so I could prolong this financial support, and also prolong kind of having to figure out what I actually wanted to start doing with my time and with my life. And very quickly after I got to law school, I realized this was just not for me, but I was too afraid to quit because I was too afraid of what other people would think, like, would I be a loser or a quitter, or a failure because I left? And I was just really committed to staying, not because I liked it, not because I thought it was right for me, and not because it was something that I felt called to do. I was committed to staying because I was afraid of what other people would think, which is the exact opposite of what I have been raised on.
(14:52) – SP: And I remember I got pneumonia really bad during the first semester of law school, and I remember my dad saying to me, “Do you think that there’s potentially a connection between the fact that you’re feeling sick all the time, and everyday you’re going to a place that you don’t wanna be, and doing something that you don’t feel you should be doing, but you’re too afraid to leave out of fear?” And I said, “I’m sure there is a connection but I don’t wanna leave.” Anyway, eventually I did leave, and after I left, I felt worse, I felt like a loser and a quitter, and a failure, and I had no idea what I was gonna do at that point to start supporting myself, or working essentially.
(15:38) – SP: And I remember my dad saying to me, “You don’t have to know, you don’t have to know what it is that you’re passionate about, and you don’t have to know what career you’re gonna take, and you don’t have to have all the steps lined out.” Like, “I go here and I graduate from here, and I get a job here, and I meet this person, and I get married this time, and I have these number of kids by this age,” he said, “Let go of all of that. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is that you know how you wanna feel.” And he said, “Do you know how you wanna feel?” And I said, “Yeah, I wanna feel content, I wanna feel when I wake up in the morning, I wanna feel at peace, that where I am and what I’m doing is all right with my soul essentially. And when I go to bed at night, I wanna feel content, I wanna feel peace, knowing that what I did with my day, or the direction of the steps that I have taken were in alignment with with who I am and how I wanna feel. And I wanna feel good, and I wanna feel at peace, and I wanna feel content.”
(16:41) – SP: And he said, “Then make that your focus, make that the number one most important thing, because when you feel good, you feel God, there’s no difference. And when you are doing what makes you feel good, as long as it’s not harming anybody else, you are on the right path.” Because when you feel good, you are taking… I guess what I wanna say is when you are doing things that feel right to you, when you are doing things that you feel called to do, or when you are doing things that are in service of others, when you are doing things that you are passionate about, you feel good about yourself, and you feel good in general. And once I heard him say that, I absolutely felt more at ease, because a lot of young people, I think, go into college or… Not college, the workforce, or whatever they’re doing, and they feel like they have to have it all figured out, or know the career that they’re gonna choose. Or they have to do what they’re passionate about.
(17:46) – SP: And for my parents, it was like, “If you don’t know what you’re passionate about, let that go, just do what makes you feel the way you want to feel, and always, always, always be in service of others.” Because study after study has shown that when we are in service, when we are kind, when we assist others, we feel good. And the person who receives the kindness feels good. And even the person who witnesses the kind acts feels good. So it was definitely a different sort of emphasis than I think a lot of parents would give their child, which is, you signed up for law school, stick it out, you can be a lawyer, you have a great career, you can make a lot of money, you can retire at whatever age you decide you wanna retire. And that’s a good career path. And that was just not the advice from my parents.
(18:40) – DB: To me, is highly, highly evolved because it’s past the point of when you’re finished school, then you’re unhappy and you’re doing something you hate. They’re saying, “Hey, look at this from, what is success, what defines success anyway? It’s happiness, it’s feeling good not forcing yourself career to finish it.
(19:00) – SP: Right. And you see so many people that really love what they do, and I think when you see people like that, you can actually feel their enthusiasm for what it is that they’re doing and the way they’re connecting with people. And my dad used to always say that the word enthusiasm breaks down in Greek to enthousiasm which is God within. It’s when you are enthusiastic, when you have that joy for what it is that you are doing, it’s contagious. And success can’t help but find you when you are on the right path, but if you make your life about checking boxes and getting a certain number of zeros in your bank account, your whole life is going to be spent chasing something, striving without ever really arriving to a place of just being at ease with where you are, because there’s always gonna be somebody with more zeros in their bank account, there’s always gonna be somebody with more boxes checked. And I think if you live your life according to that manual, you are going to find that at the end of your life, you look back and realize you spent so much time focused on things that didn’t really matter.
