ABOUT BYRON KATIE
(exert from her website)
Byron Katie,
founder of
"The Work",
has one job: to teach people how to end their own suffering. As she guides people through the powerful process of inquiry called The Work, they find that their stressful beliefs about life, other people or themselves radically shift and their lives are changed forever. The Work is based on Byron Katie's direct experience of how suffering is created and ended and it is an astonishingly simple process, accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds and requires nothing more than a pen, paper and an open mind. Through this process, anyone can learn to trace unhappiness to its source and eliminate it there. Katie (as everyone calls her) not only shows us that all the problems in the world originate in our thinking; she gives us the tool to open our minds and set ourselves free.
HOW "THE WORK" BEGAN
Byron Katie
became severely depressed in her early thirties. For almost a decade she spiraled down into depression, rage, self-loathing and constant thoughts of suicide. For the last two years she was often unable to leave her bedroom.Then one morning in February 1986, she experienced a life-changing realization. There are various names for an experience like this. Katie calls it "waking up to reality."
In that instant of no-time, she says, "I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that 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."
She realized that what had been causing her depression was not the world around her, but the beliefs she'd had about the world. Instead of hopelessly trying to change the world to match her thoughts about how it should be, she could question these thoughts and by meeting reality as it is, experience unimaginable freedom and joy. As a result, a bedridden, suicidal woman was instantly filled with love for everything that life brings.
Katie's process of self-inquiry, called The Work, didn't develop from this experience;
she says that it woke up with her, as her, that February morning in 1986. The first people who did The Work reported that it had transformed their lives and she soon began receiving invitations to teach the process publicly.
Since 1986, she has brought The Work to hundreds of thousands of people across the world, at free public events, in prisons, hospitals, churches, corporations, universities, schools, at weekend workshops and at her amazing nine-day School for The Work.
Byron Katie has also written three best-selling books, Loving What Is, I need your Love- Is that True? and A Thousand Names for Joy.
Inspirational Works: Events that Inspire, Motivate and Transform lives.
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