Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer: The Hidden Power of Beauty, Blessings, Wisdom, and Hurt

Gregg Braden is a well-known author, of course, and this is another enlightening book from his pen/computer.

He tells about the Navajo from the American Southwest. They found out that life’s tests “pushed them to the depths of their greatest suffering” but also discovered that the same tests revealed their greatest strengths.

Braden quotes their Beauty Prayer:

“The beauty that you live with,
The beauty that you live by,
The beauty upon which you base your life.”

But I can’t say I understand its significance re what Braden is saying.

He writes about beauty and surviving life’s hurts but, in my view, fails to explain what he really means.

But he does say that our initial feeling, hurt, leads to wisdom by our finding new meaning in show more painful experiences.

Prayer has the power to create change. He quotes Rev. Samuel Shoemaker as stating: “Prayer may not change things for you, but it for sure changes you for things”.

He tells us that when we bless the people or things that have hurt us we are temporarily suspending the cycle of pain. During the blessing a doorway opens for us to begin our healing.

As stated, I don’t understand what Braden says about the power of beauty. “Beauty is a trigger that launches us into a new perspective --- Beauty awakens only when we invite it into our lives.”

He tells us that “life is nothing more, and nothing less, than a mirror of what we’ve become within”. He also states that this is backed by science. (I assume this means that when negative things happen to us, it’s because of something negative inside us)

“—we’re bathed in a field of energy that connects us all with the events of our world.” Through this energy the beliefs and prayers within us are carried into the world around us. “We must embody in our lives the very conditions that we wish to experience in our world.”

We have to feel as if our prayer has already been answered rather than feeling powerless and needing to ask for help from a higher source.

This is what Neville and many others have been telling us all along, so it’s nothing new, but of course it’s always good to be reminded of it.

In Chapter One, Braden goes into depth about “the Spirit of God”, or “the Field” and the need to feel gratitude and appreciation, as if our prayers have already been unanswered. The Field responds to human emotion.
He makes a pilgrimage to the monasteries of central Tibet and here an abbot confirms that Feeling is the prayer. He states “Ask without hidden motive and be surrounded by your answer”.

Back in New Mexico where Braden lives he is shown by his native friend David how to “pray rain”. Not pray for rain, but pray rain. This involved feeling what rain felt like on his body, smelling the smells of rain on the earthen walls, and feeling what it felt like to “walk through fields of corn chest high because there has been so much rain”.

He invites us to pray in this way, feeling as though what we want has already happened, and feel the gratitude for what our life is like with the prayer already answered.

“The Field simply mirrors the quality of our feelings as the experiences of our lives.”

Braden refers to the physicist John Wheeler who studied the relationship between consciousness and the universe.

We learn about a group of people positioned throughout the war-torn areas of the Middle East feeling peace. When they did this, terrorist activities stopped, crimes against people lessened, etc, etc. This shows that when a small percentage of the population achieves peace with themselves, that peace is reflected in the world around them.

Again, this is not new, since we’ve heard of the same sort of experiences in areas where a small percentage of people are meditating together.

This illustrates too that when a few people in the general population, like you and me, work on themselves and achieve peace and happiness, this will be reflected in the rest of the population. (Again I’ve often heard on spiritual webinars that it doesn’t really matter what we do, we just need to be – i.e. ourselves and peaceful.)

Chapter Two is about Wisdom, Chapter Three about Blessing (Blessing is the Release), Chapter Four about Beauty and Chapter Five about Creating your own Prayers.

This is a beautiful, inspiring and rewarding book, which I highly recommend. show less

I found his discussion of praying from the feeling of having already had your prayers answered interesting. I'm also wanting to read more on the importance of beauty and blessing in everything.