|
FOR
THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS BYRON KATIE has dedicated her life to a revolutionary
new process of inquiry that she calls “The Work”. The Work
is a four-step self-enquiry exercise that guarantees freedom from emotional
bondage by allowing you to see your problems from an entirely different
perspective through helping us recognize the difference between truth
and fiction. She asks us to first think of a pressing problem we are
experiencing with a loved one, or an issue in society, and then go inside ourselves to find the answers to four seemingly simple but
extremely powerful questions:
1.
Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without that thought?
Once the questions have been asked, Katie suggests that we turn our
projections and judgements around in a process she calls “the Turnaround”.
This means that the statement is reversed so that what was once “Paul
should understand me,” now becomes, “Paul should not
understand me” and “I should understand me”
and “I should understand Paul.”
This seemingly simple process can be profoundly mind opening to those
of us who want to let go of the problems in our lives. By taking responsibility
for our own feelings and actions, letting go can be very easy. But even
though most of us want to get rid of our problems, letting go of “our
story,” as Katie puts it, can be very difficult. To make the process
easier, Katie requires us to talk to our inner selves to find the answers
and we must be truly honest with ourselves.
As Katie says, “For thousands of years we’ve been told not
to judge, but we still do it all the time—how our friends should
act, whom our children should care about, what our parents should feel,
do, or say. In The Work, rather than suppress these judgments, we use
them as starting points for self-realization. By letting the judging
mind have its life on paper, we can discover through the mirror of those
around us what we haven’t yet realized about ourselves.”
Katie has visited jails where every single inmate claims they are innocent.
By the end of their sessions, however, some had recognized that they
were responsible for their own actions. By taking responsibility, they
were freeing themselves from disillusionment and finding their reality
easier to handle.
Says Katie, “For thousands of years, we've believed that in order
to find happiness, we need to change the world around us: a bigger house,
more money, a healthier body, a more attractive or understanding partner.
With these beliefs as our unconscious religion, we've spent our lives
at war with the world. Trying desperately to get reality to match our
stories of how we believe it should be, we wonder why we don't feel
any lasting sense of peace.”
After the incident with the cockroach, Katie says she experienced “the
profound realization that without any story about how life is supposed
to be, we are left with a sense of peace far beyond what we hoped to
find by fulfilling our dreams. On the other side of our myths about
reality is reality itself, completely indescribable—and unknowable
as long as we're still pursuing how things should be. Only when we give
up ‘what should be’ can we experience the profound peace of
‘what is'.”
However, says Katie, “This ‘giving up,’ can't be achieved
by the thinking mind. How can we let go of what we didn't create in
the first place? Instead, we do The Work, a simple inquiry process that
helps us honestly reexamine the ‘should's’ that we have been
believing in. By welcoming our arguments with reality and exposing them
to the clear light of direct investigation, the mind wakes up to its
innocent mistake and gives up its losing battle with reality. The result
is peace.”
At this point, Katie says, people often say, "But if I give up
my motivation to change the world around me, I'll become complacent,
passive, or boring." Katie responds, “Can you absolutely know
that's true? That's not my experience. Just the opposite—being
a lover of reality is exciting beyond imagination, and leaves me free
to make real change."
Many people have realized, after answering Katie’s questions, that
they have disillusioned themselves into believing that other people
are to blame for their feelings and actions. But don’t fret, if
you too sometimes wonder the same thing, Katie has some reassuring words
of wisdom: “There is no right or wrong, only choices.”
Katie believes that when we are confronted with a choice, the worst
that can happen is just a concept, a belief we have about what may happen,
as opposed to what will really happen, which, of course, we can
have no way of knowing in advance. And the worst that can happen if
you take a different path is still just a concept. The positive and
negative feelings we associate with our actions are merely part of “our
story”. When we know how to view the reality of our actions, the
emotional baggage we carry is eliminated and what is left is our true
nature, which is pure love. Katie says that we would be happy living
with Frankenstein if we did not carry a “story,” because our
true nature accepts everyone and everything for what it is.
Byron Katie has not always felt this way about herself or the world.
She too has had to face terrific obstacles in life and had to give up
a story that she herself carried for years. At one point, Katie was
addicted to drugs and alcohol, had an eating disorder and was on the
verge of suicide. It was not until she was sleeping on the floor of
a woman’s shelter that something happened that turned her entire
life and beliefs around. She awoke one morning to the sensation of a
cockroach crawling on her foot and she watched. The cockroach felt like
it was a part of herself, and yet she moved her foot in reaction, then
her hand, and then her body. During this suspended moment in time, Katie
was observing her own actions as reactions to a squeamish moment when
something crawls across your body, but she recognized that the cockroach
was just as much a part of her as her own body. She could not determine
where she ended and where something else (in this case the cockroach)
began. She realized that everything was her, and she was everything.
After this mind-shattering epiphany, Katie’s life changed completely.
She began meditating away her issues by applying the knowledge of that
moment with the cockroach. She had learned that all of her actions up
to that morning had been reactions to the people around her.
She started to recognize that her reality was not as devastating as
she had made it seem, and, as a result, she started to take responsibility
for her own actions. Katie's enlightenment started to attract people
to her and she gladly helped them understand themselves better. Today,
Byron Katie has become somewhat of a guru, whose workshops people travel
from near and far to attend. To listen to tapes of live sessions, or
to see Katie work in person with members of the audience at the ‘donation
only’ sessions she hosts around the world, is to watch magic in
action. In less than half an hour, sitting with her upon the podium
as she gently and compassionately confronts volunteers one-on-one with
a series of probing questions that cannot help but take them right back
inside themselves to the very source of their “stories”, Katie
helps people completely transform their perspective. To see the wonder
on their faces as the “light bulb” goes on, to see the sense
of freedom and release that fills their eyes as they finally get
that they really do not have any way of knowing for certain that
the “stories” they have carried with them, often since childhood,
have any basis in fact, is to see a master magician at work.
Byron Katie doesn’t pull rabbits out of hats. The magic she works
is far more meaningful and life changing than that. Through developing
her simple, yet immensely logical and powerful “Work,” Katie
transforms people’s thinking and perceptions so rapidly and dramatically,
it never fails to pull them out of their past and propel them straight
into the present, where they can look at their “stories” objectively,
take responsibility for their own constructions and perceptions, and
then liberates them to move forward into a future free from the pain,
misery and insecurity that has been preventing them from living authentically.
Of course, as Katie reminds us on her website, just reading about a
process of self-realization doesn't mean very much. So - if you would
like to experience for yourself how four simple questions and a "turnaround"
can help you bring yourself peace, clarity, and happiness, visit www.thework.com,
where you can not only read more, but also can sample The Work yourself
for free, by downloading the Worksheets.
[Ed’s
note: Katie’s new book Loving What Is: Four Questions that can Change
Your Life written with Stephen Mitchell is available now from your local
bookstore, from Katie’s website, or through planetlightworker.com by
clicking
here.]
©
2003 Emily Dennis
We invite you
to share your experiences, opinions and questions on this article. Please
visit the PLW Community and leave your
comments.
|
e-mail
this article to a friend