The Work of Byron Katie
The Work was born on a February morning in 1986 when Byron Katie, a 43-year-old woman from a small town in California, woke up on the floor of a halfway house, at a complete dead end in her life, and began to laugh.
In the midst of an ordinary American life - second marriage, children, a successful career in real estate - Byron Katie had entered an inexplicable descent into paranoia and despair. She began to drink too much and to eat uncontrollably until her weight passed 200 pounds; at times she emotionally and even on one occasion physically abused one of her three children. For seven years she was so depressed that she rarely left her house, staying in bed for weeks at a time, unable even to brush her teeth. During those years her husband suffered four heart attacks and, in the end, was forced to put Katie in a halfway house for women with eating disorders. The other residents were so afraid of her that she was placed alone in an attic room.
What followed is difficult to grasp. Katie woke up one day on the floor of her room and watched a cockroach crawl across her bare foot. At that moment she lost all concepts of who, where, or what she was. She awoke as the fundamental, luminous state of being that is without any separation and that experiences itself as pure love. Like the great spiritual masters from many traditions, she knew she had reached the end of confusion and suffering. She realized that her previous understanding of life had been utterly backward. That was the moment she burst into laughter.
It took Katie years to learn how to speak about her state of being. She had no external context for her awareness. She had never meditated or been remotely interested in spirituality. She had never even read a "spiritual" book. She just had her own experience to guide. But word spread about a "lit lady" in Barstow, and many people found themselves magnetically attracted to her. Katie was convinced that what was needed was not her personal presence, but a way for people to discover for themselves what she had realized. Out of this came a simple method of self-inquiry that she called The Work.
Katie began teaching (sharing) The Work wherever she was invited-at first in small gatherings in living rooms and eventually in many countries to audiences of hundreds. By the end of 1999, approximately 200,000 people had attended at least an introductory presentation of The Work, and 36,000 had attended Katie's weekend or weeklong intensives.
Currently there are more than 75 "Work Groups" in cities across the country. It is also being promoted on a grass-roots level all around Europe and most of the developed world, from townships in South Africa to De Koepel Prison in Holland to the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles, California. Katie does about ten public appearances a month.
About The Work of Byron Katie
The Work of Byron Katie reveals a fundamental confusion in the center of what is called sanity. Most people have been afflicted with this confusion for so long that they take the suffering it causes for granted. The confusion has nothing to do with the content of our thoughts and beliefs, but rather with the way we relate to them. The Work of Byron Katie clarifies this confusion so fundamentally that one hesitates to call it psychological, and so practically that one hesitates to call it spiritual. The Work is simple and radical. It is a new way of self-discovery and awakening that does not depend on "teachings" or beliefs. It results in a profoundly sane and joyful state of mind.
People begin doing The Work in a variety of ways. Thus far, most have been inspired by participating in one of Katie's workshops, at which she brings a loving incisiveness to one-to-one dialogues. Some have picked up one of her "How To" pamphlets and worksheets and begun a life-changing practice by themselves. All War Belongs on Paper, is the first presentation of the whole of Katie's teaching - in all its liberating clarity and warmth and in a form in which The Work can truly stand on its own.
People who do The Work begin right in the center of their lives with whatever is upsetting or angering or saddening them at the time. The instructions fit on a single sheet of paper; Katie's nursery-rhyme directions are to "judge your neighbor, write it down, ask four questions, and turn it around." People write down the thoughts that express their problem, and these written judgments become the basis for an "inquiry" that deconstructs the attachment to the thinking that is the cause of their suffering.
The Work reveals that our everyday thinking-the beliefs, concepts, judgments, or "stories" that we use to control and obscure our actual experience-never correspond with reality. "The Inquiry" (Katie's four questions) first reveals the inaccuracy of our thinking, then shows how we cause our own suffering when we attach to a false thought. Then comes the remarkably liberating question "Who would you be without your story?" Those who are ready to ask themselves this question, within the context of their written judgment, notice the painful inner struggle end. The question allows a glimpse of "what is" and a realization that "what is" is always preferable to our story about it.
Many people report a feeling of release and freedom that is immediate and unstoppable; but if The Work depended on a momentary experience, it would have far less significance. The Work is an ongoing and ever-deepening process of self-inquiry, not a one-time cure or quick fix.
The effectiveness of The Work is impressive, but it also has a remarkable correspondence to the new biology of the mind. As cutting-edge neuroscientists move closer to an explanation of consciousness, they have begun to discover the unreliability of what they call the "interpreter," the part of the brain that generates the familiar narrative that gives us our sense of self. In the words of Antonio Demasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa, "Perhaps the most important revelation is precisely this: that the left cerebral hemisphere of humans is prone to fabricating verbal narratives that do not necessarily accord with the truth." Or consider this from The Mind's Past by Michael Gazzaniga, Director of the Program in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College: "The left brain weaves its story in order to convince itself and you that it is in full control…. What is so adaptive about having what amounts to a spin doctor in the left brain? The interpreter is really trying to keep our personal story together. To do that, we have to learn to lie to ourselves."
The implications of statements such as these are far-reaching. After all, what these scientists refer to as the interpreter is also what we have learned to rely on as our rational mind. What else can we trust? This is where The Work of Byron Katie comes in: Katie corroborated the findings of these scientists in advance, through her own experience, but she went on to point out a way to give up our reliance on "story" and find our way back to the actual truth of our lives.