Exploring The Work:
an interview with Byron KatieOne might say that Byron Katie didn't choose her work; The Work chose her. One morning in 1986, she had an experience of realization that not only freed her from a paralyzing depression but brought with it a method to help others as well. In the decades since she has authored four books (with one on the way) including Loving What Is: Four Questions that can Change Your Life and A Thousand Names For Joy: Living in Harmony With What Is ( both written with her husband, the translator Stephen Mitchell) and traveled the world giving courses and free public events, visiting hospitals, prisons, and corporations in the service of bringing her own sense of freedom to the larger world.
The Light Connection: You describe The Work as “a process of Inquiry.” Could you tell us something about that and how The Work works?
Byron Katie: Yes. The Work is a way to identify and question the thoughts that cause all the suffering and violence on the planet. We write down our stressful thoughts—this is very important to do. And then we put these thoughts up against inquiry.—The Work is four questions—and then we find opposites after we have questioned the concept we're believing. Let's take a negative concept like “My children don't understand me.”
The first question of the four is: “Is it true?” The second question is “Can I absolutely know that it is true that my children don't understand me?” Just notice how the mind wants to give all the proof that the stressful thought is true, in this case, that your children don't understand you. When you do The Work, you just notice that. And you notice that The Work stops working in that moment, because instead of answering the question, you have gone into justification and defense. You just notice—and then you come back to the question and just answer.
This is Inquiry:—“Can you absolutely know that it's true, what you are believing—that your children don't understand you?” And then the third question, “How do you react when you believe that thought?” Just get very still and notice what happens when you hold to that belief. What happens to your physical body, what are the feelings that happen? You may feel angry, neglected, depressed, resentful. You just notice and honor those feelings, experience them, allow them. And then move into the fourth question, “Who would you be without the thought?” You take a long look at that. “Who would you be, who are you,” if you didn't even have the ability to think that thought? Picture your life without it, see the difference. When the mind is inquiring, you discover very quickly that the world is one thing and that what we believe about the world is quite another. There is no way that anything in the world, or anyone in the world, can upset you. You can only be upset by your thoughts about the world.
The world, actually, is perfect; what we believe about the world distorts it. It puts it into an image that isn't real. And not even our thoughts are the problem; the problem comes when we believe them! Thoughts come, they go. The moment we believe them, that's attachment, and we begin to suffer.
After you have answered the four questions, you turn the stressful thought around; you find opposites. This can be amazing: to actually experience the opposite of what you have been believing. One way “My children don't understand me” can be turned around is “I don't understand my children.” Another turnaround is “I don't understand myself.” Another is “My children do understand me.” And with each of the turnarounds, you find at least three genuine examples of how the turnaround is true in your life. This is not “positive affirmation” or wishful thinking. You find specific examples of how the turnaround is actually a true statement.
So the structure of The Work is four questions and a turnaround?
Yes. And I can't tell you how powerful it is to find the three examples. How is each turnaround as true as or truer than your original statement? I can't know if my children really understand me or not. What's important is, do I understand them? That's my bliss. When I don't, it's not my bliss. We can even turn our own children into The Enemy in our minds. That's crazy! That's why it hurts.
This obviously is a process that requires enormous honesty…
It does. Even to answer one simple question—“Is it true?”—about a thought that you may be holding on to for dear life. It means coming out of denial. That's like coming out of the closet, and when we do that, we can breathe and the light hits us. Then we can shine
To return to the turnarounds: “My children don't understand me” turns around to “I don't understand me.” Where is it that I don't understand myself? Where is it that I fool myself, especially around my children, since that's the situation that I'm looking at? Where is it that I don't understand some of the actions that I take toward them? In that way I come to see that if I really focused on my own enlivenment, my own self, then the world would change. I can't change other people, I can't change my children, but can I change myself? And as I shift to my own self-realization, my children follow, through the example that I'm setting. It has to be that way. If I hate picking up the children's socks, they'll understand that, and they'll hate picking them up too. But if I love it, they're going to understand that, and we'll all race to pick up the socks, because it just makes sense.
Speaking of living by example, this Work came to you based on a very profound transformative experience in your life, right?
It did. After more than a decade of clinical depression, agoraphobia, paranoia, suicidal thoughts—it was horrible, horrible, to be locked in a prison like that, with no way out—and I was so full of self-hatred, I couldn't even allow myself to sleep in a bed, so I'd sleep on the floor beside the bed. As I lay sleeping one morning, a cockroach crawled over my foot, and I opened my eyes, and in place of all that hopeless darkness, that deep, deep suffering, there was a joy that is indescribable. And by grace what I realized was so powerful that it has sustained itself for twenty-three years. I'm open to anything else, for sure…and nothing that I have seen has changed that. The important thing, David, that I came out with, is that when I believe my thoughts, I suffer, and when I question my thoughts, I don't suffer.
I've come to see that this is true for every human being. We cannot pretend that we don't believe what we believe. We believe it until we break the spell. The Work breaks the spell. The Work wakes us up from this dream, this life of suffering, and leaves us in a world that is so beautiful, you don't care whether it's real or not.
In reading some of your materials, it seems to me that your work requires that we believe the world is perfect just because it IS, which is a big leap, really for most people to take…
You can't believe that, however hard you may try. It's not possible to make yourself believe what you don't believe. But as you do The Work, you begin to get in touch with your essence, your true nature, and everyone can test it for themselves. When you believe a negative thought, you experience stress. When you don't believe it, there can't be any stress over it. The Work is the how. It teaches you exactly how to end all suffering. And anyone can do it if their mind is open to it.
