Book SummaryThe Power, by Rhonda Byrne

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Power

Love is the way. This concept is well-known and often promoted in religious, philosophical, and humanitarian spheres. But there is another reason leading with love is important—the amount of love you give to yourself and the world correlates to the circumstances of your life. Your ability to live a fulfilling and joyful life is dependent on your ability to fall in love with life and feel that love deeply. In The Power, author Rhonda Byrne builds off the concept of the law of attraction from The Secret to explain how love is the determining factor underlying that law. Through love, you can form a lasting and powerful relationship with the universe to attract the things and life you want. (Shortform note: You can find the summary for The Secret here.)

The Power of Love

Love is not simply an emotion celebrated in movies, songs, and romance novels. Love is a force in nature just like gravity, physics, and magnetic fields. Like those other forces, the force of love is invisible, but it is present in every decision you make and interaction you have with people and life’s circumstances.

When you give and feel love for the people and things in your life, you emit a positive energy that connects with the law of attraction. By its nature, the law of attraction receives the pictures of life you send it and returns those pictures back to you as people, circumstances, or events that change your life. Whether those changes are good or bad is based on whether the picture you sent was positive or negative.

How Your Thoughts and Feelings Shape Your Life

Life is not random and does not simply happen to you. You create your life every day through the choices you make. Think of life like a big catalogue of all the things it has to offer. Like a clothing or home furnishings catalogue, you flip the pages and see items that you either want to buy or not. Similarly, each day, life presents options to you that you can choose to either accept or decline. The options you see are determined by the frequency you’re on. You only receive options with the same frequency, and you can either choose to sync your frequencies together or move on.

So what is a frequency? A frequency is an energetic signal you send to the universe that activates the law of attraction. You create this frequency through your thoughts and feelings.

Your thoughts create the frequencies of your life, and your feelings magnetize them so they reach the law of attraction. Positive thoughts place whatever you’re thinking about on a positive trajectory. For instance, if you want a better job, the way you think about your current job dictates whether your career path will be positive or negative.

• If you think about how much you love your job and all the good things it brings to your life, you have jumped on a positive frequency with work.
• If you think about how much you hate your job, you have jumped on a negative frequency regarding work.

You will receive either positive or negative circumstances surrounding your future job prospects because of these thoughts.

Your thoughts only gain power when you attach feelings to them. Feelings strengthen the energetic field surrounding your life. Positive thoughts fill your field with love, and negative thoughts remove love from your field. Whatever charge your field carries is the energy the law of attraction will pick up and send back. So keep your thoughts positive, because it’s impossible to feel bad when you are thinking good thoughts.

For example, how you feel about your job determines your job experiences:

• When you think about the things you love about your job, you magnetize the work frequency positively, and the law of attraction will have no choice but to reflect back more to love about your job. This could manifest as a promotion, more interesting responsibilities, more money, or a dream job.
• When you think about how much you hate your boss, the long hours, or your duties, this lack of love is sent to the law of attraction, and it has no choice but to reflect back that lack of love for work. This could come back as more hours, a worse boss, a bad assignment, or a loss of the job.

You can’t dictate what the law of attraction will send to your life, but you can dictate how you feel. Keep your thoughts and feelings positive to ensure whatever comes back to you will support your ability to remain positive and find more things to love in your life.

Boosting Positive Feelings

Even if you have a specific desire and project positive thoughts and feelings about it to the universe, you can do more to ensure you’re attracting the most beneficial picture you can by boosting your feelings. You can supercharge your powers of attraction by filling your life with as much love as possible.

When you have a desire you want to achieve and set your feelings on a positive frequency, sit with the good feelings to strengthen them. Feel them deeply in your heart until you feel completely full of love for that thing.

Look for other things to love to strengthen the power of your energetic field. Every time you feel love for something, you give love to that thing. The more love you give, the stronger your magnet becomes to attract love back. And the more love you attract back, the greater the reward you’ll receive will be. To strengthen your energetic field:

• Identify all the things you love about your life and feel that love.
• Search for the things you love in the world and feel that love deeply.
• Pile on as much love to your good feelings about something specific as possible to ensure what you receive is the best version of that thing.

The Process of Creation and Unlocking Your Power Potential

You can use your thoughts and feelings strategically to get what you want with the three-step process of creation. First, we’ll cover the three steps to bring what you...

The Power Summary Introduction: The Path to The Power

Rhonda Byrne will never forget September 9, 2004, because that was the day her life changed. She’d been struggling for a while, and it seemed as though her job, relationships, and finances were beyond repair. But on this day, her daughter gave her a 100-year-old book, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles, and her life changed.

From this book, Byrne created the fundamentals of her...

