Loving What Is

In Byron Katie's book she writes about our doing "The Work". In reflecting on the stories we tell ourselves about situations we can create a lot of inner suffering. For example if I am speaking on a Sunday morning and a person gets up and leaves the room, I can begin making up a story about that. Maybe they are bored, don't agree with what I am saying. "Will they come back?" I worry. Can you see how I knew nothing about why the person got up and left? I began spinning a tale in my head, began suffering from my thoughts only to discover the person went to the bathroom!

"The Work" is where we investigate our thoughts and work to understand them. My thoughts above were from fear.. .I'm not good enough thinking. If we can stop our story spinning in its tracks, we will save ourselves a lot of suffering. We do this a lot... taking our uninvestigated theories for truth.

And we can also do "The Work" in relationship to our thoughts about others. We are invited to put those thoughts up against her 4 questions:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know that it's true?
• How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
• Who would you be without that thought?

The last and most important step is to turn your thoughts around. Here is a summary to help you remember what to do in the midst of suffering:

Judge someone, write it down

Ask four questions

Turn it around.

For more information go to www.thework.com