“I pursued Lena for four years to no effect. I fixed her computer, I ate onion rings because she liked them, I pulled out my funniest remarks, I underplayed how much I wanted her. Nothing worked.
Then she and I had a chance to spend a weekend together. She made it clear that no form of sexual contact was okay. I wasn’t allowed to hold her hand, to hug her, to give her a kiss on the cheek—nothing. Every time the urge to show affection arose, I had to not act. Instead, I noticed my thoughts. And this is what I saw: that I used all those techniques to make women like me. All that weekend, instead of feeling like I was repressing myself, I noticed that those simple physical actions actually dissipated the loving, fun, sexy sensations I was feeling. Without the usual outlet, those feelings just kept running through my body. At the end of this totally platonic weekend, I had never been more blissed out and full of love!
The key moment when I stopped seeking her love was, to say the least, a huge relief. My whole body relaxed. I simply couldn’t make myself believe that I needed a relationship with her, or with anyone else, to be happy. I stopped feeling pulled outside myself, I stopped reaching for happiness where it didn’t and couldn’t exist. I just stopped doing what I had been doing my whole life. As a result, I felt stable and honest and complete for the first time.
I stopped seeking this woman’s love, and I apologized for all the ways I tried to get her to agree with my thought that we should be a couple. I genuinely—and I was shocked by this—had no desire to be with her in a committed relationship, and I felt content with the fact that I loved a woman who didn’t want to be with me that way. Well, the great ironic punch line to the story is that the moment I stopped seeking her love and approval, when I could no longer find a reason to be with her (or anyone else, for that matter), she looked at me and thought, “The freedom that I’ve always wanted—I can find it with Steven. Oh, and he’s pretty cuter And she leaned over and kissed me.
Now, four years later, we’ve been married for a year. And our actual relationship is much better than the one was imagining for all those years.”
Source: I Need Your Love—Is That True? by Byron Katie
“Although she might never identify it as such, Byron Katie is espousing a form of meta-cognition, a way of thinking about thinking. Are your thoughts a true reflection of the reality around you, or do they come unbidden from your unconscious?
Byron Katie just wants you to be happy. She doesn’t know you, but she believes she can help you find your happiness, and countless of her fans and followers would agree. She also thinks that helping you find happiness goes a long way in solving the myriad problems in the world. She’s been on Oprah. Tony Robbins is a fan and incorporates her work into his own teachings. Her methods are remarkably simple; she only asks that you question your own thoughts and that you accept reality for what it really is. You will wonder why you never thought of it.
An unusual woman with an unusual name, Byron Katie is leading a revolution of the mind. Although she might never identify it as such, she is espousing a form of meta-cognition, a way of thinking about thinking. Are your thoughts a true reflection of the reality around you, or do they come unbidden from your unconscious? Can you trust what your own mind tells you? Byron Katie would say no. She would ask you to question each thought as it comes, to mull it over and put it to the test. And then she would ask you to take that further, to ponder the opposite of that thought, and whether that “turnaround,” in fact, might be a truer version of reality. This process she calls “The Work.”
The Work: I had the opportunity to see Byron Katie speak in person at the Omega Institute NYC Conference, and I have also been reading her book I Need Your Love — Is That True?. Both were eye-opening, I might even say life-changing, experiences for me. The Work is a series of four questions that you apply to each stressful, unhappy, or counterproductive thought that comes into your mind. Take, for example, the thought “I am such a pushover,” which you might have after being taken advantage of by someone you love or trust.
Is it true? This is only a simple yes or no question, either I am a pushover or I am not — in objective reality without adding my own filters and biases.
Can you absolutely know that it is true? This is also a yes or no question but requires more thinking. Who is to say what constitutes being “a pushover”? Perhaps being a pushover to one person is seeking or receiving just the right amount of guidance to another. If I cannot definitively say that it is true, then the answer is no.
How do you react — what happens — when you believe that thought? How does this thought make me feel and behave? If I worry that I am easily manipulated, I may beat myself up in my relationships and unnecessarily put walls up. I criticize myself. And I begin to resent the other person because I can’t put my guard down around them.
Who would you be without the thought? If that thought never existed, how would I feel and behave? If I never had to worry about being a pushover, I could live more freely. I wouldn’t put my guard up in my relationships, and I would allow myself to be vulnerable and who I really am. I would feel better about myself.
The Turnaround: Now comes the point where Byron Katie asks you to take the opposite of your thought and mull it over. One turnaround might be: “I am not at all a pushover.” Is this any truer than the original statement? Can I think of any examples in which this is true? Another turnaround might be that my spouse/partner/parent/coworker is the one who is a pushover. In this way, I could come to see that everyone can be manipulated at times, and that this is normal. I can see that I am not “such” a pushover at all, and that I am letting the fear of being controlled actually control me. I can begin to let these thoughts go and no longer criticize myself or others. And so the stress associated with the thought of being such a pushover would no longer exist.
What Bryon Katie is offering is a method of self-inquiry that allows us to free ourselves from the anger and negativity we feel when we accept our thoughts, unquestioned, as true. We cause much of our own suffering by believing what our minds tell us. If we can see that certain thoughts are the cause of our own unhappiness, we can begin to let go and be free of them. Questioning these thoughts, putting them to the test of The Work, is a form of enlightenment. If the unexamined life is not worth living, perhaps the unexamined thought is not worth thinking.
“Before I woke up to reality, I had a symbol for all my frustration: my children’s socks. Every morning they would be on the floor, and every morning I would think, “My children should pick up their socks.” It was my religion. You could say my world was accelerating out of control in my mind; there were socks everywhere. And I would be filled with rage and depression because I believed these socks didn’t belong on the floor even though, morning after morning, that’s where they were. I believed it was my children’s job to pick them up even though, morning after morning, they didn’t.
I use the image of children and socks, but you might find that for you, the same thoughts apply to the environment, politics or money. We think these things should be different than they are, and we suffer because we believe our thoughts. At 43, after 10 years of deep depression and despair, my real life began.
What I came to see was that my suffering wasn’t a result of not having control; it was a result of arguing with reality. I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered; when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.
When you question your mind for the love of truth, your life always becomes happier and kinder. Inquiry helps the suffering mind move out of its arguments with reality. It helps us move into alignment with constant change. After all, the change is happening anyway, whether we like it or not. Everything changes. But when we’re attached to our thoughts about how that change should look, we feel uncomfortable when we realize we’re not in control. Through inquiry, we enter the area where we do have control: our thinking. We question our thoughts about the ways in which the world seems to have gone crazy, for example. And we come to see that the craziness was never in the world, but in us.
When we understand our thinking, we understand the world, and we come to love it. In that, there’s peace.
Who would I be without the thought that the world needs improving? Happy where I am right now: the woman sitting on a chair in the sunlight. Pretty simple. The apparent craziness of the world, like everything else, is a gift we can use to set our minds free. Any stressful thought you have about the planet, for example, or about life and death, shows you where you’re stuck, where your energy is being exhausted as a result of not fully meeting life as it is, without conditions. You can’t free yourself by finding a so-called “enlightened” state outside your own mind. When you question what you believe, you eventually come to see you’re the enlightenment you’ve been seeking.
Until you can love what is–everything, including the apparent violence and craziness–you’re separate from the world, and you’ll see it as dangerous and frightening. I invite everyone to put these fearful thoughts on paper, question them, and set themselves free. When the mind is not at war with itself, there’s no separation in it. I’m 65 years old and unlimited. I’m no longer interested in what my children do with their socks.”
Quoted from a book by Byron Katie: A thousands names for joy
