Dr. Pati Beaudoinwrote an excellent article about the movie and book, The Secret, and has given permission to post it here. If you haven’t seen The Secret, do see it or read the book. (There are links at the bottom of this page to buy either from Amazon.com.)

It is turning out to be, not only an exercise in positive psychology for some, but an important contribution to their psycho-spiritual growth. I have personally met some of the experts featured in the movie.

Pati’s analysis of The Secret makes the principles more understandable and therefore more practical. I have posted her article in two parts.

Dr. Beaudoin was a student of mine in the seventies before she became a psychologist and launched her successful career.

Watch for Dr. Beaudoin’s forthcoming book, 
Letter to Husbands From a Wife.

THE SECRETS BEHIND THE SECRET

by
Dr. Pati Beaudoin
© 2007 by NRPA

If you have been applying the central teaching of The Secret and getting zero results, you are not alone. Many people who saw the movie or read the book are putting their minds on what they want with full feeling and not seeing the results that seem to be promised in The Secret.

The essential message of The Secret is that you can get anything you want – not from Alice’s restaurant – but from your own wishing. If you place your mind on what you want and feel as if you have it and feel gratitude, you will get it. And from the examples in the movie, it seems as if you will get it quickly.

If that sounds ridiculously easy, it is. There’s bit more: You must keep your mind on what you want, not on what you don’t want. So if you want money and you feel poor, you must move your mind away from the feeling of being poor and keep it on wealth.

But it still doesn’t work for most of the people who walk into my office, feeling like failures because they have done all that and haven’t manifested what they most want. You see, there’s a little more to The Secret than is told in the book and movie. The central message – that your mind is powerful and your thoughts manifest – is completely true. But there’s more.

Imagine if I handed you a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and said “This is a bunch of wood pulp and ink lines.” Would it be true? Yes, but there would be a deeper and more beautiful truth. In fact, the truth has multiple levels. Suppose I said it was a sequence of letters? Still true, and a little deeper. An even deeper truth would be that it is words, and if we go deeper it’s poetry, deeper still, a play, psychology and philosophy.

And that is the truth of The Secret: There are multiple levels of truth behind what the book and movie present. The first level is that it is very important to
know what is meant by wanting something with your whole mind, heart and soul. That includes every level of consciousness, and most people don’t know that the unconscious mind is much larger and more powerful than the conscious mind. Think of the conscious mind being the size of a pea, and the unconscious the size of the planet. If thought forms are being emanated from both at the same time, is the consciously-controlled thought form likely to outweigh the unconscious thought-form? Your conscious mind is smarter and can choose what to think, but your unconscious is much larger and more powerful.

Your unconscious mind carries many, many years of attachment to certain ideas. Think of your unconscious mind as a blueprint that absorbs everything that has ever happened in your life, including everything you’ve seen, heard, felt, thought and said. If you have grown up with physical abuse, for example, there are many memories of the events – and even more memories of wishing not to be hurt again. That wishing not to be hurt carries with it an image – how can you construct a picture of not being abused? You can’t. You might get a picture of the abuse with a red line through it, like a no-smoking sign, but you can’t construct a picture of no-abuse or no-hurt. Thinking of a wish for no-hurt means thinking of hurt, and so most people who have grown up with any kind of abuse have stored millions of hurt-wishes. After seeing or reading The Secret and learning to create a positive thought instead of a negative one, they might project a thought emanation something like, “Thank you for my husband who treats me with loving respect.” So they send that thought out, but every time they do, they automatically stimulate the area of the unconscious that stores thoughts of how people treat me, and the powerful unconscious messages about “all the ways people abuse me” get sent without awareness. So you have an unconscious negative message with a lot of power and a conscious positive message with very little power. Of course this tends to lead to more of the same problem.

Click here to read Part Two

Dr. Pati Beaudoin is a Licensed Psychologist who practices in Roswell, GA.  She has taught internationally on such varied topics as hypnosis, family violence, and energy psychology.  She is the author of Letter to Husbands From a Wife, which is due to be published in summer of 2007.

The book        The DVD