Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World

By Pierre Pradervand

Published November 10, 2009 (Paperback) Atria Books/Beyond Words

More Info:  Pierre Pradervand

My mind churns out dozens of thank yous in a day, in addition to those I say verbally.  And, this puts me in a lovely, almost unshakably powerful place.  But nothing prepared me for the stunning prescription this book provides, The Gentle Art of Blessing.  The transformational power of blessing is as immutable as is the law of gravity.

For the past week, I’ve been troubled.  My best friend of six years, misinterpreted a line I wrote in a Facebook chat to him.  He took my line “I love growing with you” as “codependent.”   Obviously very angry, he had shifted –  in a few lines from his earlier compliment — that I am healed, to being done with me forever, and he de-friended me instantly.  I was shocked, stunned, and didn’t have a way to explain what I meant when I wrote that — actually, that I was joyful that things had been going so well.

This cruel abandonment echoed my mother’s numerous abandonments of me — by neglect, by suicide attempts, and by outright disowning me.

I tried kickboxing, therapy, talking it out, dreams grew vivid and occasionally violent.  And, I prayed.  Despite feeling shut out, despite knowing I did not deserve this, despite still caring for this friend, I didn’t know what to do with the tortured feelings that kept rising within me.  And, this afternoon, I was at Beyond Words Publishing for a holiday party.  I was given a book, The Gentle Art of  Blessing, and I began reading it.

This book was the answer to my prayers.

Pierre Pradervand says you cannot bless and judge simultaneously.  The two cannot occupy the same space.  And the feeling that goes with the blessing must be genuinely loving and specific.  We don’t bless to condemn, or out of anger, because, like karma, those emotions will boomerang back to the sender.  We always reap what we sow.  All energy begins with thought, after which follows the Law of Attraction.   If that thought is of blessing another, we both win.

I sent him blessings for all the good ways he’s treated me, for all the good times we’ve had, for being fun and sweet, for loving me the best way he could.  Much better than psychologically using him as a target for my roundhouse.  The blessings — I felt calm, soft, loving for all mankind, I felt my stiff heart melt.  And, this was enough.  I don’t know what, if anything he has felt, is feeling.  Maybe he’ll open back up the door of friendship, maybe he won’t.    I send another blessing. And smile again, heart warmer still.  We are all connected.

There is science to blessings. And there is healing.  The mind is powerful.  Words, even more so.

Several years ago, I was grocery-shopping with my two sons and then-husband.  The very next day, I was to fly to New York to do my first interview on TV ever — with Mel Gibson.   We got back to the car, and — anxious about something, I don’t recall what — I pulled the front seat forward in the two-door convertible.   The seat had been stuck, and suddenly snapped, smacking me in the forehead.  Just glancing upward, I could see the instant lump.  The three of them gasped.  One ran and got me ice.  I instantly  saw in my mind’s eye, one possibility of me interviewing Mel Gibson with a lump on my forehead.  No way would a makeup artist be able to conceal that.  I got calm, completely still and I kept saying “This cannot be.  This is not possible. “  Before my sons returned with the ice, the lump was gone.  They looked at me, puzzled, my littlest guy said, “How did you do that?”  Simple, the lump was not true, it did not belong in the picture with Mel and me, and so it was gone.

Pradervand has numerous healing examples in his book, illustrating the power of the mind, the backbone to his argument that there is a scientific basic to why blessings work.

“Love regenerates while hate destroys,” he writes.  And he tells story after story — from the Bible, from the Holocaust, from the streets.  We cannot change others to suit ourselves, however, we can bless them, and remind them they are divine.  Unconditional love.  That’s what I was feeling when I typed those misunderstood words to my friend.

The book blew my mind with its illustrations for the law of unconditional love and the law of harmony.  You can choose to walk in the same old grooves, or create a new path, to change your future.

To bless, expecting nothing, is to win everything — for both the one sending the blessing, and the one receiving the blessing.