The first time I watched The Work, I realized that I was witnessing something truly remarkable. What I saw was a succession of people, young and old, educated and uneducated, who were learning to question their own thoughts, the thoughts that were most painful to them.
With the lovingly incisive help of Byron Katie (everyone calls her Katie), these people were finding their way not only toward the resolution of their immediate problems, but also toward a state of mind in which the deepest questions are resolved.
I have spent a good part of my life studying and translating the classic texts of the great spiritual traditions, and I recognized something very similar in process here. At the core of these traditions— in works such as the Book of Job, the Tao Te Ching, and the Bhagavad Gita—there is an intense questioning about life and death, and a profound, joyful wisdom that emerges as an answer. That wisdom, it seemed to me, was the place Katie was standing in, and the direction where these people were headed.
As I watched from my seat in a crowded community center, five men and women, one after another, were learning freedom through the very thoughts that had caused their suffering, thoughts such as “My husband betrayed me” or “My mother doesn’t love me enough.” Simply by asking four questions and listening to the answers they found inside themselves, these people were opening their minds to profound, spacious, and life-transforming insights.
I saw a man who had been suffering for decades from anger and resentment toward his alcoholic father light up before my eyes within forty-five minutes.
I saw a woman who had been almost too frightened to speak, because she had
just found out that her cancer was spreading, end the session in a glow of
understanding and acceptance. Three out of the five people had never done
The Work before, yet the process didn’t seem to be more difficult for them
than it was for the other two, nor were their realizations any less profound.