(20:09) – DB: Completely, completely, yeah. I wanna get into more too, like for me, I guess my goal especially over this year is finding peace in no matter what situation, embracing it, no matter what’s going on externally, is finding that peace within. And I wanna hear more about your own personal meditation. What you do to find balance day-to-day, being a mother of three, juggling all these different things? How do you find peace and keep that balance right now?
(20:45) – SP: Yeah, I actually had a really incredible experience, I’ll share it with you briefly. On the one-year anniversary of my father’s passing, I was driving home from my mom’s house with my husband and our kids, and I had this really clear memory of being in the car with my dad at different points in my life. My husband was driving, I was in the passenger seat, but all of a sudden I just felt like I was back in the car with my dad, for some reason. And I was just thinking about all the different times he and I would be driving to the grocery store, to dinner, to nowhere, anywhere, and how at ease and how peaceful I would feel, how peaceful I felt at that time in my life when I didn’t have so many huge stresses weighing on me, ’cause we’ve had quite a tumultuous last four years with losing my stepson and my father and lawsuits and financial hardship, and all these different things. So I was just remembering how easy it used to feel to be in the car with my dad, and I felt like, I literally felt like he shook me and was basically saying, what I got from this experience was that he was basically saying to me, “You are doing this all wrong. Didn’t I teach you better? What’s wrong with you? You are waiting for all of the pieces to fall into place, believing that when that happens, then you can have peace.”
(22:15) – SP: And it was like I felt him say, “Serena, you have peace, and then everything falls into place.” And he used to say this, this line from Moby-Dick that I love, that Herman Melville is such a beautiful writer obviously, and he said, “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but surrounded by all of the horrors of the half-lived life.” And the half-lived life is getting to the end of your life and dying with your music still in you, right? Or it’s like, the half-lived life is getting to the end of your life and realizing that all this time you spent waiting to be happy, to find love, to go after it, to chase your dream or to pursue what you feel you came here to pursue, you wasted all of that time waiting for all the pieces to be right, before you took that leap of faith, before you found that insular Tahiti, that no external situation, no external situation can take from you. And in that moment I really felt like, I realized that I had been waiting for all of the legal things and the weight that I had gained from, that was after I had my second daughter, she was like two months old at that time.
(23:41) – SP: I was waiting for me to lose weight, I even thought that I needed to lose weight before I could start writing and speaking again. And I just adopted this really limiting belief that I had to wait for everything to fall in a place and then I could be happy and then I could have peace. And it was like, just this realization that I couldn’t believe that I had been going on for over a year, operating from that mindset, when I had been, not only raised on a very opposite one, but I was really choosing to live from a place that was just only continuing the stress that I so badly wanted to avoid. So to answer your question, the way that I am able to find peace or have that time for meditation or whatever it is in the midst of a lot of these difficult situations, is that I have things that I like to do. One of them is cooking. And when I do it, it’s almost like a meditation for me. It’s just taking a bunch of ingredients, this is for me, I know for some people it’s running, for some people it’s painting, for some people it’s just listening to music. I like taking a lot of different ingredients and making a beautiful meal out of it, and when I do that, I feel really at peace. But the other thing that I do that’s more than just a task is when I find myself adopting that limiting belief, which is like, “How in the world could I be at peace right now?” Look at, I have three children under the age of four.
(25:13) – SP: And as I told you before we got live, one of them came home and threw up all over the floor yesterday. How could I be peaceful in the middle of that when my eight-month-old is trying to crawl to it, and splash in it as fast as he can? But the truth is, is that I absolutely could be calm during a situation like that, and as soon as I realized that I was rising to the stress, that I was allowing myself to be, I don’t know, just taken over by the stressful situation, I very quickly… Especially because it’s easier for me, I think because I have little kids and they watch my reaction. And so if I see that they look stressed based on my reaction, it’s almost like seeing yourself in the mirror, but I just reset it and say, “You know what? It’s okay, sometimes these things happen. Are you okay? Let’s get you cleaned up. It’s not a big deal. Mommy’s here for you,” instead of being like, “Argh!”, which is kind of what I was starting to do when it first happened. And so I think it’s just having an awareness of the way you respond, and taking a moment when you find yourself responding in a way that only doubles the stress, taking a moment to pause and redirect. I really, really think it comes down to something that simple.
