Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

Product Information

Asking those questions leaves no room for understanding or empathizing with the legitimate reasons why we have a judgment, resistance, "should" or pain in life or towards someone. The worksheet Katie designed allows us to judge the people/situations in our lives that provoke us as a way of opening our eyes to the truth, clearing the lint from the projector so we can see reality as it is. Like developing an exercise regimen, working through Katie's four questions is a difficult discipline when you start, but it becomes a natural part of your routine if you are committed to The Work.

In this book, Katie does more than describe the awakened mind; she lets you see it and feel it in action.While living wholly in the future or in the past is counter-productive, we need to expend some energy deciding where we want to go and what we want to be and then figuring out how to get there.

So being an integrated, healthy or sane adult does not mean we just give up what we want because it would be "arguing with reality," as Katie reiterates many times. She should just grab her magician wand and shout, “Abracadabra, it’s your fault,” and be done with her ‘inquiries. Considering the fact that most of my reading and listening comes from local libraries, that is saying something. However, something may be true for us - and there are good reasons why we have any judgment we have.Then one morning, she woke up in a state of absolute joy, filled with the realization of how her own suffering had ended. But the way Katie speaks with him, she leads him to the conclusion that it is him that's being unreasonable or unaccepting because he's equally not accepting their nonacceptance of him essentially.

Clearly this is not Byron's intent, but a mass-market paperback in the self-help section is a potentially tragic lure for people who self-treat despite needing the help of a serious professional. Each day, I am growing with my healthier beliefs as I keep a journal on everything I feel needs my attention. I would not have read this book if I didn't have to for a book club, and when I first picked it up and started reading I was like "Oh come on. Nothing lives but a story and when we meet these stories with understanding, we really begin to live without the suffering.And unless you think Mother Teresa's lifelong effort to serve others and relieve suffering is on par with Jeffrey Dahmer's lifelong path of sadism, death and destruction, then you too believe that some paths are inherently higher than others. However, there are some key nuances that I believe Katie seems to miss, which made the application of the work too simplistic and rationalistic, and ultimately not as effective as it could be if it incorporated a more humanistic and compassionate understanding of the psyche and our needs as human beings. Byron Katie has rocked my world and shaken loose my mind more thoroughly than any other spiritual teacher I’ve ever encountered, living or dead.

So we can move on to other people and strategies without blaming them, though we allow ourselves, compassionately, to feel disappointed, and take that disappointment as our soul's wisdom that we do need to move on and set that boundary perhaps. Katie only asks in the work whether something is true or not - but I find that you come to a place of transformation and resolution much quicker if you can understand how or why something is true or not - and that's the useful part of the understanding of cognitive distortions as they are common biases or ways of thinking and perceiving that are ungrounded and unhelpful and that are often the source of a lot of our suffering and inability to face and accept what is. However, we need to realize we are also a part of the world and do have some control over what happens; and that a healthy adult realizes that and is able to be assertive without being attached. Byron Katie to come on to my show, The Daily Interaction podcast, for an interview and she said yes.In fact, “If you want reality to be different than what it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. The case-studies revealed the complexities of the technique in ways that the oversimplified narrative could not. In Byron Katie's book with Stephen Mitchell, Loving What Is: Four questions that can change your life, the light came on. Out of nowhere, like a cool breeze in a marketplace crowded with advice, comes Byron Katie and The Work. My first dumbfounded moment was in her conversation with a mother who was struggling with her young son not doing his chores, not doing his homework and sometimes lying.