Byron Katie believes that by challenging stressful thoughts, you can change your life. Anne Dempseyreports.
There's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare's Hamlet said it most famously - suggesting that it's our perception of events that cause the pain or joy, rather than the events themselves.
American Byron Katie, known to friends and colleagues as Katie, has taken the same truth and transformed it into The Work, a tool for living which is freely available on her website, and developed through books, tapes and workshops.
The Work is a process of inquiry that helps you to identify and challenge the stressful thoughts causing much of your suffering, and so transform them, according to Katie.
She will be in Dublin on July 6th to conduct a public workshop, demonstrating how The Work works.
She is no stranger to suffering herself. Now 64, she used to be a successful property developer, married with three young children. She was also a manic depressive, who drank compulsively, was chronically overweight and in her 30s went into a long downward spiral.
"I used to believe that in order to be happy, everything would have to be right, I needed people to understand, to listen to what I had to say. My happiness was completely dependent on others," she says.
Then came the lightbulb moment. "I was trying to get my life together staying at a halfway house. Asleep on the floor, I was wakened by a cockroach walking over my leg, and for a moment, I was blank, there was no thought, nothing, I was suspended.
"Then the normal thoughts rushed in, and I realised in that moment that it is our thoughts that cause all the suffering in the world."
It was, she says, the turning point. "Over the next few days, people were quite shocked around me, I was no longer fighting with everyone. As my own negative thoughts began to lose their power, I had to learn all over again what is true, I became apprenticed to life - and a very good listener.
"The first time I spoke in public, I was invited to a church. I sat in the back, waiting for the speaker, then realised I was the speaker. I had nothing prepared.
"I walked to the front and stood there, saying nothing. People began to ask me questions, which I answered. Within a few years, it had evolved into The Work."
In its most basic form, The Work consists of four questions which inquire into a statement you make to describe a difficult situation in your life. The questions are followed by a turnaround - an opportunity to experience the opposite of your original statement and see what you and the person you've judged have in common.
The four questions are: Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it's true? How do you react when you think that thought? Who would you be without that thought?
So, for example, your statement to describe a problem in your marriage might be "Paul doesn't listen to me." In answering the four questions honestly, you might find that Paul listens sometimes and not at other times. You could find that when you believe your husband never listens, you feel angry and silenced, and without that thought you could be more secure and hopeful.
After you've investigated your statement with the four questions, you're ready to turn it around by finding three examples where each turnaround is true.
A statement can be turned around to the opposite, to the other, and to the self. So "Paul doesn't understand me" could be turned around to "Paul does understand me." Another turnaround is "I don't understand Paul." A third is "I don't understand myself."
"The turnarounds may be revelatory, showing you previously unseen aspects of yourself reflected back through others. As I began living my turnarounds, I noticed that I was everything I called the other people in my life. They were merely my projection.
"Now, instead of trying to change the world around me, which didn't work, I can put the thoughts on paper, investigate them, turn them around, and may find that I am the very thing I thought you were," says Katie.
Irish psychotherapist Mary Collins Osborne, a trained coach with The Work, uses it with individuals, groups and corporate clients.
"I think what is profoundly appealing and also puts people off The Work is its simplicity. It is unbelievably simple and no skill is required. Something happens when people hear the question 'is it true?'. We may never have questioned before that our stress and our anxiety is basically because we believe what we think.
"In my 15 years as a psychotherapist, I have never heard of questioning the mind at this level.
"Through The Work, I've seen people change. Sometimes it is dramatic and sometimes it happens in its slow way. The Work is not a fix it. It's not about people doing it to feel better, though it may relieve stress in the short term.
"When people do The Work for the love of truth, to really want to know what's true for them, that's when the magic happens."
The Work with Byron Katie, July 6th, 2007, Stillorgan Park Hotel, Dublin, 10am-6pm, €59, tel: 01-2875524, info@seminars.ie www.thework.com