The Power (the Secret, #2)

The Power is a continuation of Rhonda Byrne's self-help work The Secret (2006). While The Secret introduced the law of attraction, the idea that a person's thoughts shape their reality, The Power argues that love is the single force governing all positive outcomes and that feelings, not thoughts alone, are the mechanism through which this force operates.

Byrne opens with a personal narrative. On September 9, 2004, she was at a low point in her relationships, health, career, and finances. That day, her daughter handed her Wallace Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich, which Byrne credits with changing her life. She went on to create the film and book The Secret, spreading the law of attraction to millions. She positions The Power as containing the essence of everything she has learned since then and asserts that love can transform every area of life. The book's introduction declares that every person is meant to have an amazing life and that the power to achieve it resides within.

Byrne establishes that life consists of only two kinds of things, positive and negative, and that love is the sole cause of everything positive. She characterizes love not as a mere emotion but as the positive force of life itself, surpassing even gravity and electromagnetism. She credits love as the driving force behind every human invention. She equates the law of attraction with the law of love, explaining that both operate on the principle that like attracts like: Whatever a person gives out through thoughts and feelings returns in matching circumstances. To illustrate, she tells the story of a woman who, after an abusive twenty-year marriage, refused to harbor resentment and focused on imagining a new life. The woman eventually married and moved to Spain.

Byrne argues that feelings are the true mechanism of the law of attraction, comparing thoughts to a rocket ship and feelings to the fuel. She categorizes all feelings on a spectrum, with good feelings such as joy, gratitude, and excitement stemming from love, and bad feelings such as anger, fear, and despair stemming from a lack of love. She insists that how a person feels in any given moment matters more than anything else, because feelings create life circumstances. She instructs readers to amplify good feelings deliberately and warns against settling for a merely adequate emotional state, which she considers effectively negative.

Building on this, Byrne introduces "feeling frequencies," asserting that a person's emotional state determines which frequency they occupy, attracting matching people, events, and circumstances. She presents the "tipping point" concept: If a person gives even 51 percent positive feelings, the scales of their life tip toward positivity, because returning love multiplies itself in an accelerating cycle. She warns that blame, criticism, and complaining attract corresponding negative results and urges readers to replace negative vocabulary with positive language.

Byrne presents her "Creation Process," a three-step method: Imagine what you want, feel love for it as though you already have it, and receive it as the force of love delivers it through circumstances, events, and people. She stresses that desire must be deeply felt, stating, "Whatever you desire you must want it with all your heart" (62), because desire itself is a form of love. She supports this with anecdotes, including a young woman who imagined holding a white calla lily and received one spontaneously at a friend's dinner two weeks later. Drawing on quantum physics and ancient scriptures, Byrne argues that every possibility already exists in creation. She encourages physical props, such as empty wardrobe hangers for anticipated clothes, to generate the feeling of already possessing what one wants.

Byrne explains that each person is surrounded by an electromagnetic field shaped by their feelings; the more love one gives, the stronger this field becomes, attracting desired outcomes with increasing speed. To change negative circumstances, she instructs readers to imagine the opposite of what they do not want, because creating the desired outcome automatically replaces the old. She recommends spending seven minutes daily imagining and feeling what one wants. To manage bad feelings, she advises against resisting them and instead suggests imagining negative emotions as wild horses one can choose to dismount.

Byrne argues that life responds to what a person gives, presenting the world as a catalogue from which one chooses through love. She tells readers to feel joy when they see others possessing what they want, since envy repels desired outcomes. Citing the physicist Albert Einstein's view that time is an illusion, she argues that human beliefs and imagination directly shape outcomes. She urges readers to release negative stories from their past and stop identifying as victims.

The book presents three "Keys to Power" as daily practices. The Key of Love involves actively seeking things to love throughout each day and maintaining written lists. The Key of Gratitude, which Byrne calls "the great multiplier," involves being grateful for what one has received, is receiving, and wants as though it has already arrived. Byrne shares how her mother used gratitude to rebuild her life after losing Byrne's father, and recounts a man who had depression following a divorce and practiced gratitude daily; within 120 days, he transformed his job, relationships, and finances. The Key of Play involves using imagination and playfulness to create desired outcomes. Byrne cites the cyclist Lance Armstrong imagining his medical treatment as Tour de France training, the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger imagining fame from a small European village, and the inventor Nikola Tesla building and testing inventions entirely in his imagination before constructing them physically.

Byrne applies her principles to specific life areas. On money, she contends that the difference between wealthy and less wealthy people lies in the proportion of good feelings they give about money. She introduces "sticking power," arguing that love makes money not only arrive but stay. She shares a story of reaching financial crisis while making The Secret, withdrawing several hundred dollars, and giving the money to strangers, after which $25,000 arrived unexpectedly from forgotten shares. She advises never placing money ahead of love.

On relationships, she argues that changing a relationship requires only changing one's own feelings. She shares the story of a woman who restored her marriage by revisiting early photos of her husband until her love returned, after which his depression and anger disappeared and his health improved. She defines what giving love is not: trying to change another person or denying their freedom to choose. She introduces "Personal Emotional Trainers," a concept of imagining difficult people as trainers who challenge one to choose love, and warns that gossip harms the gossiper rather than the person discussed.

On health, Byrne argues that beliefs function as commands to the body's cells, citing the placebo effect and research from the Institute of HeartMath as evidence that feelings of love and gratitude boost immune function. She shares the story of a woman diagnosed with a rare heart disease who imagined her heart strong and healthy daily; four months later, cardiologists found it perfectly healthy. She also tells of a father whose premature baby, born at 23 weeks and given a zero percent chance of survival, survived after the father began imagining light shining on his son and giving thanks each morning. On aging, she argues that beliefs about life expectancy program the body to deteriorate.

In the closing chapters, Byrne describes her daily practice of spending 15 minutes each morning sending love and imagining her day going well. She encourages readers to choose a personal symbol for love's presence and to simplify their lives by releasing trivial frustrations.

The book concludes by framing human existence as eternal. Byrne argues that each person has always existed and will always exist, equating the highest frequency of love with what ancient texts called heaven. She identifies the purpose of life as joy and asserts that giving love is the greatest source of it. The book closes with the declaration that love is the only thing a person brings into the world and takes with them, and that every choice to feel good "lights up the world" (247). Byrne's final assertion is that "The Power is within you" (247).