A woman does The Work with Katie on the stressful thought, “I need your approval.” For more information about The Work of Byron Katie visit http://www.thework.com.

Fear of Disapproval

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 she calls The Work, they find that their stressful beliefs—about life, other people, or themselves—radically shift and their lives are changed forever. Based on Byron Katie's direct experience of how suffering is created and ended, The Work 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 deal with 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.

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Jo-Jo from Hercules, California asks, "What if the Santa Barbara shooter had had the chance to do inquiry, to challenge the thoughts that led him to kill people? Perhaps he wouldn't have done what he did." "If I have no cause to kill. why would I kill?" Katie says. "Every time we do The Work and question the thoughts that cause anger and separation, we lose the ability to do harm, because we are taking care of original cause, which is the mind and what it's believing." "Is it possible to do The Work as a community for Elliot and for kids who are not able to discover the questioning of their minds, so maybe they won't harm people?" Jo Jo asks. "If that shooting is of concern to me," says Katie, "then I'm going to do The Work on that shooter. I'm going to question every judgment I have about that shooter from the moment I first heard about him. I'll put those judgments, what I'm thinking and believing, onto the Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet. And then I'm going to give myself what I want the community to have. And if I don't find peace with it, I'm going to do another Worksheet. I'm going to call a Certified Facilitator of The Work, I'm going to call the Do The Work Helpline. I'm going to go to the School for The Work. I'm going to go to thework.com and follow the simple directions. I'm going to give myself everything I want the community to have. Then I'll call the community together and invite them to do The Work. Some of them will come, some of them won't, but you're serving the community just through the invitation." "Is it possible to do The Work for Elliot and other mass murderers, even though they're gone?" Jo-Jo asks. "To do The Work on him is to shift that," Katie says. "Do The Work as him. Put yourself in the place of someone who is so bitter, so angry at women, and what he might have been thinking and believing in order to do such thing. You'll recognize thoughts there, whether they were his or not; you'll be sitting inside the mind of a murderer. That's in all of us. "When you do The Work on him, you'll find the murderer in you, and when you do The Work as him, sitting in that car just before he went in to do the deed. By doing that you're going to clean out everything you don't want in this world. Once that's cleared out, there will never be a mass murder that will upset you again. When you're really clear, he could be aiming at you or at your nieces and nephews, and you will not be alarmed. You will be of service instead. There's nothing more powerful than peace. And it's so exciting." In the clarity of awareness, you're unlimited. --Byron Katie Website: http://www.thework.com Webcasts: http://www.livewithbyronkatie.com Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/theworkofbk Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theworkofbyronkatie Twitter: https://twitter.com/ByronKatie © 2018 Byron Katie International. Inc.  All rights reserved.

How to Find Peace After Another School Shooting

An audience member is angry at a loved one who died. She believes that "Stanley didn’t have to die." Sensing him sitting at the breakfast table with her, she wrestles with feelings of blame such as "He shouldn't be okay that he died," "He should be trying to fix this," and "He should come back in his current, enlightened state." Byron Katie takes her through a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet available at http://thework.com/sites/thework/downloads/worksheets/JudgeYourNeighbor_Worksheet.pdf . Together they discover some illuminating turnarounds that help her find peace in the passing of her loved one. "It doesn't matter what's in our head," Katie says. "Is everything welcome there? Is your mind at home with itself? Because if you're not comfortable with it, it could use a little Work." August 2017 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center Website: http://www.thework.com Webcasts: http://www.livewithbyronkatie.com Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/theworkofbk Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theworkofbyronkatie Twitter: https://twitter.com/ByronKatie © 2017 Byron Katie International. Inc.  All rights reserved.

Stanley Didn't Have to Die

Jason Wachob, founder of mindbodygreen.com, interviews Byron Katie about her system of self-inquiry known as The Work, which helps people to tell the difference between what they believe about reality and reality itself. JASON: Katie cuts through the bullshit pretty quickly: "The Work isn't meant to support you to feel good. There's no feel-good in it. It's about waking up to reality," That's good stuff. "When I sat down with Katie, she shared intimate details about her awakening and what life was like beforehand. It wasn't easy. As a mother of three, she—understandably and relatably—was always worried about money, depressed, and stuck in a cycle of compulsive eating and smoking. One day in 1986 everything changed; she suddenly saw the world through different eyes and recalls in great detail exactly what it was like. That's how The Work was born. Katie shares several examples that illustrate The Work, dives into the essential questions to ask yourself (which she details in her new book, "A Mind at Home with Itself"), and helps us see ourselves as entirely separate from our belief systems. In her words, "Suffering is the flip side of our true nature," and The Work is one way to guide yourself in the right direction.   Website: http://www.thework.com Webcasts: http://www.livewithbyronkatie.com Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/theworkofbk Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theworkofbyronkatie Twitter: https://twitter.com/ByronKatie © 2017 Byron Katie International, Inc. All rights reserved.

Podcast: Mind Body Green interview

At the 5-day silent retreat in Engelberg, Switzerland ("Being with Byron Katie") a Dutch woman questions her beliefs about the meat industry. The situation is that she's watching an undercover video made at a slaughterhouse in Belgium. As she watches, she thinks, "The meat industry is the largest, most accepted form of violence in the world today." They continue to question the thoughts on her Worksheet such as "I want the meat industry to stop being supported by millions of people," "I want the meat industry to be revealed to be just as shameful as the slave industry," "The meat industry should wake up to the fact that animals are sentient beings too," "I need the meat industry to listen to scientific research (that shows that eating animals is no longer necessary or moral, because there are so many other sources of protein)," "The meat industry is cruel, unethical, unrealistic, unsustainable, a waking nightmare, and a collective cultural shadow," and "I don't ever want to see animals being tortured, separated, transported in unacceptable ways, or murdered for a few moments of our sensory pleasure." To assume that any human being is less wise or less aware than anyone else is something I would question. —Byron Katie   Website: http://www.thework.com Webcasts: http://www.livewithbyronkatie.com Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/theworkofbk Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theworkofbyronkatie Twitter: https://twitter.com/ByronKatie © 2017 Byron Katie International, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Meat Industry is the Largest, Most Accepted Form of Violence in the World Today

A man does The Work onstage with Byron Katie during her 2017 Zurich event. In English with German translation. The first statement on his Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet is "I am saddened by my father because he beat and abused me." BK: In any situation, I really want to know what is real, and what is not, so I question the thoughts that cause my suffering. It's my job to wake myself up to reality. The fantasy is not that pleasant, so just begin now. This is the time and the place. And what I love about sitting in silence, in The Work, is that it's all there. Be aware that you are dreaming your past. Notice the difference between reality and imagination. Through doing The Work with Katie, the man discovers some peace in a situation that was pure horror. "What I love about the past is that it's over." —Byron Katie "Mind is the creator of everything, without exception." —Byron Katie Website: http: //www.thework.com Webcasts: http://www.livewithbyronkatie.com Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/theworkofbk Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theworkofbyronkatie Twitter: https://twitter.com/ByronKatie © 2016 Byron Katie International, Inc. All rights reserved.

Fear of Disapproval

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