Helena from Germany recalls how overwhelmed she feels while sitting with her students on the first day of class and feeling unprepared for the semester. Byron Katie helps her to meditate on the situation, question her stressful thoughts, and find examples for the turnaround. Through this questioning, she comes to see that she is always prepared for anything to happen. © 2016 Byron Katie International, Inc. All rights reserved. For more information, visit thework.com

I'm Unprepared for The Semester

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

In this fascinating discussion between Byron Katie, John Tarrant, and Stephen Mitchell, the three take a deep dive into similarities between The Work and Buddhism, and how these were woven into "A Mind at Home with Itself." John begins, "In Katie and Stephen's new book, Stephen translates and makes very accessible one of the great wisdom texts, the Diamond Sutra, while Katie responds to this text from her inner quiet. Deconstructing your thought forms and what mind is believing is a practice common to Zen Buddhism and The Work, with its four questions and the turnarounds." "I loved interacting with the Diamond Sutra," Katie says. "Stephen would read me a chapter and then ask me to respond. After hearing it, I always felt that I wouldn't add anything or subtract anything. Stephen encouraged me to respond by asking me questions. It was such a beautiful experience." Stephen explains, "My intent was to make the Diamond Sutra text transparent so that the Buddha mind could shine through; accessible, here and now, and radiant. My intent was also to bring Zen and The Work together, because we've found that each practice enhances the other. For people doing Dharma practice to learn to question specific thoughts that are causing impediments is of enormous benefit, and likewise, meditation practice, deepening one's stillness and ability to focus, has great benefit for people practicing The Work." "Yes," says John, "and there are similarities between the Dharma and The Work as transformational practices. One is the understanding that reality is more profound and beautiful than my maps or thoughts about reality." "Inquiry is a way to test that over and over and over," Katie says. "Through the four questions and the turnarounds, we begin to wake up to the mind as creator of all. That all of the apparent outside really is inner." John quotes an ancient Chinese Zen master: "'Zen directly points to the human mind without reference to words or scriptures.' And of course, scriptures like the Diamond Sutra say that. So inquiry into the nature of mind becomes a practice. There's really nothing wrong with having a thought, but you can be curious as to whether it's true or not. So there's a question mark that happens with it. You're not trying to get rid of it or contradict it; you're just wondering about it." "Yes," Katie says, "there's an excitement about it when each thought ends in a question mark. It's 'Is it true?' without experiencing the actual words. It's that open, brilliant, fearless state of mind where you come to understand and appreciate the true nature of everything." "In a way, that's a practice," John says, "because as soon as I start believing something, I can be pretty sure that it isn't true, because our thoughts are hypotheses about reality. Mainly we think we are our thoughts in a naive sense. We think the world we've made of our thoughts is something we're compelled to live in." Any reaction I experience is an invitation to inquiry--an invitation to experience the questioning of thought. --Byron Katie. John Tarrant, Roshi, teaches and writes about the transformation of consciousness through meditation on Zen koans (existential questions than can't be answered through rational thinking). Byron Katie shows us how to question the thinking that causes all the suffering, revealing the peace and wisdom within every one of us. Stephen Mitchell's many books include the bestselling "Tao Te Ching," "The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke," "Gilgamesh," "The Gospel According to Jesus," "The Book of Job," "The Second Book of the Tao," "The Iliad," "The Odyssey," and "Beowulf." 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.

Discussion of "A Mind at Home with Itself" with Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell, and John Tarrant

A woman from Denmark asks, "How do you know when it's time to make changes? You get to love everything as it is, but still, Katie, you make changes, for instance, you left Paul, your ex-husband. So I'm confused, because I am happy and content, but I still feel a need to change my life. I can always find a way to love what is, but then am I not being true to myself?" Byron Katie answers, "I didn't change my life; I lived a yes to my own heart's desire. Even though I was married to Paul, I found a deeper marriage: to my inner voice. So I became only answerable to that. The only thing that could stop me from living out of that was fear. Love is a fearless state of mind. I had no other reason except that yes to leave Paul. I began to travel and was very rarely home. That was too much for him. He naturally began to make another life for himself, and I'm grateful for that. So the change came from inside. If you're afraid to make a change, write your fearful thoughts on a Worksheet and set yourself free to make change, or not. "There are no do's or don'ts. Inquiry is about the end of suffering. It's freedom to ask anything of anyone, and then trust that they'll say yes or no. Freedom doesn't look the way we think. It's just a natural flow of words, and humor, and life. I know there is this precious place of no past and no future. The Work can open us to that. This precious place is always there. It's always to be trusted, unfailingly." As the mind changes, life changes. --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 © 2017 Byron Katie International. Inc.  All rights reserved.

How Do You Know When It's Time to Make Changes?

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.

I'm Unprepared for The Semester

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