Customer Reviews

The Power

5 star:		(290)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(32)

 

 

"The Power", by Rhonda Byrne, is a book about the power of love. The author wrote "The Secret" in 2006 and it became a world-wide bestseller. The author promises that this book will add immeasurabley to what you learned in "The Secret".

My father suffered a heart attack and I was spending endless hours at the hospital. One evening, I went to Walmart and I noticed this book on the shelf. I was instantly drawn to it. I spent the next couple of days reading this book as I sat in the hospital. It was a very anxious time but this book helped me gain a different perspective. The "power" in this book is the power of love. Your life is made up of only two kinds of things...positive things and negative things. This book explains how your attitude and way of thinking can make bad things seem better.

Most of the information in this book comes from the New Thought Movement of the early 1900s. These authors taught the principles of positive thinking and the law of attraction. Ms. Byrne quotes many of these authors in this book but she also describes how these principles can be used in everyday life to produce positive results in your life.

My favorite chapter in the book is "Keys To Power". One of the topics in this chapter is the "key of gratitude." Everytime I start feeling down, I think of things that I am thankful for. I am soon feeling much better. Ms. Byrne says, "No matter what negative situation you may find yourself in, you can always find something to be grateful for, and as you do, you harness the force of love that eliminates negativity."

Positive thinking does not always come easy to me. I remember my mom telling me when I was a child, "All you ever do is grumble, gripe and complain." Children tend to live up to spoken expectations so I tend to see the cup as half empty instead of half full. I like this book because it reminds me that changing your mind can change your life. I have a decision to make.

When I was in seventh grade, I made my first "vision board." Of course, that was many, many years ago. Back then, I called it (among other things) my "dream poster." I cut up magazines and newspapers and did drawings of things I wanted to do and places I wanted to see. I also wrote in notebooks with different colored pencils a "diary" of all the things I had achieved in life -- before any of it could have actually happened. I focused on my desires. I read biographies and novels and watched movies about people who did what I wanted to do. I worked on making my dreams come true. I got into the schools I dreamed about. I owned a business -- back when the "glass ceiling" in business was proudly made out of solid cement! I took a trip to Europe, and got a newspaper to foot the bill for all the expenses. I danced professionally. Yep, I was on the stage at Lincoln Center once! Later on, I got yet another job of my dreams.

And, I did this while lots of people spun their wheels in the background telling me what a fool I was, that I should give up -- over and over and over again. I've faced ridiculous obstacles, and conquered them every time.

So, I guess I discovered "The Secret" before Rhonda Byrne made it popular. But, even Rhonda Byrne admits that it is not her invention at all! Dream. Focus on those dreams. Keep going, even when reality and so-called realists tell you that you are wasting your time.

I laugh when I read the one-star reviews for The Secret and The Power. Sooo many people have the answer, they think. It's just that their answer is always "no." No, you can't have more money. No, you can't have that career. No, you can't get into that college. No, you can't dance, can't sing, can't paint, can't..... anything. And, for them, people who keep moving on are stupid, because we can't see it their way.

Enjoy your negativity, folks. I can't imagine what I might achieve next. But, I assure you it won't be sitting on my rump insulting others who dare to dream, and dare to achieve.

The Power, by Rhonda Byrne is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it to anyone capable of thinking outside of narrow limitations.

I loved it! I thought it was even better than "the secret", but I love both. I have read "the Secret" several times and will do the same with "the Power". It's easy to flip through for quick inspiration and the book radiates love, which is what the power is about.

This is a graduate course in law of attraction! What a gift the author has given the world! This is much more than the SECRET and is a "how to" to bring goodness into your life. It will change the way you think and feel about everything.

The one star and five star reviews differ with people's attitude toward what this book calls them to do. It doesn't say sit and salivate and drool with love like a puppy. It tells you to take the attitude of love, meaning positivity in outlook and focus. So if you are the type of person that is mired in negative stuff and you cherish your state, then you will keep saying "buh-humbug" all the way. But if you have had enough of your pity-parties and you want to clear the junk in the attic of your head, then you will decide to APPLY the book's suggestions and God forbid, you may actually get out of your misery corner. So if you have no such intention, then don't waste your money. Not too many of the reviewers seem to have actually tried any of the concepts in the book. So they are not at all talking from experiential evaluation of the book. IF you want to try and APPLY the ideas, the book will be an uplifting start. Take the ideas and build on them, practice thinking only what you love and want, and if you still do not get any results, then come back to review with complaint that it was painful reading. If you honestly put it into practice, you will not need to! If it will sit on the shelf with all your other half-baked, half completed projects of yours, then save time and money now. So my suggestion:

You want to really APPLY and practice the book's way of living = BUY!!!!
You do NOT want to APPLY and practice = Don't buy.

