Serena Dyer and Saje Dyer: The Knowing
Saje Dyer and Serena Dyer Pisoni, daughters of beloved spiritual teacher and motivational speaker Wayne Dyer, share their voyage from lost to understanding, how they learned, forgot, and rediscovered their knowing, and how you can discover yours as well.
An Interview with Serena Dyer and Saje Dyer: The Knowing
Interview by Sandra Sedgbeer
To millions of readers worldwide, Dr. Wayne Dyer was a beloved spiritual teacher and a motivational speaker. But to Serena Dyer and Saje Dyer and their 6 siblings, he was simply a dad. So, when he died suddenly in 2015, the sisters were blindsided by grief and felt unprepared to navigate life’s challenges and conflicts without his guidance.
That experience launched them on an adventure as they came to realize and metabolize their father’s teachings with a new urgency, intimacy, and power as they applied them to their lives.
Sandie Sedgbeer: So, what inspired you to write this book?
Saje Dyer: I can start by saying that when our dad passed away suddenly in 2015, as you just said…the night that he passed away, I found myself so grief-stricken, unable to sleep and I was in the bathroom just sobbing. Suddenly, I felt this urge to start writing, and I got out my laptop and wrote something that I have sort of forgotten about, and a few days later, I saw it again and thought, wow! That was actually pretty poignant especially considering the state that I was in.
I continued to go with that, and writing became an outlet for me. I felt inspired as more and more synchronicities, signs, and miraculous events took place in the days, months, and weeks and continued to occur after my dad passed away. It turns out that Serena was also being called to write. I didn’t even know that at the time. At a certain point, we began to compare notes and thought about—are we writing books? We realized that a lot of our writing has some common themes and ideas. It sort of fit together very naturally, so we decided to combine our writing and put this book out. It was a long journey, but that was the start of it.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Well, the book is filled with all kinds of fascinating synchronicities and pieces of evidence. The type of irrefutable evidence that you can’t just dismiss as coincidence. Were you nervous about writing a book? After all, your father had big shoes to fill. Did you worry that people would judge and compare you?
Serena Dyer Pisoni: I can say I was not nervous about that. I had written a book with him while he was alive—it came out in 2014, we’d written a book together, and I have to be honest—I never set out to fill his shoes, and I don’t’ think Saje did either. I think we both wanted to share our experiences. The older we got, the more we understood that we had a unique upbringing, to say it simply. As a result of that upbringing, we had a unique way of looking at his death. I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised by the result that we have with this book.
Saje Dyer: I felt called to write this book, and my dad said to both Serena and I on different occasions that he thought both of us would do work similar to his. He brought us on stage with him at other times, and I also wrote a children’s book, so this felt more like dharma, an exciting thing. I’m just talking about my own journey. The intimacy that I shared with my dad as being his daughter, I think, brings an exciting perspective to what we write about.
Sandie Sedgbeer: I can’t think of many people who have not been impacted by one or more of your father’s books. More years ago, than I care to remember, it made a massive impact on me at that time. So, I think it’s interesting to have you two, who live so closely, knew him so well, not only share some of the stories of your growing up. So that would give us this inside look at your family in a way and how you kind of interpreted some of those experiences.
Serena Dyer Pisoni: That was always the goal. To share our own experiences and hope that it touches someone else and maybe helps someone else find peace in their own journey and in their own grief for their own experience.
Saje Dyer: That’s what our book explores, too. That introduction that you presented us with was a returning to our knowing, a remembering, there was a point of forgetting, and we had to remember and go back to ourselves. It’s also something I have to do every day, and we all have to do. We all have egos that get in the way, so it’s a remembering, a returning to that place daily, hourly, whatever it takes.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Whenever we read about somebody like your dad in the kind of position that your dad occupied, one wonders, are they really like that at home? Reading your stories about your early years, it seems that your life was idyllic. Your parents were paragons. They were the kind of wise, unconditionally loving guides that every child would wish to have. There were 8 of you—sounds a little bit like the Waltons, but of course, you had your own struggles just like everybody else did.
I mean, one of the parts that really touched me was how you talk about your parents, the experience they went through when Saje was 11 and Serena was 16. Of course, you had a harrowing experience, but what came out of that experience for you was that it genuinely defined marriage. Do you want to say a bit of that?
Serena Dyer Pisoni: That experience you’re mentioning is when our parents said they were going to get a divorce. That really blindsided us as children. There was a period when they were both really struggling and really suffering and fighting. Of course, they weren’t fighting in front of us, but it was clear that something changed in their relationship, and resentment took hold.
During that time, we were with our dad in Maui for the summer. During that time, it was very alarming to see him become someone who didn’t want to get out of bed, somebody who is struggling with depression and trying to make sense of how his marriage had failed.
I can tell you that watching that was scary but what came of that, what came out of that was a decision that both of them made together to return to love and that even if they didn’t want to stay married in the sense that they were going to be living together as husband and wife, they returned to the place of loving each other unconditionally. So they stayed married until our dad passed away.
They ended up not getting a divorce. They canceled the attorneys, and they said we can just define our relationship in a way that works for us on our own terms, and that’s what they did. Our mom went on to have a relationship with somebody she’s still in a relationship with now 20 years later. Our dad had many relationships, but they both had happy lives.
They remained best friends because they didn’t feel that they had to stay confined by the term marriage. They understood that they could write their own terms, they could live their own way, and as long as they remained rooted in love and friendship, it would all work out, and it did. Amid his depression, he wrote The Power of Intention. It was probably the book that sold the most, the most popular book that sort of relaunched his career, if you will, after his first book, Your Erroneous Zones. That book helped so many people, and it brought in a whole new younger audience of Wayne Dyer fans. That whole thing came about due to his own struggle and suffering but using it to serve others.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Losing a parent, it’s a devastating experience, but when you lose someone so well known as your father, someone that so many people revere, it must be strange to be having to share your private grief with the public. How did you feel about that?
Saje Dyer: I would say that maybe at the beginning, there were times when it felt strange, but the type of public figure our dad was, is not like some big-name actor who the whole world knows. The majority of the people who know him come from a community of people who are spiritually aligned with that kind of work, and really it was such a comfort because everyone has just shared through social media—Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff—from day 1 of him passing on, receive endless messages from people of how much our dad touched their lives, synchronicities, it goes on and on. So, it was actually a comfort just to know that our dad had such an impact on the world. So, we weren’t grieving alone.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Serena Dyer and Saje Dyer
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