Our parents, our children, our spouses, and our friends will press every button we have, again and again, until we realize what it is we don’t want to know about ourselves, yet. They will point us to our freedom every time. (Byron Katie, Loving What Is)
The moment I heard Oprah, on her Super Soul podcast, reiterate the question “You haven’t suffered?” in a conversation with Byron Katie, who had just revealed that she had not suffered in the span of 22 years—and confirmed that she indeed had not—I immediately knew I had to learn about Byron Katie.
This is BK’s story: She was deeply depressed for about a decade. Overweight. Agoraphobic. Suicidal. An addict. And at the age of 43, she had a moment, on the floor of an attic of a halfway house for women with eating disorders, where a cockroach (cringe) crawled over her foot, and she had an awakening “where the mind hit” and she suddenly realized that everything she was believing (that was causing her suffering) was not true. She has not suffered once since this moment of awakening. BK even explained to Oprah, “I am open to suffering, but no I have not suffered.” (So yes, I’m with Oprah needing to confirm that this was true because WTF?)
As someone who had suffered from my own set of debilitating beliefs for most of my life, I had been hungry for knowledge on how to become free. I had been on a journey of figuring out how to get out of my own way for two years: I found mentors, therapists, group programs, books, podcasts, etc. to assist me with getting closer to my freedom, to start doing the creative work and cultivating the relationships that I dreamt of constantly but never had the courage to pursue. The resources I listed above helped me tremendously, but learning about BK’s process of how to do what she terms as “The Work,” which she coined after her awakening, amped up everything I had learned about healing to a whole new level. Whether or not that’s because of “The Work” itself or because of the order in which I discovered it, I’m unsure. Either way, I’m glad my consciousness was able to catch the potency of it.
For two straight weeks, I watched video after video of BK taking people through the process of doing “The Work.” I was amazed at how she walked each person closer and closer to self realization—alchemizing people’s pain into inner peace right in front of my eyes. From cancer patients, to incarcerated people, to victims of sexual violence, to people who were jealous of their roommates and lovers, to people who feared death and war—the list goes on.
There was a moment I found myself crying in public at my local Coffee Bean reading BK’s book Loving What Is. I got to the end of a session where she walks a young woman, who was molested by her father, towards her freedom by just simply asking her these four questions and I couldn’t believe the words I was reading on the page in
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