(NOTE: This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)
I met a living master last Saturday night. Her name is Byron Katie. She is the author of several books, including:
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
I Need Your Love – Is That True?: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead
and her latest book….
A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are
Katie (everyone who knows her calls her by her last name, which she essentially uses as if it were her first) came to my town over the weekend to offer a workshop, prior to which she offered a free introductory evening, so that people could have a firsthand experience of her doing what she calls The Work.
The Work, if you do not already know, consist of four questions that Katie invites you to ask yourself at any time that you are “hung up” on a particular thought or idea about yourself or another, or about any situation that is plaguing you. She claims the asking and the answering of these questions change help you “get off it,” and can alter your experience of any unpleasant or unwelcome thought or emotion.
On Saturday she sat before several hundred people who jammed a meeting room at the college in our town (they were standing along the walls and sitting on the floor in front of the first row of seats) and demonstrated this process.
Here are the four questions that Katie suggests you ask:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
The Work can be done either by oneself or with another person.
I went to Wikipedia today to learn more about all this process of inner inquiry. Here is what I found on this Internet open source…
“First one identifies a belief or thought related to a topic that causes anxiety or unhappiness. Initially one is encouraged to choose something which feels important, which annoys or troubles you, that someone else does or did: for example ‘My mother never loved me,’ or ‘Tom shouldn’t expect me to solve his problems.’
“One by one, the person doing The Work asks themselves, or is asked, each of the four questions listed above. If they are doing the Work by themselves, people are asked to write down their response, and if they are doing it with another person they speak their answers aloud.
“After the four questions, the thought is literally turned around to its opposite. For example: ‘My mother never loved me’ turns around to ‘My mother always loved me,’ Then the person doing The Work sees if they can find ways that this new thought is equally true, or more true, than the original thought.
“The turnaround also takes the form of turning the statement around to oneself: ‘I never loved my mother,’ or ‘I never loved me.’
“Katie sumarizes The Work as: ‘Judge your neighbor, write it down. Ask four questions, turn it around.’
“Katie has applied this technique to exploring painful beliefs across many topics, including relationships, parenting, illness, death and trauma. She has facilitated The Work with audiences in widely varying situations, from ordinary people dealing with financial worries to prison inmates and survivors of armed conflict.”
That is taken from Wikipedia, as I have noted above. I had a chance to meet and talk with Katie for a brief moment after Saturday’s event and I want to tell you, she’s the Real Deal Meal. There’s not a fake bone in her body, there’s not a single pretentious fiber.
Let me see here if I can illustrate how The Work works…

…Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that you have just found out that you have been laid off, “downsized” out of your company. And let’s say that you have a thought about it that sounds something like this:
“I am being betrayed and damaged by my company laying me off.”
Now, let’s do The Work. With regard to the above thought, let’s ask the Four Questions:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
Then, let’s do what Katie calls The Turn-around. Let’s see if we can find a way to turn it around.
“I am not being betrayed and damaged by my company laying me off.”
Can you think of any examples of how or why this Turn-around could be true? Think of one or two of those ways or reasons, and write them down.
Okay, now you’ve done The Work. The only question left is…which thoughts about this do you choose to believe, and to live out?
Now I’m going to do The Work on a thought…on one of the thoughts…that I have been having about a relatively straightforward and uncomplicated medical procedure that I am to undergo this very day over at one of our local hospitals. I have had, for several days, a worrisome thought about it that goes something like this: “This is going to be uncomfortable and nerve-wracking and dangerous.”
Using Katie’s process of inquiry (Katie says, Leave no thought unquestioned), I would now examine that thought…
1. Is it true?
2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do I react when I believe that thought?
4. Who would I be without the thought?
Of course, I do not know that this thought is true. And I certainly do not absolutely know it’s true. How I react when I think this thought is with a quivering stomach and just a little shortness of breath and with not very happy feelings. How I would be without this thought is peaceful, happy, and calm.
There are several ways that I could turn this statement around. The most obvious is: This is not going to be uncomfortable, nerve-wracking, or dangerous. I could go further with that. I could think: This is actually going to be easy. I am going to enjoy joking about it, chatting amiably with the nurses, kidding the doctor, and engaging the procedure with great curiosity.
You see, Katie’s point is that things happen to us and around us, and we can’t control much of that. But we can control how we experience it by choosing what we think about it. Your entire experience of life, she says, is contained in your thoughts. The problem is that people tend to imagine that their thoughts are out of their control. Katie says that is not true — and that most of the time the thoughts we are thinking are things that we are simply making up. They are not true. We do not and cannot know them to be true. We are simply conjuring ideas and then living into them, stepping into them, as if they were true. Thus, we create worry, anxiety, upset, even anger. We live unhappily in these moments — and, alas, these moments are not few and far between, but, instead, rather frequent and constant in people’s lives.
So Katie says, the moment you have an unwelcome or worrisome or angry thought, simply question it. Then look closely at how you might feel if you just changed your mind about that idea you are holding. Turn it around. See it from another perspective. Let your mind be the Master of your experience.
Norman Vincent Peale wrote a book about turning your negative ideas around 50 years ago or more. He called it The Power of Positive Thinking. Esther and Jerry Hicks have just written a text that hovers around the same notion: The Astonishing Power of Emotions. And next month my own new book explores this idea deeply. It is titled Happier Than God. All of these books — as well as Katie’s marvelous books listed above — may be ordered from any of the online bookstores and be in your home within 24 hours. I think you would love reading any one of them.
Now Katie is not suggesting simply “positive thinking” here. Her idea is that we can all love “what is,” no matter what that happens to be, not simply by moving immediately to a more positive thought about it. This may do nothing but put a band-aid on it, “covering” your real thought with a cosmetic idea that you may or not may not be able to hold as your truth.
But if we deeply examine our thought about what is happening through the process of critical inquiry that Katie calls The Work, she believes that such inquiry will lead us logically and naturally to another way of viewing the data — a view that we will be able to hold onto because it is soundly based in logic and reason, not just “wishful thinking.” This new view, she says, has the power to alter our experience.
So, there you have it. What do you think about that? And, as you explore what you think about that, ask yourself…
1. Is it true?
2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do I react when I believe that thought?
4. Who would I be without the thought?
I’ll go to work on now, in my mind, on my own thoughts about today as I head for the hospital. And you have a wonderful day!