(26:32) – DB: Which is huge too. The recognizing part is key to that too, being able to see that.
(26:38) – SP: Yeah, of course, because nobody’s perfect and I don’t care how spiritual or wonderful you are, there’s gonna be times where the situation is stressful, and you respond accordingly. But I think that, the more you practice just being aware of that and just not cursing yourself out ’cause you got upset, and not thinking you failed ’cause you got stressed, but just being like, “Alright, you know what, I don’t wanna go there, I’m just gonna take a moment and re-direct.” And I really think that that really makes all the difference in the world. I really do.
(27:09) – DB: Yeah, I agree, I agree. I love that story too. I think it will help a lot of people understand that you can be at peace, you can find your calm in any situation, because life doesn’t slow down, and you can’t weight in.
(27:23) – SP: Right. And one of my all-time favorite books is Man’s Search for Meaning. I read it every year, I re-read it, it’s not very long. And it’s Viktor Frankl’s experience as a psychiatrist in Nazi Germany. He was in the holocaust and he was in a concentration camp, and the one thing that gets me every time is when he wrote that, “When you are in a situation that you cannot control, that you cannot change, you have one ultimate freedom, which is you are challenged to change yourself.” You have the freedom to choose how you respond and how you react and who you become in a situation where you have no control. And when I read his book, I’m always so deeply moved by the stories and the examples of people in these beyond evil horrendous situations that maintained their humanity.
(28:25) – SP: That even though they were starving, they gave their piece of bread to the man who lost his son that day. They would take off their coat to keep somebody else warm. It’s, these people were in a situation where it was just beyond horror and they still so often maintained their humanity, because that was the last thing that they had control over, it was the last thing that they could choose. And I find that so incredibly inspiring, to think that my situations are absolutely zero compared to a situation like that, obviously. And to think that these people maintained their kindness and their beauty and their love for fellow mankind and womankind, the least I can do in honor of that legacy is to make a point of maintaining my own and choosing to be more human, more compassionate in all situations.
(29:30) – DB: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s interesting ’cause I always go back to that. I think of prisoners of war, I think of people in jail for years and years or different situations where they’re forced. They only have themselves and what you can do just within yourself in any situation. And I think people in those situations and especially a book, I’d love to read that book too. It’s just it’s inspiring how much you can change, and how much you still have control and how you can change any situation, change your perception, I guess, of the situation and then it can change things. Definitely.
(30:12) – SP: And that’s really what it all comes down to. A Course in Miracles says a miracle is a change in your perception. And my dad’s famous line is; when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. But that’s not just a clever play on words. He actually created that line, if you will, after he read a study about they were observing these like sub-sub-sub-atomic particles called quarks, which I’m sure you’d know of more than I do, ’cause I don’t have a background in science and all of that. But they were observing these particles that were being accelerated at certain speeds. And they did an experiment where they would observe the way the particles behaved and different people that observed the same particles received… Let me change that. Depending upon who was viewing the particle, the particle behaved differently. And I think that that shows that at our most basic level, or all energy and energy’s always responding to the energy that we bring forth to a situation. It’s like that famous study, I think it was in that river in China, where they labeled the water with… Have you heard about that study? They took samples…
(31:31) – DB: Dr. Emoto?
(31:31) – SP: Yeah.
(31:33) – DB: Yeah, yeah.
(31:33) – SP: Yeah. It’s just another beautiful example of how words, just words, have energy and they have an intention. And at any time the energy that you bring to a situation, it doesn’t just change you, it changes the way you see the situation, and therefore the situation itself changes. And I think that it’s just a beautiful example of when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at literally change. You can transform things by the very energy that you bring to the thing that you’re witnessing.
