the Work of Byron Katie
as discovered by N
originally published in the Sept 2007 issue of RELAX Magazine
photos N
In the town center of Ojai, California, I spot a mom and a teenage daughter walking down the street. In colorful garb and matching bandanas, they look like flower children straight out of a Mad Max sequence. As they walk closer, I notice they also look preoccupied. But I’m in a new town and need to figure out where I’m going that afternoon. When I ask them for directions, the daughter doesn’t break her frown. Chewing on her lip, with a hard look in her eye, she looks lost in her own world. 16 going on 50.
What is it, I wonder, that keeps eating at us Americans?
Maybe I could start to find out. An outdoor bistro patio on Ojai’s main drag is where I find myself entering a workshop for the international best-selling author and founder of the self-help process known as the Work.
Cold Canyon road outside Malibu, 9:3opm, two days shy of the end of 2006. A red Mustang juts out at a strange angle along the steep, windy pass. Ineke van Heijden, vacationing from Europe, arrives first.
I was in California for the Work event in Los Angeles and had flown in from my home in the Netherlands. Having already attended the School for the Work, I was equally excited to attend this additional New Year’s event. But I was beginning to feel tired as I drove along the road toward Malibu. I rounded a corner.
I saw red and silver metal blocking part of the road. As I got closer, I could see it was a car wrapped along a telephone pole.
As I stopped my car, the very stressful thought occurred to me, “I don’t know what to do!” My mind was racing. I was in a foreign country, I didn’t know the roads, the towns, the conventions, what to do in such a case. My heart was praying, hoping there was no one in that car somehow. The stressful thoughts were torturing me. The urge to run away was incredibly strong.
But, I ran down the hill to the car and saw two people inside. Though it was dark,
I could see that it was serious. Very. There were two crumpled, limp bodies in the seats. My reaction? Fear. Panic started rising.
This is real, I thought. This accident is now.
A BRISK, NO-NONSENSE voice rings out from the microphone. “I like to say, ‘There’s nothing you can do to keep me from loving you.’” This is Byron Katie.
Named an “innovator for the new millennium” by TIME Magazine, Byron Katie is a grandmotherly woman now in her 70s who travels the world filling requests for her workshops. At her events, she takes people through an inquiry process she developed known as the Work. We all have hobbies. Her hobby is clearing the moldy junk of the mind. And I have some questions about all this. Others apparently do too — it’s standing-room only at the back. I find a stone bench, sit down and take out my notepad to listen.
“I’m very disappointed that a friend didn’t show up. She just didn’t show up to this workshop today,” a woman complains. “I don’t know what happened. And I’m really…” She shifts in her seat.
“Ok. So she didn’t show up. Alright, now find three genuine ways that it’s better for you, for her, and — for the world that she didn’t show up!”
Laughter peals out from the crowd. “Oh my!” exclaims the woman, clearly seeing the challenge in the question.
Katie (as she’s known) smiles. She very much has a baby face. I try to remember the last time I saw a baby-faced senior citizen. Katie pauses to let the noise die down before continuing.
“Einstein said there was only one important question: is the universe friendly? Well 21 years ago I fell into the answer not even knowing there was a question,” she says. “If your friend didn’t show up, it’s your stressful story about it that keeps you from your peace. And again, I invite you not to believe me — test it for yourself.”
Katie’s husband, the internationally-renowned poet and translator Stephen
Mitchell, prepares to read from their co-authored labor of love,
A Thousand Names for Joy. Today’s event is part of the book tour, which
adds a third, poetic volume to the more practical-minded New York
Times best-sellers Loving What Is and I Need Your Love — Is that True?
Stephen ushers in the passage delicately. “Before a thought, there’s no one.
Nothing. Only peace. Peace that doesn’t even recognize itself as peace. What I know about dying is that when there’s no escape, when you know
that no one is coming to save you, there is no fear. You just don’t bother. The worst thing that can happen on your deathbed is a belief.”
I take this in. I’m not particularly enamored of thinking of deathbeds.
Next, Katie fields a question from another female audience member. What triggers her stress, reports the woman, is a memory of her ex. She describes experiencing “a lot of bad feelings and turmoil” since the break-up. Not only was the man emotionally immature and dishonest, she says, but in addition “he just treated me horribly.”
My purse spills to the ground. Two people lean down to help me quietly
gather up my belongings. A stately woman with shiny eyes and coiffed curls compliments me on my dress.
When I tune back in to the event, I hear Katie asking the woman, “So, who would you be without the thought, ‘He treated me horribly’?” I realized I had this woman’s very same thought. Suddenly, I wasn’t listening to her answer. Instead, it occurred to me that I myself might feel lighter, happier and less eaten-up inside.
