Photo by Gregg Segal
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Quit Your Pain
By Mark Matousek, May & June 2006
Want to be happy? Self-help guru Byron Katie offers a surprisingly easy way to zap your self-destructive thoughts
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Misery loves company, which is why, on a recent Chicago
morning—feeling like the world's biggest failure—I found myself
in a frigid convention hall with 200 other wisdom-hungry souls praying, if not
for salvation, at least for a dose of sanity. I'd been through an abysmal
divorce—the kind that makes you wish you'd become a monk—when a
friend suggested I sign up for a weekend self-help seminar led by a teacher
named Byron Katie. For the past 20 years Katie, 63, has been showing seekers
like me how to lead stress-free lives using a technique she calls The Work.
Admittedly wary after years of reporting on the pop-psychology circus, I was
intrigued by Katie's rep as a tough-minded button pusher in the often
soft-headed field of self-help (Time voted her one of its Spiritual Innovators
for the 21st Century). My friend had another term for it: psychological shock
and awe.
At the stroke of nine Byron Katie strutted onstage in a chocolate silk-pants
ensemble, a shawl thrown dramatically over her shoulder, Doris Day-pretty,
perfectly coifed, self-assured as a lion tamer.
"Our most intimate relationship is the one we have with our own
minds," she said. "I was in terrible shape till one day I realized a
simple thing. When I believed my own thoughts about myself, I suffered. When I
didn't believe them, I didn't suffer. Everything changed for me after
that day."
Katie paced the stage, grinning and nodding. "Thoughts are like
children," she continued. "They're gonna scream till we pay
attention. When we do, and put these beliefs to certain questions, thoughts
we've believed 40, 50, 60 years—the worst, stressful
thoughts—get popped. It takes a lot of courage. But isn't it time to
get real? Haven't we conned ourselves long enough?"
Katie held up a pink worksheet: "Are you ready to do The Work?"
The motley group, ages 18 to 80, hooted and hollered. The exercise involved
making a list of our greatest shame points—the poisonous self-judgments
we reveal to no one—and then applying The Work. "Be brutal!"
Katie pushed. "If we don't question what we believe, we're
destined to live it out."
The Work, as I knew from reading Katie's most recent bestselling book,
I Need Your Love—Is That True? (Harmony, 2005), involves four
questions you ask about a painful belief: 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 that thought?
At the Chicago seminar, an affluent-looking, silver-haired fellow became a
classic case study for The Work. He grabbed the microphone, and in a low voice
said, "My father never loved me."
Katie gazed at him like a hawk scoping a rabbit. "Excellent," she
responded, and then fired the first of her four questions. "Now, is that
true?"
The unloved son nodded emphatically. "Can you absolutely know it's
true?" Katie asked. "Well," he said. "That's how it
feels."
"Of course it does," Katie agreed. "Now, how do you react
when you think that thought, sweetheart?" She's known for scattering
endearments like candy to children.
"I feel miserable."
"And who would you be without that thought?"
"A lot better off, I know that."
"Can you turn it around?"
A look of annoyance flashed over his face. "What? He does love
me?"
Katie steepled her fingers below her chin. "Okay…but can you
think of another turnaround?"
Now he appeared baffled. Then his eyes lit up. "You mean…I
don't love him?" he stammered, as if this thought had never occurred
to him, but saying it, the truth rang through.
"Very good," Katie said, nodding. "Now," she added,
"can you give me three examples of where your lack of love toward your
father was clear?"
"I distance myself from him," he began. "I get furious at him
for how he treated my mom and my family. I just can't forgive
that."
"Good, sweetheart. What else?"
The man gripped the chair and confessed that he'd never really,
truthfully, liked his father in the first place.
Katie held out her arms, embracing the pop of another victim's tale of
woe. Half-stunned, the man took his seat. "Remember, the mind is a
child," she repeated. "It believes what we tell it. Our lives become
hell through our self-created stories. But we each have the power to stop the
abuse."