(32:08) – DB: 100%, 100%. I love that, I love that. Okay, I’m gonna ask one… Well, we did talk about failure a little bit, but I read that in your book you were raised to understand that failure is an illusion, and that no one fails at anything. And can you tell us a little bit more about this part in your book and expand upon that too?
(32:33) – SP: Yeah. I think that people get really up in arms sometimes about this idea ’cause I’ve been challenged with this idea before. I think they almost viewed this as the participation trophy thing that so many people are against. They’re against everybody getting a trophy just because you participated. It’s, they’re against this idea that you can’t fail. What I’m basically trying to explain there is that when you believe that you’ve failed at something, you’re placing a judgment on the situation or the experience. And a lot of times that “failure” is a stepping stone that gets you to the next better, higher place that you were meant to be all along. So sometimes what we perceive as a loss or a failure is really a stepping stone, and it’s like in pole vaulting in the Olympics, when in order to get that body over that high bar, they first have to go really low and then they get low enough to launch themselves high enough to clear the bar.
(33:32) – SP: It’s kind of like that. It’s this idea that, with a sling shot, you have to sometimes pull it really far back. But then by doing so, it catapults the energy, catapults the stone forward. And so I think it’s really meant to be interpreted in that way, that oftentimes what we judge or deem to be a failure is really the experience that we needed to have in order to get to the next place, which is where we really were meant to be all along. And that’s the way I choose to look at… Because you see so many people, I mean some of the most successful people in the world will tell you that they were fired from their first job, or they were broken up with, and then right after they met their spouse. Or they thought that losing the job that they had been trying so hard to get was the worst thing that could ever happen to them. And then it turns out that that loss of the job or that no or that door shut in their face is really what got them to the place where they were meant to be all along. And I think that that’s ultimately the way to view all of the situations that happen in our lives, right. Is this a situation that I’m going to allow to reduce me, or is this a situation that I’m going to allow to transform me, to elevate me, to get me to the next place?
(34:56) – DB: Right, right. And I think it’s so amazing when you recognize that at the time, I feel like I can look back and say, “Oh, all these failures weren’t failures. They helped me here, here and here.” But being in that moment and failing and being like, “Well, this is leading to something else. This is an experience that could help me.” I think there’s a lot of power in that, not only looking back, but in that moment when you look at the failure you just had too.
(35:20) – SP: Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times I was upset over a breakup or something when I was younger. And now, I think, “Thank God,” because I would be so unhappy if I was married to that person. And it’s like, at the time, when I was 18 or whatever, it was so devastating. But now, it’s like, “Hallelujah. Thank God they broke up with me because I wouldn’t have met the person that I know I was meant to be with if I had stayed in that situation.” So it’s just a little example. But I think it’s very true.
(35:51) – DB: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And then just… Yeah, taking that and when you are in failure too, understanding… Looking back, and like, “Well, there’s something. There’s something with this. There’s something to be said about this for sure.” Okay. The last question, ’cause I know you’re busy too. I wanna hear more about what you’re up to now. I know you launched a six-week program called; Finding Your Worth in a World Full of Judgment, a while ago. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about what’s going on, what you’re up to, besides being a mother of three and running all around with that.
(36:31) – SP: Yeah. So my sister Sage and I launched that program in June and it was really wonderful. We created this Facebook group where people that had signed up could be part of this… Really, there was over 100 people. Maybe like 115 or 110, but it felt very intimate. Everybody, the group is still ongoing and everybody has really developed this incredible connection and friendship and support. And it was just such a beautiful experience of no judgment. If we had, I think it was, let’s say 110 people. If we had 110 people, we had 110 genuinely good people in the group. So we got such a loving experience. I think everybody did out of this. But basically we just started putting out videos into the group of a lot of the material and the topics and the things that Sage and I had been writing about in our book. And in early August, we signed with Sounds True Publishing, and our book, Sage and I wrote it together, called The Knowing, will be coming out hopefully in late 2020.
(37:35) – SP: We’re right now in the editing phase. We’re working with a wonderful editor, Alice. And we have this new project that we’re doing, which is the book. And so, once it’s ready to come out, we’ll be doing, I’m sure, some type of a book tour, maybe some speaking engagements. But right now, we’re just starting to really buckle down and get it written and edited as best as we possibly can with Alice, so that when we turn in the final manuscript, it’s ready to go.