You decide. Simple: In the end what you get is what you want and love.

I have finished reading "The Power" for the 2nd time. This book has life changing suggestions to change the way you think to change the way you feel - it tells you how to look for the positive in all situations. Even when it is really hard to find a positive aspect to something that has gone wrong - there is always a lesson to be learned so that in itself is positive. It also has made me realize what love really is - not just for a person or family but for the whole of life. I have just purchased the audio as well because I'm going to take a 2-3 hour driving trip and I would like to listen to it on the way.

I'm not saying you are going to receive a million dollars but I'll bet you'll feel better about it if you don't :)

Barbara Johnson
Cave Creek, AZ

I purchased this book in an airport in Washington DC on my trip home to Florida. I have been battling a life threatening disease for some time now. I love reading Rhonda Byrne. She gives me inspiration to keep up with the fight.

Ok, before I talk about the book I feel I must share something. I just returned from a full weekend conference given by Hayhouse where their most prominent authors gave lectures, usually about two hours long. All of them write in the self-improvement or new age genres and so all of them were inspiring and uplifting. The thing is, there was SO much information given to me at one time...and so much of it would slightly contradict what the previous author had said...that I left unsure how much I had even absorbed. It wasn't until I returned home that "The Power" popped back into my head and that's when I realized just how valuable a book it really is.

"The Secret" absolutely talks about our feelings being even more significant than our thoughts or words when it comes to attracting the experiences we want. It's in "The Power", though that this is examined even further. For those who don't know, this "power" the author refers to is love :)

When I first picked up the book, I scoffed. You see, I had read and watched "The Secret" years ago when it first came out (ok, I think it was like five years ago...let's not be that dramatic). And while I absolutely loved it, I didn't experience the best results. I also started getting tired of constantly affirming and focusing on manifestion...it just became exhausting. So when I stumbled upon this new book in B&N (sorry Amazon), I thought, "well, here we go again." So I turned to a random page...and forever whatever reason, I was hooked.

I don't know why I didn't understand the whole "feeling" portion of "The Secret" because they DO absolutey cover it...but "The Power" really drills this into your mind. What I love about this book is that the author keeps the concepts very simple and then uses the bulk of the book to give you examples that I personally found incredibly inspiring. The basic concept is that everything in the Universe is either positive or negative...love or lack of love...light or dark. If you want to attract more positive things than negative things, all you have to do is tip the scale of your FEELINGS more to the positive side than the negative side. That's it! (and for anybody who just thought, "what do you mean THAT's IT"...careful...because that's negative ;)

Feelings are REALLY important when working with manifestation and I will tell you why. No matter what it is you want or desire...I really don't care what it is...the ONLY reason that you want to bring that into your life is because you believe you will FEEL better once you have it. Period and end of story. The heart is a huge magnet in the body and the frequency it sends out is POWERFUL!!! So if you want those things that will bring you happiness tomorrow, you must think of them from a loving, joyful place TODAY!!!

Better yet, you don't even have to "manifest" things, per say. Instead, you can simply practice falling in love with everything that is around you NOW. When you see something you love, you can feel happiness deep within your heart for that moment and then let it go. Just don't be surprised if that certain something keeps showing up in your life ;) The bottom line is that whatever emotion starts your day will most likely snowball and that's the emotion that will attract the experience you refer to as your future. So even if you aren't working on manifesting specific things, you can instead use the concepts taught in "The Power" simply to discipline yourself into attracting happier experiences, in general. Interestingly enough, some of the most successful people in this world didn't start out saying they wanted to be famous or make a million dollars. Instead, they just went about life with an open heart and asked themselves how they could help other people be happy. So keeping your heart open and acting from love can STILL bring you the things many people dream about, but without obsessing about manifestion.

One concept that I LOVE in this book is that it's impossible to feel bad in the exact moment you are having a good thought. When I first read this I laughed and rolled my eyes and then made a sincere effort to prove the author wrong...and I couldn't do it!!! The moment I could make myself feel bad, I had already changed my good thought into a bad one. So I continued the experiment the next day and you would have been amazed if you saw what happened. Literally one amazing and happy event and interaction with people was followed by another and another and another! A presentation that I had been anxious about the day before went WAY better than I could have EVER anticipated. My teachers (I was in a yoga teacher training) had given literally everybody else notes and yet after I gave my teaching presentation (after hours of ONLY thinking positive thoughts) they said, "wow...that was GREAT...um, we really don't have any notes for you at all." As I was smiling ear to ear, another student said, "well, nobody's going to want to go after THAT." (and mind you, there was nothing out of the ordinary spectacular about the presentation other than my heart was wide open both before and during!)