Katie turns her body toward the audience. “What I’ve found, is when
you don’t believe that negative thought, there’s no cause for depression. There’s absolutely no way to remain depressed.”
“For those of you not familiar with the Work, what we’ll be doing here is asking four questions and finding opposites,” continues Katie. Her attention is back on the woman. “So honey, what is a turnaround to ‘He treated me horribly’?”
After a few moments, the young woman offers an opposite. “I treated
myself horribly. I allowed him to run all over me. I didn’t protect myself.”
“Yes, that’s one turnaround,” Katie replies. “Now can you give me one concrete example of where you treated him horribly?” The woman pauses, struggles. “I invite you to sit in it,” Katie offers gently.
“See where you treated him horribly. Even just in your mind.”
The lady still isn’t sure, so Katie moves on, suggesting another route.
“Find one place where he treated you wonderfully,” Katie suggests.
Another long pause. “Well. He gave me 3,000 dollars for vacation,” she finally offers.
“Yes honey. You know, this work isn’t always easy — I don’t call it the
Work for nothing.”
After seeing these two people in the wreck, a woman and a man, I ran up the hill. In total confusion and driven by panic, I ran to a house I could see in the wooded area and began banging on the door for someone to answer, although I knew there was a good chance they would think I was some sort of crazy foreign person.
I began screaming, “Help! Help!” It was only later that I noticed I was actually
yelling, “Call 911! Call 911!” A part of me stopped and was observing myself — how do I, Ineke, know the emergency number in a place I’ve never lived before? By this time, I was running back down the hill.
My urge was to go to the people in the car. All I remember is that one feeling: I had to be with them. Looking in, I could see no airbags had gone off. I crouched alongside them. The woman’s face was pale and grey in contrast to her blond shoulder-length hair. I moved over to the man in the passenger’s side. He too was listless and fading. Both were still breathing, still alive.
The woman ’s breathing was labored and shallow. When I placed my hands to support the back of her head, careful not to move her, I felt the blood. My hands were red.
EVER PASSED one of those beverage distilleries or gotten to tour inside one, say in Milwaukee or Boston? Modest-sized plants reveal steam rising from high stacks inside. Metal plates move, forming the final spirits.
Best I can figure, Byron Katie is some sort of human happiness distiller.
Yet before the workshops and the TIME Magazine accolades, the name Byron Katie referred to a psychotically-depressed housewife in the high
desert of Barstow, California. Being a successful breadwinner, and having a husband and healthy teenage kids did little to stave off the vortex of despair growing inside Katie during that time. As chronicled in Loving What Is, Katie holed herself up in her bedroom for weeks on end. Once there, she would submit only to doing her real estate business by telephone. Bathing and brushing teeth simply weren’t on the agenda. She had become a remote-worker — in the fullest and most unfortunate sense of the word.
In order to avoid her explosions of rage, Katie’s children would find themselves sneaking past her door. A gun under the pillow was fast becoming her most frequent companion. Before long, Katie began buying up all the houses on her block — in an attempt to make her paranoid thoughts stop torturing her. When she finally landed in a halfway house for women with eating disorders (her insurance plan wouldn’t cover any other treatments), things seemed to get worse. Once at the facility, she made such a frightening impression on her fellow halfway house clients that it was voted she be sent away to an attic room.
Then something really weird happened.
One morning she noticed a cockroach crawling over her foot. In that moment, clarity erupted inside her. “I saw that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, and when I didn’t believe my thoughts, I didn’t suffer,” she says. In later weeks, once home, Katie sat in her living room, and asked herself question after question — filling entire notebooks. Nothing looked the same. A new person had appeared in her place.
Over time, this seed of strange homecoming developed into a process that would become known as the Work.
These days, Katie asks workshop attendees to write their stressful thoughts
on a small card. Then, she offers four simple questions for each thought.
1. Is that true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe the thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
The final instruction is to Turn the thought around. The Work functions on an intuitive level, without right or wrong answers. If Socrates met Buddha at a cognitive psychology production meeting, this would be their deliverable.
Back at the workshop in Ojai, I’m told Katie will join me in a few minutes.
I take a seat inside the aptly-named Feast bistro and reflect on steamed garlic clams versus slow-roast duck confit. I learn from Feast that the town of Ojai was portrayed as Shangri-La in the famous Frank Capra movie Lost Horizon.
Though Katie glides in to the opposite seat before I have the chance to
rehearse my introductory remarks, this triggers less stress than usual.
After all, even if I was a total wreck, wouldn’t it be cool with her anyway?