From your experience of the thousands of people you have been with around the globe doing this Work, can you give an example of how that new openness changed someone?
I am thinking of one man who was bipolar and there was no way out, and he found a way out. His life has become an amazing example of clarity and generosity, and he affects the life of millions of people now. Or schizophrenics whose minds suddenly make sense to them. Rather than having to depend on meds and live in that kind of fear and guilt and shame, they just don't do it anymore.
There are many examples of this on my website and in my books—sometimes people's lives open up radically after just one session. Women who have been raped and think they can never get over that, or parents whose children have died. It's very radical.
Sometimes people come to ‘The School for The Work' very angry, even suicidal, and when they leave, it's no longer possible for them to be depressed. They even look forward to depression, because they know how to deal with it. My mind is just swimming with examples.
One woman at ‘Turnaround House' had been trying for ten years to heal a condition involving her feet; they were coarse, like hard leather, and broken and bleeding.
Her sixth or seventh day there, they started healing and by the time she left, they were healed. We did nothing but investigate her thoughts, using The Work—no medication, no nothing. I see these kinds of things all the time.
What is ‘Turnaround House?'
It's a twenty-eight day program where people come to turn their lives around. Everyone from addicts to successful business people. They're all thrown in there together, with one thing in common: they believe their stressful thoughts. What we do at Turnaround House is to test these thoughts to see what is real and what isn't.
So testing stressful thoughts is the essence of The Work …
Yes, to see if they can stand up against this inquiry. I call The Work checkmate, because there is nowhere to move away from peace, if your mind is open and you allow the answers to surface, because it's pure knowledge that you're tapping into. It'll just blow your world apart, because every time you question what you believe, your identity changes. Eventually you have the thought of ‘I' and all you can do is laugh. Or ‘me.' You just laugh. Mind ceases to have the ability to see itself as any particular identification, so mind is free. There's nothing left but gratitude and laughter.
In more traditional religious parlance, it's the Ego that's checkmated?
Yes. And eventually you discover that there's no such thing as the ego. The ego itself is just a thought! Basically, the mind discovers itself through these questions. People talk about a war between good and evil, but to the mind that's clear, everything in the world is good. I sometimes say, “God is everything, God is good.” When you really understand that, in your bones, there's no need to question your thoughts. It's done. There's nothing life can bring you that you don't welcome with open arms. That's clarity.
The frightened mind keeps saying, “Something terrible is going to happen!” In the center of any thought about “Something terrible is going to happen!” is a frightened, immature, baby mind.
And in the center of that frightened mind are the questions. “Is it true?”
If the frightened mind is open, just for a moment, then clarity penetrates it. In its nature it's just pure love, and there's nothing that can't be healed by the truth. We've heard that it's the truth that sets us free. The Work takes that statement to a whole other level.
These questions are available to anyone. My job is to make sure everyone knows that they exist. It's up to them whether they use the questions or not.
Tell us about your new book, Who Would You Be Without Your Story?
It's inquiry. I've sat down one-on-one with people and they have gone from confusion to clarity, and that changes people's lives. Sometimes in a half hour. Sometimes in five minutes!
It's amazing. There are so many examples in it of people working through things like cancer and divorce and death in their family and frustration with their children; everyone can relate to these people and their problems—such amazingly honest and brave people. People can order the book from TheWork.com or Amazon.com or find it in bookstores. Just reading it can shift a person's life and, every time you shift, you become a kinder human being. And that's my interest.
What is The School For The Work?
That is a nine-day course I do. I call it ‘The School of You;' it's radical. I can't imagine anyone who would live the rest of their life without doing the School first, if they only knew about it.
It is so powerful. I'd love to invite everyone to do it; there is one coming up very soon: October 24 to November 2 in Los Angeles . They can register at the website, TheWork.com.
What is the difference between ‘Turnaround House' and ‘The School of You?'
Turnaround House is a twenty-eight-day residential program, and it's quite different from the School.
The nine-day School is living out what I experienced for the first three years after the powerful transformation I described earlier, and it works for everyone whose mind is open to it.
The people who come invest the tuition and the time and are highly committed to getting what they came for, and I actually put them through the experiences I went through—and for some reason it works, because it's genuine. No tricks. Just going inside ourselves to see what's real and what's not.
For the longer Turnaround House, I have all kinds of exercises that they do every day. I have an excellent staff there, and it's amazing what occurs for people.
Any final thoughts for our Light Connection readers?
Suffering is optional. There is a way out of any problem you think you have. And for people who aren't even in trouble, who just want answers to all the essential questions, who just want to know what life is about, what are we doing here, who am I: Come to the website, TheWork.com.
Though we do give a lot of scholarships to the School for The Work, a lot of people can't afford it, but on the website everything is free. Everything I've got is free there—everything; there's nothing held back. There are a lot of events that we charge for, but The Work is free; you don't even have to sign up for the newsletter.
There is a wealth of material both written and available in audio and video that illustrates the way The Work is done. I even have a free hotline that people can call, through the website, and the facilitators don't ask who you are or where you're from, they just walk you through The Work, so people can sit with it and learn it, and they don't even need a teacher.
Byron Katie's The School for The Work will be held in Los Angeles Oct. 24-Nov. 2; Turnaround House happens in Ojai, Oct. 2-29. More information about these and subsequent programs is available at www.TheWork.com or by calling 1-800-98-KATIE (52843)
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