As far as criticism is concerned...well, this book is about love and the power behind it. So really, the people who criticize it are simply proving the concepts of the book to be true. If you think, "this book is stupid...all these books are the same....what a bunch of fluff...you've got to be kidding me..." well, all of those thoughts are followed with negative feelings and so people who think and FEEL that will be attracting plenty of negative experiences, hence writing a negative review. So in my experience, it couldn't be a problem with the book but rather how disciplined the reader is in applying the concepts CONSISTENTLY in their daily life. Are they really starting their day with meditation and getting in the most amazing, joyful state before starting their day? When they visualize their dreams are they just seeing pictures or are they adding the emotions on top of the pictures? If something unexpected happens...traffic jam, spilled coffee, long line at the grocery store (all a result of PAST feelings, by the way)...are they able to stay either neutral...or better yet, positive despite what is in front of their eyes?

It does take discipline to apply the principles in the book, but the GREAT news is that it feels AMAZING at the same time! Why? Because LOVE feels AMAZING!!! As "A Course in Miracles" says: everything in the Universe is either an Act of Love or a Call for Love. When you learn to make everything you do an act of love, you will attract more and more of it into your life, in ways you could least expect :)

I recommend this book SOOOOO highly (I mean, clearly)!!! And while I love all of the other authors out there and think that it's great to hear many differnt perspectives, the bottom line is that love is truly what makes the world go round. So if you want to read a million books, make sure this is one of them. And if you only want to read one book this holiday season, buy "The Power"!!!!

Thank you, Rhonda Byrne...you rock my world.

:)

Long before I came across this statement from The Power: "If you feel bad about having bad feelings, you are adding more power to your bad feelings," I was having bad feelings about what I was reading. This book proclaiming to be about love and good feelings presents a disturbingly cold, mechanistic view of life. In one example, Byrne loses her dog. While she and her daughter are searching, "negative feelings of anguish [begin] to increase. I knew we had to stop searching...." Why, you might ask? Because the universe has no choice but to deliver the result "lost dog" that has been placed in its magnetic head via Byrne's transmission. Note that a natural human emotion related to our capacity to care has been labeled "negative"--that is, bad. The act of searching for your dog and feeling concern about it renders the universe incapable of letting you find it. So Byrne goes home and puts food in the dog's bowl instead, and goes to bed. Maybe then the universe will understand what it should do. Is that fair to the dog? If the universe is that thrown off by human feeling for a lost companion, then how powerful can it be? (The dog was found by a neighbor.)

In another example, the universe drives your dream car past you for you to select. But in the midst of focusing all your intensified love at the car in order to attract it, you feel a twinge of envy for its driver. "You just gonged yourself out of having your dream car," Byrne tells us. Just like that. Canceled. That is "The Power". A universe where concern for a lost companion is labeled "negative", but obsessive love for a car is "positive"--until you mar it with a whiff of the negative. A universe where any human feeling besides a relentlessly imposed positivity is considered deficient, and might even be considered, in the words of Neville Goddard, cited in the book, an infection: "to think feelingly of mistakes of the past is to re-infect yourself." Re-infect yourself with what? A conscience? This relentless universe, which can only copy everything you think or feel (Byrne offers the terms "boomerang" and "copying machine" as helpful in understanding it) unfolds with Byrne's opening remarks: "Life is simple. Your life is made up of only two kinds of things, positive things and negative things." Well, no. It's not. Not my life. My life is made up of many things, most of which are not reducible to a positive/negative dichotomy. To reduce all things and experiences to one of two polarized categories is to rob the world and life of their grandeur, their beauty, their complexity, and yes, their difficulties and their heartbreak, too. And there is nothing in Byrne's universe that escapes being reduced in this way.

Take relationships. Byrne encourages us to think of people as our personal Emotional Trainers, monitoring them on the positive-negative scale to be utilized as teachers in building our own personal universes, or to be avoided, accordingly. "When you're happy, then only the happy version of other people can come into your life." Never mind the stunningly obvious untruth of this claim. What does it mean to admit only controlled versions of whole human beings into your presence--controlled by you? What kind of friends, partners and parents would that make us? Doesn't being in relationship with others ask us to be people of many dimensions, capable of understanding the full range of human experience and extending that understanding to others? Screening others through a positive/negative filter for their usefulness to us is not love.

Yes, the world would be a better place if people cultivated more love and gratitude in their lives. But we don't employ them to manipulate people and things to our uses. In Byrne's construction, love is no longer the highest human virtue. It is a mechanism, designed to trip the switch of the mechanical universe to have your desires unblinkingly, unthinkingly delivered expressly to you. In fact love is not even love, desire is love, Byrne reveals at one point. Where is the heart here? In an entire book putatively devoted to love, I don't find a speck of compassion for other people, or for animals, or for the earth. Maybe that's because "as far as the law of attraction is concerned, there is only one person in the world--you!" There's no reciprocity here. No fellow feeling. You wouldn't want to ruffle your magnificent positivity by troubling yourself with another person's feelings.