She’s dressed head-to-toe in black. A Johnny Cash tune enters my head.
As I fiddle with my recording device, I sense Katie’s polar-blue eyes on me.
“Today we find ourselves attempting to balance modern life and family
and the demands of the world,” I begin. “And it seems there are a million
things taking their toll. What do you see as the origin of stress?” I ask.
Katie looks me straight in the eye. “We believe our stressful thoughts.
We believe thoughts that are not true for us. And only then do we
experience stress — while we’re believing that thought.” Less than two minutes into our conversation, I’m seeing there’s a directness about Katie that leaves no room to hide. She continues. “So let’s say for example, I have a thought, ‘He doesn’t care about me.’ I have all these images in my head to prove it. And stress happens as a result of that.” However, Katie goes on to explain, when we’re thinking, ‘He cares deeply for me, he’s so wonderful,’ we experience something different. We still experience feelings, but instead of hurting us, they feel right. “If we are believing our stressful thoughts, the effect is depression, stress, anger, frustration. Everything that is not loving and caring is happening in our mind — so it shows up in our feelings. If we didn’t believe those thoughts, we would simply laugh.”
I think back to my life. Sometimes I’ll be going through my day and see
some sort of depressing visual or see myself in a negative light. In these
moments I’m receiving visuals instead of a statement. What’s the
relationship between visuals and words for this work? I ask. Is there a
way to translate?
“Yes,” she affirms. “Put those images in the context of a story, and go back and journal it. Circle the concepts that you’ve journaled, question them one by one, and turn them around. So it’s about identifying the story and questioning it.”
Ok, sounds simple enough. But it occurs to me that people have stresses
and sorrows that they’re dead sure about. I ask Katie if this work isn’t pretty extreme for the average person — and are some people better served by methods like meditation?
“Yes. The Work is very extreme.” A smile spreads across her face. Her eyes dance, mirroring the sparkles on her silk scarf. “It is extremely extreme. We are confronting our whole identity. We are confronting the entire world in our mind as we believe it to be. So we’re questioning the world as we believe it to be and when we do that we lose that world. And it leaves us in a state we think we don’t know how to deal with. But in truth, we know how to deal with it very well. Because what we’re left with, basically, is ‘How can I help?’ And that’s what we love to do, is help each other.”
“I can’t say what meditation is for others,” she continues. “Maybe it can be about voiding thoughts and sitting in silence and clearing the mind. Whereas in the Work I’m inviting people to begin their meditation with ‘He doesn’t care about me’ — is that true? Or whatever thought troubles them. And then I invite them to sit in that space, allowing whatever is there to surface. So it’s more like a guided meditation. The question ‘Is it true — can I absolutely know that it’s true?’ is ultimately a guided meditation. All four questions are. And the turnaround also is meditation. ‘He does care about me.’ This is allowing those experiences of caring to surface, rather than fighting them away, avoiding them, dismissing them. Because as long as we do that with our thoughts, we do it with people. They’re going to say what we don’t want to hear. So to work with the thoughts in our heads is to work with the whole world.”
Yet aren’t pain, stress, and suffering great muses, great inspirations? How will great achievements — music, art, et cetera — come into being if there isn’t that pain or worry to motivate an individual?
Katie tells me that her experience is that each of us creates solely out of
“a clear mind, a free-flowing mind, creativity just flowing nonstop.” In those moments, she asserts, there is no pain — there is only art. I consider this. It jostles very forcefully with the reigning “pain-as-romantic” philosophy. As if sensing this, Katie continues, “We don’t need pain to be creative. In fact, it’s limiting. If you look at yourself during times that you’ve done things that you’ve absolutely loved, you haven’t been suffering. You were free.”
“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.” ~William S. Burroughs
While sitting roundtable with Katie, others arrive to take their seats. First is Steve Hardison, a top business and wealth coach whose clients are a Who’s Who of the CEO world. Tall, sandy-haired and of crisp Mormon stock, you take one look and just know this man was a high-school quarterback. Next to him is Melony, a trim and lovely young woman who helps lead Katie’s team. Bright and affable, she has got to be one of the rare Type-A surfer chicks on record. Soon, Stephen joins the group. Though he lends a quiet, erudite energy, he appears animated from doing the book signing. This is also a man clearly well-versed in scaling back and allowing his wife to shine. Must be some fine balance to strike every day.
I wonder how children might function in this equation. I’m interested to hear from Katie about doing the Work with children. Can it help kids with their stress? Are they able to understand?
