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Byron Katie’s “The Work”



Via the blog Prophet or Madman, I just came across something called “The Work” by a woman named Byron Katie, who seems to be yet another New Age/self-help guru. The Work bills itself as “a deeply transformative process of inquiry that is helping people around the world approach their problems from a perspective of clarity and inner peace.”

The interesting thing, to me, about The Work is that it seems to be predicated upon a series of questions you are supposed to ask yourself when a situation comes up that hurts or angers you, filling you with negative thoughts:

  1. Is it true?
  2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
  3. How do you react when you think that thought?
  4. Who would you be without the thought?

I’m sure there’s more to Katie’s message and method, but this seems like a good starting point for further discussion. First off, this reminds me a lot of the Landmark Forum’s distinction between “what happened” and “the story about what happened.” They talk a lot about how people invent and interpret stories around events to give them meanings which are often not actually true. I guess the idea is that if you drive a wedge between events and interpretation, you allow yourself the opportunity to intentionally change that interpretation for the better, or else be aware of negative tendencies within yourself

Overall though, in terms of Katie’s questions, I’m not sure I really buy into them as being useful. Mainly because they focus almost exclusively on analyzing thought. In order to analyze thought, you need more thought. Somehow, this is supposed to help you “accept reality” according to her website:

This “giving up,” however, can’t be achieved by the thinking mind. (Hoping to give up attachment, the mind subversively attaches to a concept of liberation.) The remedy that brought Katie her freedom is something she calls The Work, a penetrating inquiry process of four questions and a “turnaround.” By exposing unconscious beliefs to the clear light of direct investigation, the mind wakes up to its innocent mistake and drops its losing battle. This happens naturally when we see that something we once believed is proven wrong-for example, when we learn years later that a bitter disagreement was based on a simple misunderstanding. With The Work, we don’t have to wait months or years to resolve our lingering issues; liberating insights happen consistently and on purpose, showing us that suffering is ultimately based on a misunderstanding-our own.

But maybe she’s talking more about using the thinking mind to overcome the problems of the thinking mind, a la philosophical skepticism. Or not, it’s hard to say from these short excerpts. But I have to admit the way she’s presenting it doesn’t particularly intrigue me, especially not enough to sign up for some seminar.







5 Reader Responses

  1. alistair Says:
    August 18th, 2005 at 6:31 pm

    from a neuro-transmitter standpoint our witnessing of situations and events release chemicals into the bloodstream that do things like make our muscles contract, pupils dialate, blood pressure elevate,etc. therefore changing our physical state. this change is then interpeted, after the fact, subjectively, by the person experiencing the changes in thier physiology. it is the interpretation that shapes our reality. if we control the process of interpretation we control our perception of reality.
    the neuro-transmitter response is extremely fast. hundredths of a second. faster than our ability to realise the change is occuring. there are many schools of practice that give us some ability to delay the concious response to this process. yoga is one, scientology it seems holds out some training in this regard as do the higher teachings of most religions, but the priests never get to that point it seems,and the focus on self-control has been transformed into something that happens after death.y`know, the mansion of my father`s house has many rooms.

  2. hebrides Says:
    August 19th, 2005 at 9:33 am

    Her “Work” sounds similar to, but somewhat different from the process of “disputing” in Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, the grand-daddy of cognitive therapy, founded by Albert Ellis. Basically, the assumption is that what makes us upset about stuff is often the irrational beliefs we have. Thus, if you get angry when your girlfriend is late to dinner, for example, you’d ask–why am I upset? What is the thought behind me being upset? Then you ask yourself, “Is this thought rational? What evidence do I have for it? What are other thoughts that I might have in relation to her being late? How would they make me feel?”, that sort of thing. So you change the thought and/or choose to focus on something else. With practice, you start to do this pretty automatically. Personally, I’ve found it to be very useful even if I don’t always remember to do it. I guess where it differs from this woman’s “Work” is that there really isn’t any mystical or transcendental payoff assumed in this process. Also, once you’ve disputed the thought and feel less crazy about it the idea is to stop thinking about it and choose to do something else. Apparently, clinical research has show this sort of “distracting yourself” (e.g. “Alright, my girlfriend’s late. There are a variety of possible reasons and even the most negative scenario is something I can deal with, but right now there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m gonna read this comic book/ work on my novel, etc.”) is pretty effective.

  3. hebrides Says:
    August 19th, 2005 at 9:37 am

    Whoops. Byron Katie. I just read Katie and assumed “The Work” was created by a woman. Are there any women named Byron? Okay, time to work on my novel…

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 19th, 2005 at 11:01 am

    Yeah it’s a woman alright. Supposedly according to her site, her mother named her Byron to cash in on a small inheritance which was contingent upon naming one of her children that.

    Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy - thanks, that’s just the lead I was looking for.

  5. Nicq MacDonald Says:
    August 19th, 2005 at 9:05 pm

    Katie is actually her middle name, at that… she hasn’t used her last name since she got divorced and started teaching…



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