My seatmate elbowed me, knowing why I was there. My wedding ring was still
stuck on my finger.
"There's so much courage here," said Katie. "It always
amazes me."
The Work came to Katie through a life-threatening crisis. Born Byron
Kathleen Reid in 1942, the headstrong second daughter of a homemaker and a
railroad engineer, she had a run-of-the-mill upbringing in the Mohave Desert of
southern California. After a shotgun wedding at 19, she spent the '60s, and
most of the '70s, raising her three kids and becoming a local real-estate
mini-tycoon.
What happened next knocked this feet-on-the-ground lady sideways. Divorcing
her husband at 33, Katie slipped into a downward plunge of rage, paranoia, and
suicidal depression. Morbidly obese, she became agoraphobic and for two years
could hardly leave her bedroom, often unable to bathe or brush her teeth.
"I had plenty of money, a beautiful home, three kids who were
healthy," she has said. "I felt ungrateful and confused. I was
dying."
Katie moved to a halfway house-like facility. Relegated to the
attic—the other women were afraid of her outbursts—Katie fell
asleep one night in 1986 never expecting that when she woke the next morning,
she would experience a stunning, out-of-nowhere shift in consciousness that
would not only heal her but lead to discovering the four simple questions of
The Work.
She returned home at 43, completely at peace. "I realized that my
thoughts were creating my suffering," Katie has written matter-of-factly.
Gradually she began to do The Work with neighbors who wanted to know how
she'd changed so remarkably. She received invitations to speak. Asked
whether she was enlightened, Katie waved such nonsense aside. "I'm
someone who knows the difference between what hurts and what
doesn't."
Yet for all her success, Katie's tough love message—"All
suffering is optional," she claims—rubs many mental health
professionals the wrong way. "To assume that simply by asking four
questions and turning a thought around you can address the complexity and
seriousness of traumatic issues—such as rape or incest, for
example—misses the mark," says Los Angeles-based psychotherapist Ron
Alexander, Ph.D. Her cruel-to-be-kind approach and categorical rejection of
victimhood are what rankles critics most. A meditation teacher who prefers to
remain anonymous suggests that The Work "has no heart in it."
Watching Katie myself, however, I never doubted the full involvement of her
heart. While it's true she refuses to coddle whiners, her aggression seems
the exasperation of someone watching people hurt themselves unnecessarily in a
manner she barely survived herself.
When I met with Katie a few days later in a Manhattan hotel room, along with
her husband, Stephen Mitchell, a distinguished writer and translator, she
elaborated on this point. "Imagine if your energy were not being taken up
with stress, what you'd be capable of!" she said, glamorous in another
flowing, silky ensemble. "We're all so busy being miserable,
depressed. But the mind that has questioned itself looks forward to life. Do I
choose to live in a way that's most fulfilling for me, or am I going to
prove that I'm the primo example of suffering, and here's why we should
all be miserable?"
Without intending to, Katie had just punctured the central balloon of my own
divorce melodrama.
"Suffering over things that have happened to us is nothing more than an
argument with the past. Your father may have slapped you when you were three,
but you've done it now a million times."
The face of my ex flashed before me. I was the one holding the whip.
"On our deathbeds, we're still saying that he or she ruined my
life," Katie exclaimed, pouring a cup of tea. "People say life is a
dream. Well, let's question the nightmare and have a happy dream! Retiring
from stressful thoughts could be the most important retirement there
is."
A week later I wrote my ex a long-overdue letter abdicating my wounded
position, confessing to my own conjugal errors, and sending wishes for
friendship. Dropping the envelope in the mailbox, I realized that nothing had
changed except the conviction that I was right and my version of our debacle
was the true one. My depression began to lift, and I was reminded of something
Katie had told me before leaving. "Reality is always much kinder than our
thoughts about it," she said, tightly squeezing my hand. This seemed, for
once, absolutely true.
Mark Matousek's new book, The Art of Survival, will be available in
late 2006.
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