The Power Summary Chapter 1: This Thing Called Love

Life is not complicated. Despite what you may think, it’s solely composed of two things: positive elements and negative elements. In any facet of life, be it personal, professional, financial, or spiritual, your success or failure is determined by your positivity or negativity.

If your life is more negative than positive, you’re not leading the life you deserve. You may even be jealous of others who seem to have everything they want and believe they got their charmed life through luck or connections. But at the heart of their achievements is behavior. These people did something specific to create the life they wanted—they led with love. With the knowledge gained in The Power, you can have the life you want, too.

The first five chapters will guide you through the power of love, how your thoughts and feelings affect that power, and how to use love to attract what you want in life. The last four chapters focus specifically on using love to improve your finances, relationships, health, and overall life.

Everything Is Love

Love is often misunderstood as a singular emotion written about in poems, songs, films, and philosophical texts. But what you don’t realize is...

Shortform Exercise: Love Your Life

Everyone has positive and negative experiences, but sometimes we focus on the negative rather than believing in positive things without realizing the consequences that has on our lives.

When you look at your life, how do you feel your previous thoughts have either led to positive or negative circumstances?

The Power Summary Chapter 2: Shape Your Feelings 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.

The Difference Between Good and Better-Than-Bad Feelings

You may think the absence of bad feelings is the same as...

Shortform Exercise: Tip the Scales for More Happiness

It’s not easy to stay positive all the time. But to change your life, you only need to be positive most of the time.

What are some ways you can boost your positive feelings about your life? (For example, name two things you can see right now that you’re grateful for. Or think of one thing you love about your job.)

The Power Summary Chapter 3: The Three-Step Process of Creation

Now that you know how your feelings and thoughts create your life, you need to learn how to use them to get what you want. To attain specific goals in your life, you must follow these three-steps: Imagining, Feeling, and Receiving. This process can also be used to change something you don’t like.

The first step is to use your mind to imagine what your heart desires. Then, feel the love of doing what you want and having what you want. After you imagine and feel love for what you want, all you have to do is receive what you want. Feel that what you want is yours and show love for it.

To test out the Creation Process and gain confidence using it, try manifesting something small—a flower or book. Use your imagination to see it, feel the love of having it, and then receive it. When you receive it, you will truly believe in the law of attraction and can start using it to benefit your life.

In the following sections, we’ll dive deeper into the steps of Imagining and Feeling to help you use the process to its full potential to Receive.

Step 1: Imagine Your Life as You Want It

You can have anything you want if you can imagine it and love it. What you imagine must be from a...

The Power Summary Chapter 4: A New Way to View Life

Before we move on to ways to strengthen your love power, you must understand the type of mindset that leads to a happy life. This chapter presents considerations that help reframe your view of the world so the power of love is always working in your favor. These considerations include how to understand and manage your life experiences, how to rewrite your story, and how to expand your thoughts about what’s possible.

Life’s Catalogue

The pictures of your life that you see were drawn with either a yes pencil or no pencil. That’s because life presented things to you as options, and you likely either chose yes or no. But if you learn to simply ignore what you don’t want, rather than choosing “no,” you can stay on a positive frequency.

Think about looking at a clothing catalogue. You flip a page and see a green sweater. You either choose to buy it or flip to the next page without much thought. The aspects of life are the same as that green sweater.

When life puts something in front of you, it’s like flipping the page. You can either say, “Yes, I want that,” or, “No, I don’t want that.” Whatever choice you make is what will be brought to your life.

• ...

Shortform Exercise: Find Your Story

The way we view our lives has a big impact on what life we are able to live. But changing our lives can be as easy as believing we can write a different story for ourselves.

How would you describe the story of your life up to now?

The Power Summary Chapter 5: Unlock Your Power

Unlock your power with three “Keys” to strengthen the force of love within you: Love, Gratitude, and Play.

Key 1: Love

To exude greater love in your life, love everything in life with great passion. Approach loving life like you would love a romantic partner. Hold that love and multiply it to the nth degree until love oozes from your body and soul. Show deep and constant love for all that life has to offer to remove restrictions on your life, whether financial, personal, physical, or emotional.

When you love life with all your heart, you glow with love. People will notice and feel your powerful energy. All facets of life will open up to you, and you will be a force field against any negative feelings that come your way. When you’re full of love, you have the power of a superhero.

Your Courtship With Life

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Love is blind”? It means that you’ve fallen so deeply in love with someone that all you see is more to love. That is how you must fall in love with life. You must be enamored with life in such a way that everything you see becomes beautiful.

Look around your world to find things to love. You can love the technology...

