I’ve come to know Byron Katie’s The Work as a strategic identity cleanse, a chance to remove harmful beliefs with surgical precision. If you don’t have time or energy to overhaul your whole self, maybe you can take 10 minutes to offload a mean-ass belief from your psyche? The emotional effects are transcendent if you pick a big one. Don’t believe me? Just do The Work and see how you feel when you hang out for a hot second on question number 3.
Just so I don’t sound like a silly little convert, I’ve been studying every kind of psychological and spiritual mind-hack since I was eleven, even before people used the term ‘hack’ in such a wonderfully defiant way. How do these systems actually work? Once you remove the spokesperson and dogma, what’s at the core? How can I just do that? How does a ‘thought package’ appease, help, or transform a person? What makes Buddhism, Christianity, New Age practices, Storytelling, NLP, Therapy, Coaching, and various self-help programs shift experience? Why shift experience?
Without giving too many of ‘my’ answers (which boil down to a metaphor involving ball of elastics, and having balls), I’ll just tell you how I’m keeping myself positive and feeling empowered when I’m busy.
When I have a languishing mindset — and only a half hour over morning cup of coffee before the kids and husbands spill their agendas all over my day— I do Byron Katie’s The Work. And every time I do an inquiry, it changes my state instantly. I have had such a huge, powerful cluster of competing and complementary beliefs (having studied many greats and loads of hucksters to boot), I often need a quick psychic turn around. And I’d rather not wait for it either.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I did The Work on every belief I had, even the ones that support a happy existence or make me feel good about myself. Then I think, why in God’s name would I do that?? My experience with earnestly-practiced Buddhism left me floating on a river of awakening with very little sense of self, clawing to come back for months, while being pissed at a really nice monk…. but that’s another story.
Katie’s work is perfect for time-pressed me, who wants to do transformational shifting right now, while I’m still raising kids and don’t want to shave my head just yet. Besides, I’ve been having some really great hair days lately.
Let me first reiterate the four questions that are The Work. Katie offers this wisdom for free and I encourage you to buy her book, or subscribe to her videos to show her your support if you also find value in it.
First: isolate a belief that needs inquiry, then ask yourself, while writing the answers:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know it is true?
3. What happens, how do you react, when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without that thought?
The final step is to ‘turn around’ your initial belief statement by rewriting it in opposites. If your belief was something like my classic “I’m not enough” the turn-around could be “I’m doing more than enough” or “Enough is not me,” etc. The more turn-arounds you write the better, even if oddly phrased. Something kind of magical happens on these statements, which I don’t want to describe, lest you miss it. The beauty is, you can do all the steps in a few minutes for a huge change in your identity and state. Just be sure to do the writing part, thinking your way through it just doesn’t get it done.
Now I’m going to end this post with no distinct resolution, only a call to action. Find yourself a sneaky little statement you keep telling yourself that makes you feel crappy, then just do The Work. Here’s mine for today: my writing is amateurish.
See ya on the other side!