“Oh absolutely, absolutely. And it’s not in such a formal context with
little kids, either,” Katie affirms. “They’ll say, ‘Nobody likes me!’ And you say, ‘Oh honey, are you sure? How does that feel to be so rejected, tell me?’ That’s the third question. ‘Sweetheart, remember just a few minutes ago when we were laughing and you weren’t thinking that thought? What was that like? Look at the difference.’ They get it so quickly. So then the turnaround would be, ‘Let’s find one person that likes you, ok? Let’s find one. You find one and I’ll find one.’ They find the turnarounds. So children are very good at this.”
Katie is energized on this topic. “Parents who have the Work alive in them, their children get it. Because it becomes part of our language, part of how we talk. But we’re not “giving” them the Work, we’re simply communicating clearly, fearlessly and openly — and our children become as clear and open and honest as we are. Then they don’t have to hide. We ask them, ‘How do you feel when you thinking that?’ It’s a chance to meet our children to the depths of their soul. But we’re afraid to hear their pain. So we say, ‘Oh honey, it’s not so bad, here’s a cookie. Go back to cartoons.”
“And then we wonder why they’re overweight or just laying around,” I add.
“Yes,” Katie replies. “We’re afraid to face their pain. Because we haven’t faced our own. So, the Work is the way to do that. And Loving What Is is the way to do that. That’s the text for the Work. I call it the book of You. And people who will follow those directions, can talk to their children,
communicate with their children, lower the stress in their own life. As we find our own understanding, we understand our children.”
As part of Byron Katie International, Katie and her team offer a longer
program known as the School for the Work. But what is it? Katie passes
the audio recorder to Steve, who proclaims today he is celebrating his
one-year anniversary of attending the School. Glasses clink all around
the table.
Steve takes a deep breath. “I took my wife to the School — and I thought
it was the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had in my life. Just extraordinary in looking at who I am as a human being. Learning how to actually increase my personal peace, and to be present with my wife and my children. It was powerful. In fact, I had such a great experience going to that, that later that same year in October, I took 21 of my clients with me and we spent another nine days in the School. That’s how good it was.”
“And it’s early morning to laaaate at night,” Katie adds. Laughter peppers the table.
“It sounds like boot camp, in a fun way,” I add, to more laughter. I’m envisioning legions of Donald Trumps dancing in army fatigues on
a veranda.
“It is,” Katie replies. “In the most amazing, fun way you could ever imagine. You know, we are our favorite subject. So it’s very exciting to break the spell of pain.”
It’s difficult to argue with that. “I love that you say that,” I confess.
“I — I — feel it! ” I finish, laughing.
“Well, you know, my books are about the Book of You, and my School is about the School of You. I love inviting people to start where I did — on the ground, in the dirt, and to just start from what we’re believing — no matter how ‘unspiritual’ it may seem to us to be.”
“Yea, that resonates with me somehow,” I tell her. “Because here on the
West Coast lots of us end up exploring Eastern practices and debate about
what it might mean to be Enlightened, yet who knows what that is?”
“Well, I can tell you my version,” Katie says. I bob my head in the affirmative.
“The end of suffering. Sanity. If someone came up and said to me, ‘Katie,
you’re Enlightened,’ I’d have no way to know if that’s true. And to dwell on it would be crazy. Because that’s just a focus on me, me, me. So it’s the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t — and to work with what hurts. That’s the thing: to note the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t — and all of us know that, we all have that, we know. So. That’s what the Work is about. Just — it’s for all of us.”
Two other samaritans had arrived on the accident scene, and were asking me questions in rapid succession. I told them my name was Ineke and did my best to answer them. I noticed in the wreckage that the car’s headlights were still on. Also, the stereo was still blaring music. With a couple clicks of buttons, I turned these off and implored everyone, “Please, let’s be quiet.” What I then noticed is that instead of the stressful thought “I don’t know what to do,” I was moving in the turnaround, “I do know what to do.” That meant stay. Be the peace.
I turned to the people in the car. There was nothing labeling, nothing judging the moment. I touched each of them, held their hands. At some point, I became vaguely aware that the two other bystanders had left.
I transmitted to the man and the woman, “It’s ok to die.” It was quiet. Their bodies were ravaged, almost gone, so I was with their spirits.
At another point, colored lights began pulsing. The paramedics had arrived on the scene.
(The other samaritans had also come hack from the side of the road to speak to me about the accident and how shaken they were. “How was it possible for you to be with them?” one of them asked. All I could think to reply was, “Go to thework.com.”)
While I was touching the woman’s head in those long several minutes, I was in total connection with her. This was my work. My body was here to care for the ones whose own were failing. The woman was Shari. The man was Tom. They did not die alone.
