The Work of Byron Katie
03/27/23 Filed in: Personal Growth
"What you’re believing in the moment creates your suffering or your happiness."
Byron Katie
Byron Katie is a remarkable woman whose work, referred to simply as The Work, has touched millions of lives. It is a profound and deeply transformative process of self inquiry which arose out of an instantaneous awakening experience, where she saw clearly that the root cause of all suffering is what we are thinking and believing.
Picture all of the stories we live our lives by, the harsh judgments we have of others, the grievances we harbor daily and the deep regrets and painful thoughts we're burdened by. Think of all of the ways we live in resistance to what is and of how we project our thoughts, beliefs and fears onto others and onto our future. It's no wonder that we don't live in a peaceful world. We are at war with ourselves.
I am including in this blog post an excerpt from Byron Katie’s and Stephen Mitchell’s book A Mind At Home With Itself, which will give you some insight into Byron Katie's extraordinary and sudden awakening.
In the midst of an ordinary American life—two marriages, three children, a successful career—Katie entered a ten-year-long downward spiral into depression, agoraphobia, self-loathing, and suicidal despair. She drank to excess, her husband brought her pints of ice cream and codeine pills that she ate like candy, and she ended up weighing over two hundred pounds.
She slept with a .357 Magnum revolver under her bed. Every day she prayed not to wake up the next morning, and it was only because of her concern for her children that she didn’t kill herself. For the last two years of this ordeal she could seldom manage to leave her house; she stayed in her bedroom for days at a time, unable even to shower or brush her teeth. (“What’s the use?” she thought. “It all adds up to nothing anyway.”)
Finally, in February 1986, at the age of forty-three, she checked herself into a halfway house for women with eating disorders—the only facility that her insurance company would pay for. The residents were so frightened of her that they put her in an attic bedroom and booby-trapped the staircase at night; they thought she might come down and do something terrible to them.
One morning, after about a week at the halfway house, Katie had a life-changing experience. As she lay on the floor (she didn’t feel worthy enough to sleep in a bed), a cockroach crawled across her ankle and down her foot. She opened her eyes, and all her depression and fear, all the thoughts that had been tormenting her, were gone. “While I was lying on the floor,” she says, “I understood that when I was asleep, prior to cockroach or foot, prior to any thoughts, prior to any world, there was—there is—nothing. In that instant, the four questions of The Work were born.” She felt intoxicated with joy. The joy persisted for hours, then days, then months and years.
The Work is based on the premise that our thoughts and beliefs create unnecessary suffering in our lives and that by questioning them, we can free ourselves from this suffering and find more clarity, freedom and inner peace.
The Work is a meditative practice of self inquiry and consists of four simple questions and a turnaround process. The Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet is where you write down who or what angers or upsets you. And in answering the four questions you are given the opportunity to open up to being shown what is true, beyond what you think you know and beyond what you believe to be true.
The four questions are :
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know it's true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?
The turnaround process involves taking the original thought or belief and turning it around in various ways to see if the opposite or a different perspective might be equally or more true.
The Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet can be found on Byron Katie's website https://www.thework.com along with videos, her books, workshops, free resources and many tips on how to do the work.
Although I have never consistently included The Work in my personal practices, I listen to the weekly Podcast and have watched numerous videos of interviews and videos of Byron Katie leading people through The Work. The Work is profound and important enough that I wanted to introduce it to you. And I will add the inner shifts that watching and listening to Byron Katie have created within me, are helping me to live in what I perceive to be a kinder, more gentle world.