Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer by Gregg Braden Book Review

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

Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer is the second book I have enjoyed from Gregg Braden. This book was less scientifically dense than The Divine Matrix, but it does have a good assortment of references to ancient texts, such the Dead Sea Scrolls, to be intrigued about. Braden shares a lot other overlapping stories as examples for the spiritual theories he is explaining. The book isn’t very long with 184 pages. I found a good amount of material in this book to warrant a recommendation. If I had my way, I would retitle this book as “Secrets of Living a Happier Life”. The book has five chapters, each one revealing a secret on how to live happier. The first secret wasn’t a very big secret for me because I came to the book with previous knowledge of qigong and the Inner Smile Meditation. I like to call this “lost mode of prayer” the Feeling Prayer because of the parallels to the Inner Smile meditation. According to Braden’s studies, the ancients believed that we have direct access to the divine and the power of creation. There is a powerful unified field that we can access through the lost mode of prayer. This field is discussed in much finer detail in his book, The Divine Matrix. In brief, this field connects all things in the universe, which means that everything is connected and not separate. Every possibility is in the field–every possible joy and every possible sorrow. The field is also holographic, in the sense in which a cell in our body contains all the information necessary to create another you. Similarly in the field, any part of the field contains every possibility, which means that one small change in the field happens instantly to the whole system. The field is also a mirror reflecting our true beliefs–it simply mirrors the quality of our feelings as the experiences of our lives. Because the field connects everything together, our collective consciousness plays a vital role in the quality of our world. We create by our act of observation, and the quality of our beliefs determines what our consciousness creates. If we choose to view our world through a quality of separateness, anger, fear, and hate, then the field will reflect these qualities back to us as such in our families, workplace, in our bodies, and all the other aspects of our lives. The power of the lost mode of prayer is that we can choose to view our world through the qualities of unity, gratitude, love, and wisdom instead. The understanding of “lost mode of prayer” and The Divine Matrix has supercharged the Inner Smile meditation for me, because it allows me to really believe in what I am doing has a real effect inside of me and outside of me. Some of my experiences have been so powerful that it moves me to tears of joy. The second secret is about hurt, and the realization that hurt helps us to learn. Hurt teaches us a great many things about ourselves and the relationships that we have.The greater the hurt, the greater the benefits of forgiveness. To be able to feel love, we have to be open enough to be vulnerable to our pain. Hurt is a way for us to understand how deeply we can feel–it shows us how deeply we can love. When we learn from our hurt, it then turns into wisdom. True wisdom is not something you can learn in a book, it is something you learn through feeling and experience. It has been scientifically proven that stress and emotional duress causes sickness in our bodies. When we don’t deal with bad feelings we inadvertently hurt ourselves more than if we choose to deal with it completely at the moment. It seems so very obvious to me in my life experiences that these feelings don’t ever go away if you don’t choose to resolve them. Have you ever known someone long enough to see a pattern of unresolved hurt continue to resurface? It is very sad to see this because you want to help, but it is hard to help them if they don’t want to deal with it. Sometimes hurt is bad enough that it is buried deep, that the consciousness cannot remember the event, but the subconscious remembers. When something triggers this hurt, you will follow a defensive pattern to deal with it, rather than dealing with past hurt and the new hurt. This pattern is a groove in your life and the longer you play out these recurring patterns the groove gets deeper and deeper. In some extreme cases hurt can be so deep that another identity is created to help keep it buried. So far this secret has been teaching me to be more critical about myself and my feelings. What am I feeling? Why am I feeling this? What is triggering this pattern? This is a lot different than placing blame outside of you. Instead it helps you find something inside of you to heal. It keeps me on my toes, because I never know when I may get triggered into a pattern. The hardest part is trying to understand where it comes from, but each time I am tasked I am always rewarded to surrender my ego and let go and heal. The third secret is a blessing. It is a tool in which to acknowledge the hurt in our day to day lives as well as the sufferings of the past. Bless those who suffer, bless whatever causes the suffering, and bless those who witness the suffering. By our blessings we temporarily suspend our hurt to make it possible to replace it with another feeling–you assume your power to let go of life’s deepest hurts and unresolved feelings. After all, the best learning we do is from these challenges that life gives us so from this perspective it is a blessing. Perhaps you can tell already that the secret of the blessing is very helpful to consider when using the secret of hurt as a teacher. If you are able to bless a hurt, you may be able to see it as it really is and regroove it into a wisdom. The fourth secret is that beauty is always present in all things–the power to see beauty is a choice. The power of choosing to see beauty in our lives is the power to see beyond the hurt and pain that world is offering us and recognize the beauty that exists in all things. The power to see beauty gives us a greater appreciation in our lives and those around us. When you are able to see the beauty in hurt you can bless it and move forward with better grace in your life. I am really interested in bringing more beauty into my life. How do I find beauty in all things around me, especially when there is so much ugliness being splashed around? Is it too impractical to be happy all the time? Is it even possible? Perhaps this is the beauty in salat, which is the obligatory prayer, performed five times each day by Muslims. Maybe this method invites us to bring more beauty into our lives. I also did some research about impermanence, which comes from Buddhism. In my understanding, the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence expresses that all temporal things, whether material or mental, are in a continuous change of condition. Maybe by applying this concept into things that we do not see as beautiful, we can remind ourselves that it has the possibility to become beautiful. I rather like this idea as it gives us a daily exercise for our creative powers that we all have within us whether we realize it or not. I am trying to be more mindful about taking the time to appreciate the beauty around me, and when I do see something beautiful, I like to think that life has put it there just for me in that special little moment. The fifth secret is that you are not a victim of life’s circumstances, you are a powerful co-creator, and we all participate in creating the world we live in. I came into this book practicing the first secret, which has been a huge positive change in my life and my relationships. I am interested in how the other secrets will further shape me. I already feel that I have more tools to help promote more happiness in my life. This is the result of searching for more meaning in my life, one of the reasons why I started this blog. All of Braden’s publications so far have all been positive and empowering for me. Although I have known to varying degrees about the other secrets (hurt as a teacher, blessing as an emotional lubricant, beauty as a transformer of hurt), I never understood them in the context in which Braden covers it in this book. I am able to incorporate them with much more clarity and vigor. I am truly grateful for all the information that Gregg Braden has made available, and I am glad that I have had the opportunity to come across them. I am also appreciative that I am able to share some of that information with you, and I would encourage anyone to take a deeper look. Have you had any experiences using any of these techniques? Please comment and share. From my heart to yours.  

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