But what if love is actually love? Not positivity, not desire, not trying to feel good all the time, but actual love, something people have been willing to live and die for, something that moves you so deeply that it causes you to act, that takes you to a depth of humanity you didn't even know you had, for the sake of someone or something else? What if that is love?

Beware whenever Byrne uses the term "simple." It seems to be code for disengaging our minds and our hearts. Regarding wealth, Byrne tells us: "It's as simple as that." As simple as what? Good feelings are how the majority of the world's money ended up in the hands of ten percent of the people, she tells us. She writes that the only difference between wealthy people and everyone else is that the wealthy give more good feelings about money. This is not only ignorant of economics, history and politics, it diminishes the efforts of those who have earned their money through initiative and diligence--not attraction--and it deifies those who have obtained it through ruthless exploitation. Once again it's a reduction, and it's simple all right: there can be, after all, only two kinds of things in the world: positive/negative, wealthy/not wealthy, good-feeling/bad-feeling.

The worst simplification in The Power, though, has to do with the way Byrne intersperses selected quotations from writers, humanitarians and spiritual teachers throughout her narrative, as if to suggest that all along they were attesting to the hidden powers Byrne has now brought to light. An examination of just a few of the lives of the people she cites would demonstrate that this is not the case. To comment on just two of them, Jesus and Bonhoeffer, Byrne, by failing to consider the complete arc of their stories, trivializes them and cheapens their lives. Both were committed to love and justice. Both were executed for it. They weren't trying to have, do or be anything they wanted, they were resisting the powers of their day. How do their deaths fit Byrne's law of attraction? Was theirs a failure to think positive thoughts and feel good feelings? The love Jesus taught was far more radical and generous than a boomerang universe. For him, love was caring for "the least of these"--those who were outside the realm of the comfortable, the powerful, and the admired. He didn't blame people who were struggling or ill for their fate. Bonhoeffer conspired against Hitler to try to defeat him. He did not shrink from the challenge of his time. He did not hide in a pristine universe dedicated to giving him what he wanted. He did not look away from the news, as Byrne advises. If people hadn't dared to face terrible things in life head on at personal cost to themselves the world might have fallen to those such as Hitler. Each generation faces challenges. To choose to ignore them because "life is supposed to be fun" is to remain a perpetual child, and to fail the next generation. Byrne warns: "Taking things too seriously brings a life you have to take seriously." Yes, and we are all indebted to those who took it seriously.

I do not feel bad about feeling bad about Byrne's book. I feel grateful that I have a facility for analytical thinking, or at least plain common sense, which is as essential to human endeavor as so called positive thinking. And using common sense, I can discern that a woman who tells a story about attracting a skirt from Paris to Australia, just one, in her size, is not one who is engaged in the significant matters of our time, no matter how frequently she peppers her text with quotations from those who were. The way Byrne ends her book implies that she does consider herself a luminary in the spiritual pantheon despite having demonstrated little more in the book than how she attracted a skirt, a bouquet of flowers, and failed to search for a lost companion: "May The Power bring you love and joy for your entire existence. That is my intention for you, and for the world." Rhonda Byrne, please spare me your intention. I do not want your small, self-involved universe. It's not big enough for me. I am not a magnet. I, unlike your universe, have a heart and a mind. If my dog is lost, I'm going to search for her.

I can't tell you how special this book really is. I can recommend it to everyone and anyone who would really like to have a positive change in their lives, and quickly. I have read everything you can think of on the subject of Love and how important it is in your life. I have also read many books on how to create positive change in your life. The problem with most books I have read is they leave me still wanting and not knowing just how to make these changes. However, this book brings everything together in a simple, easy-to-understand manner that gave me the "Aha" moment I had been looking for all these years! She explains the Law of Attraction fully but easily, and then shows you what it means to express and create real Love in your life--not meaning just about relationships and the things you normally love, but each moment and how it affects your whole life.

I used to "try" to be more loving, but when something went wrong, it was very easy to slip back into the excuse that the situation was too difficult to show love. Now, once I have read just half the book, it is actually easier for me to not react negatively and without "trying" any more. The author also tells you that you don't need to read The Secret, her previous book, to understand this one, and she is correct--this one wraps everything up in one neat package. I get it now, and hope you will, too.

I always get my books from Amazon because they ship quickly even with regular shipping/super-saver shipping, and the prices are the best I have found.