(38:07) – DB: So what’s your inspiration? I know you probably can’t go too into detail about the book at this point, but tell me a little bit about the inspiration between the book. Was it based on this program or the Finding Your Worth?
(38:21) – SP: No. The program really was based on the book. Sage and I had both been writing, just different experiences, and kind of cool signs and stories and maybe communications, if you will, that we had received from our dad after he passed. And then we started reflecting on how there were signs that his soul in some way knew that he was getting ready to transition, just some of the things that he did. So we wrote about that. But then really from there, that was the starting point, it really took off into a direction that I don’t think she or I anticipated. But really touches on this idea that when our father passed away, Sage and I both questioned if we had the ability or the tools to get through so many of the different things that we were getting through.
(39:08) – SP: Like I said, I had a lot of really challenging things happen, all in a very short period of time. And there were times when I doubted my ability to apply his teaching and his message to my own life without him here to guide me as he would have been doing had he been alive. And in the process of writing, I think Sage and I really started to reflect and recognize that within every single one of us is this inner knowing. And you don’t have to have been raised by Wayne Dyer, and just because you were raised by Wayne Dyer doesn’t mean that it’s all gonna be perfect, and you’re gonna know how to solve every problem with a spiritual solution right off the bat anyway. And it was really this honest look at this fear that we had. Or let me just speak for myself, and I’ll say, for me, I know that it was taking this honest look at this fear that somehow I was a fraud because I was struggling so much, and I didn’t have my dad to help me through it.
(40:18) – SP: But then in the process of writing and really putting words to paper, realizing that I was okay all along and realizing that in the middle of a lot of the difficulties. One of them being that example of believing that when everything falls into place, then I’ll be peaceful, but really realizing that I know the opposite to be true. And I can choose now to find that insular Tahiti, no matter how much may be happening around me, I know it’s there, and I can go there and nobody can take that inner Tahiti from me, and that we all have that. And so the book is really about reconnecting with that and really rediscovering that and just sharing our personal stories with the reader, but also just sharing the wisdom behind a lot of these lessons that we were raised on, and exploring how we were raised with these great ideas but we didn’t really adopt them until our dad wasn’t here any longer, probably because in a lot of ways we didn’t need to. And just what that was like and what that process was like.
(41:27) – DB: That sounds really interesting, too. It’s we all have our journeys and you’ve had all these amazing seeds planted. And then it’s knowing when to use them, and how to use them, and how to see them in perception with them.
(41:41) – SP: Yeah, and not being afraid and not judging yourself too harshly, for when you realize you haven’t been using them. And not being afraid that because you didn’t grow up with spiritual parents, you don’t have them. I mean we all have that inner knowing. We really do and I think it’s just about returning home to that place, that insular Tahiti.
(42:02) – DB: Yeah. And I’m excited, I’m excited. You have to keep me updated on when it’s released and everything too. I have to have you go into more details about that next year on another interview or something.
(42:13) – SP: For sure, that would be great, thank you.
(42:16) – DB: So how can our viewers find you? Do you have a website or? What’s the easiest way for them if they wanna connect with you?
(42:25) – SP: Honestly, Instagram and Facebook are the easiest. My Facebook page is Serena Dyer, My Instagram is Serenadyerpisoni, all one word. But I do have a website serenadyer.com and the links to my social media are there and I get emails from the website. I have somebody that helps me with that ’cause I’m a little bit challenged in the area of computer. But yeah, I think I’m pretty easily accessible ’cause I’m on social media, and unfortunately, I’m on it all the time, scrolling. So I’m there.
(42:58) – DB: That’s perfect. I’ll be sure to list all of this when we have it transcribed in the article too. So thank you so much for taking the time today and discussing your upbringing and what you’re going through now and everything. It’s very exciting and very inspiring too.
(43:14) – SP: Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
(43:16) – DB: Thank you. Take care.
(43:18) – SP: You too.
(43:19) – DB: Bye.
(43:19) – SP: Bye.