Shortform Exercise: Use the Keys to Change Your Life

Changing your life for the better involves more than simply feeling love. There are steps you can take to improve your chances of manifesting your dreams.

Do you regularly show gratitude for the things in your life? Why or why not?

The Power Summary Chapter 6: Love and Money

Like most people, you may have a love and hate relationship with money. You love money, and when you have it, it feels great. But when you don’t have it, you feel bad about money. Most people feel bad about money simply because most of the money in the world belongs to 10% of the population. The reason for this shouldn’t be a mystery by now. People with money feel good about money, so they give love for money. And the law of attraction gives more money back to them as a result.

False Beliefs About Money

The reason so many people can’t get on the positive money frequency is a bad relationship with money that started in childhood. You probably heard warnings about being greedy or talking about money. Maybe you heard that rich people couldn’t be trusted. You definitely heard that you must work hard to make money. And because you believed everything adults you trusted said, you inherited all those negative thoughts about money.

You’ve convinced yourself that work is the only way to get money, even if you don’t like what you do. And if you want to earn a lot of money, you have to get one of a handful of lucrative positions. Well, divorce those ideas from your head. They’re...

Shortform Exercise: Examine Your Relationship With Money

The thoughts and feelings we have about our finances determine our relationship with money. We can either become someone money sticks to or is repelled by.

What are your current financial goals?

The Power Summary Chapter 7: Love and Relationships

Love rules all relationships, and your interactions with people are the gold standard of the force of love. That is not to say that you love everyone you know or strangers on the street. It means the choice to show love to people is present every time you encounter someone. The law of attraction can’t differentiate between friend, family, or foe. It simply recognizes that you are harnessing your greatest power.

Show and give love to others through support, friendliness, encouragement, benevolence, understanding, and gratitude. That force of love will come back to you, and when it does, it can touch all other aspects of your life. The opposite is also true, of course. Give anger, hate, or any other negative feeling to others, and expect the same to return to you.

Your Relationship Is What You Make of It

Look at your close relationships. Are they good, strong, and loving? Are they in jeopardy, struggling, or negative? Whatever state your relationships are in today is the result of the love or a lack thereof you’ve been giving.

Intimate relationships are often your downfall in bringing love to your life. It’s easy to take your frustrations out on those you care...

Shortform Exercise: Create Positive Relationships

It’s easy to want to blame others when our relationships are less than positive, but who we are in relationships is more important than the way others treat us.

Think of an intimate relationship you have or have had. What are two ways that relationship was successful?

The Power Summary Chapter 8: Love and Health

Good health means more than just the absence of illness. You’re not truly healthy unless you feel energetic, happy, and free of stress. Think about how you felt as a child or how children you see today feel. Without the concerns of adult life, children are enthusiastic about life. They wake each day with anticipation and spirit and believe they are invincible. If you want to be the vision of health, live like a child.

You Are Whatever You Believe You Are

You must live like a child because children have not been corrupted by negative thought patterns that lead to poor health. They have no reason to believe they are unhealthy or that their bodies are not perfect and strong, and so those results do not come to them.

Your beliefs likewise determine your physical state:

• If you were sick often growing up, you likely believe you get sick easily.
• If you’ve always struggled with your weight, you may think you have trouble losing weight.
• If you injured your back and experienced pain afterward, you probably believe you suffer from chronic back pain.

What you don’t realize is that these things continue to be true because you believe they are.

Think about...

Shortform Exercise: Live a Healthy Life

The way we think about our health affects how our bodies function. That’s why it’s important to intentionally focus on positive health.

What are your current thoughts about your body and health?

The Power Summary Chapter 9: Love and Your Life

Everything in life has a unique frequency—words, sounds, animals, plants, food, locations, items, you, and every other element in the universe. When you are presented with the frequency of something else, you have the choice to link to it positively or negatively or not link to it at all by turning away. Whatever you decide is your choice, but you’re no longer ignorant about how to attain what you want in life.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use The Power successfully and become the love magnet you were born to be. It really is as simple as finding a way to experience more joy on a daily basis. Keep that joyful feeling flowing, and everything you need to stay joyful will come to you. Life is magical, and once you discover that, it will open up to you in miraculous ways.

Open the Lines of Communication With Intention

Imagine your life as a movie playing on your television. Now imagine you get a phone call or text while you’re watching your life movie. When you answer the call or text and look back up, you’ve missed part of the scene or story. This same thing happens when you walk around your life distracted by errant thoughts or negativity.

If you aren’t...

Shortform Exercise: Find Your Power

If our thoughts and feelings of love are the predominant ways we create the life we live, finding ways to have a positive outlook on life is important.

How will the lessons in The Power help you change your life?