This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Power" by Rhonda Byrne. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How can you shape your thoughts to change your reality? How do thoughts shape feelings?
How you shape your thoughts controls your actions and inactions—your actions and inactions determine your reality. Thoughts are how you interpret events around you, and this shapes your feelings about such events.
Read to learn how you can shape your thoughts to change your reality.
Shape Your Thoughts to Shape Your Life
Feelings are part of your DNA. You don’t have a choice about whether you feel. You only have a choice about how you feel. And how you feel at any moment of any day is important because your feelings are always shaping the trajectory of your life.
Feelings Make Thoughts Significant
You have a million thoughts running through your head on a daily basis, but not all of them are significant. And if they’re not significant, they don’t have feelings attached to them and will not play a role in creating your life. Your thoughts need emotional relevance to give them power.
Think of your thoughts like a car and your feelings like gasoline. The car cannot drive down the road without gas, and your thoughts cannot attract life back to you without feelings. This is why focusing on how you feel is so important.
The energy you put into the world is a mirror image of the feelings you experience. When you feel good, you don’t have to worry about what’s in store for you. You’re sending out love, and that love has no choice but to attract back more love.
Doubling Down on Your Feelings
Why settle for simple positive responses when you can shape your thoughts to create massive responses. There is no limit to the amount of positivity you can feel, so turn up the volume on your good feelings to create the best life you can.
- Sit with your good feelings. Take control of them, and let them grow to immense proportions.
- Play around in your joy. How much joy can you feel at any moment? Celebrate the positive feelings by milking them for all their worth. Keep adding things that bring you joy to the list until you’re bursting with joy.
- Strengthen your positive feelings by piling on more positivity. The more you can strengthen your positive feelings, the bigger the reward.
Monitoring Your Feelings
Your life is not stumbling forward unguided. You create your life by the way you shape your thoughts. If you’re not sure how you’ve been feeling, look at your life. Are things the way you want them to be? If not, your feelings are likely the culprit.
- If your job is not satisfying, think about how you shape your thoughts and feelings about your job. Chances are, they haven’t been positive.
- If you often feel tired or lacking the energy for life, what have your thoughts been about your health or physical abilities? If you feel bad about not having enough energy, you’re telling the universe you want to continue feeling bad about this. You will be given more fatigue and less energy.
Take inventory of your life to understand your thought and feeling patterns. Then, make the decision to start thinking differently about your life.
You are the narrator of your own story. Not everything that happens to you is in your control, but how you shape your thoughts to interpret those events is. You can change what happens to you by choosing how you feel. Give good to the world so you can get good back.
The Frequency of a Better Life
You’ve learned that your feelings are like magnets that attract like with like. But how is that happening?
A magnet has a certain magnetic frequency that pulls something with the same frequency toward it. Likewise, your thoughts and feelings have frequencies. Good feelings put you on the frequency of love. Bad feelings put you on a bad frequency because any frequency outside of love is the wrong frequency. You never have to wonder what frequency you’re on. What you’re feeling at this moment is the frequency you’re on.
This sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite simple. If you notice you’re on a bad frequency, change your thoughts and feelings. At any moment, you can start feeling a different way, and at that moment, your frequency changes.
There are several possible feeling frequencies for any circumstance in your life. Some of these frequencies include love, excitement, hope, satisfaction, gratitude, pride, boredom, criticism, anger, pain, fear, and disappointment. The example of wanting to travel will help express how frequencies work:
- You dream of traveling to Europe someday. But you can’t afford to do it right now, so you feel frustrated and upset. You’ve placed “travel” on the frequency of “frustrated and upset” because that is what your feelings are giving out. That frequency can only attract other things with “frustrated and upset” frequencies that relate to your ability to travel.
- If you don’t have the money to travel right now but still surround the idea of travel with love, you’ve placed travel on the love frequency. What you will receive are more reasons to feel that love, which will likely turn into the opportunity to travel.
Even if you don’t have something specific you want or are content with life, you can still make your life better and learn to love life more. If what you want is a positive life trajectory, rather than a positive outcome, make sure you stay on a positive frequency.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Power summary :
- How you can have whatever you want in life simply by feeling love for it
- How to form a lasting and powerful relationship with the universe
- Tips for harnessing the power of the force of love
