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Summary: Spring-cleaning your mind
Review: Eckart Tolle, Gangaji, Paul Ferrini, and Ramana Maharshi, all discuss the need for inquiry into our fears and beliefs before we can truly re-connect with our true Self. As beautiful as their words are, it is hard for a westerner like myself to truly question my beliefs so thoroughly that they truly dissolve. But they do. With Byron Katie's The Work, you are taught to systematically review each thought that emotionally triggers you. Without the emotional trigger or "story" behind your suffering, you can think clearly and respond appropriately to what is. If you are a typical baby-boomer, you could feel overwhelmed with the thought of taking each uninvestigated belief and exposing it to the light of inquiry. But Katie says, only one thought causes your suffering at any one moment, so just deal with that one. Without attempting to repair or fix yourself, inquiry alone opens the door to the mind's eye. Amazing changes follow. In a time of possible war, peace of mind is the best most of us can achieve in the service of peace. If a human being can stop the war in his/her own mind, we come one step closer to world peace. Katie herself is remarkable in that she truly, unselfishly shares her Work with any one who seeks her help. I am so lucky to have met her on this journey.
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Summary: Another great fan of what is
Review: I went to hear Byron Katie speak and then bought this audio book. Much more useful than the written book because you can listen to people experiencing the work for real and get the full impact of how looking at what you believe and why you "choose" to believe it can change your life.Some may find Katie a little brash, but then that gives you something more to look at right there. Even my kids listened and prospered from the wisdom of accepting that what is what is supposed to be. As Katie herself often implys, everything is an oportunity to do the work. And it does change your life.
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Summary: Great Truth in Human Life and Experience
Review: The power of this book is not it's enlightening message; many many books have been written on the essentials that are covered here. The power is far more the simple words, the closeness of the message and the true authenticity of it all. Byron is capable of reducing the extreme complex to the essentials... and still make sense. She has not learned these truths from noble men that spent decades in the woods or on a mountain, she has truly found these truths in her own life. And remains, more then I could imagine, with both feet firmly on the desertground. Great, just great! Indeed, four questions is all it takes.
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Summary: Beyond Change
Review: I titled my review Beyond Change because that is how I feel about Katie's work. Using The Work has been life altering for me, in ways I find hard to express in words. What I've found is that I opened to a new way of exploring myself and the thoughts I attach to and my life has continued to unfold in the most beautiful ways. I was able to see myself and my loved ones in a new light with more love and acceptance than I thought possible.
I have totally changed my life in the past 5 years since I was first introduced to Katie and her work. I've shed the excess 250lbs of weight that I used to keep people at a distance...and I was able to see how it was "I" that was creating that distance rather than "them."
I am also now in a beautiful relationship...one that continues to provide me with the most enlightening work of my life. Each day I learn more and more about myself, and at last I have found the beauty within me to love myself and others. As Katie says...when I notice what I attach to, I begin to notice how these thoughts unattach from me. Simple and beautiful.
My suggestion is to purchase both the book and the audio tapes read by Katie and Stephen. Hearing their words in their own voices is a gift you will treasure. There is simply no substitute for hearing the loving words spoken by Katie herself. And Stephen has a way of expressing concepts and ideas that clearly and distinctly fill in any gaps. Enjoy!
If you are in the Pittsburgh area and would like to talk more about The Work, please feel free to look me up to chat.
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Summary: As my mother was dying
Review: I read Loving What Is while I was caring for my mother dying of cancer. I remained calm, peaceful and filled with insight as to what to do next in her care. The book is one of the most life changing books I have ever read. I practice "The Work" minute by minute, day by day and have found great peace and spiritual joy in it. I am recommending the book to my clients who see me for spiritual direction.
Thank you for The Work!
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Summary: Please let OPRAH know!
Review: I have experienced enormous transformation in all aspects of my life from Katie's work, along with Eckhart Tolle's practices. Oprah just endorsed Eckhart's book. She read it six times. This shows that this beautiful process towards wholeness is reaching the mainstream. Please do your part by e-mailing Oprah from her website and asking her to endorse Loving What Is. That's www.Oprah.com.
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Summary: Correcting my correction
Review: Below I corrected someone's mistake about Katie and Stephen Mitchell being married, and then I made a mistake about how they met. It wasn't through an article he was assigned to write; it was through their literary agent. Oh, well. ;)
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Summary: Weird
Review: I've participated in all kinds of new age kind of stuff. Gestalt, EST, Hypnosis, etc. and have been able to find value in most of these. However, these tapes are weird. The basic idea: that expecting that things should be different and feeling badly about this isn't going to help an individual is straight forward enough. I expected more, but if the only thing these tapes had done was reinforced this idea in a memorable way, they might interesting enough. However, they failed to even meet this minimal standard. I was disappointed. Here are the four questions: 1. Is it true? 2. Can you absolutely know that it's true? 3. How do you react when you think that thought? 4. Who would you be without that thought?. The four questions are presented with the self important phrase "the work". I can imagine a simple discipline consistently applied could be worthwhile, but I don't see this as the one. The book got some good reviews, you might check out those reviews to make up your own mind.
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Summary: An American Classic
Review: I took Eckhart Tolle's advice and read "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie. The book represents a profound renewal of American wisdom. Comparisons with works from the great wisdom traditions are tempting. Stephen Mitchell is certainly familiar with most of these traditions. He is a writer and translator of impeccable discernment. His translations and adaptations have given us works of the highest human achievement rendered into exquisitely readable American language. Mitchell has made works such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Job and the Tao Te Ching accessible to us while maintaining the integrity of their sacred message. You can trust him to pick only the best and present it to you like a lover offering the highest gifts. Now Mitchell's gentle and loving collaborative presence has helped to bring Byron Katie to a wide audience, while maintaining the integrity of her simple yet profound process call The Work. The book is structed around dialogues that Byron Katie has had in various settings doing The Work with people, many of whom are in a state of extreme suffering. The dialogues are flanked by explanatory text into which are wondrously woven aphorisms of profound and practical wisdom. Someone once said that Katie sounds like Rumi being channeled by Mark Twain on estrogen; short sentences of common-sense mystical insight flow through the text to help deepen the understanding revealed in the dialogues. Yet it is the dialogues that best reveal The Work. They possess a newness and a timelessness that invite you to enter into freedom. Yet The Work cannot be dismissed by the more cynical among us as navel-gazing passivity or mysticism, because it is a product of the action-oriented, do-it-yourself culture in which we live. We invented the do-it-yourself manual. You could say that, in keeping with the grand American tradition of practical self-reliance, "Loving What Is" is the first undo-it-yourself manual. In explaining this technology of freedom to us, Byron Katie travels with us to the minutest and most intimate corners of our lives to greet the things which we mistakenly identify as our unchangeable core of suffering and stuckness. We are invited here to get stuck in freedom, to learn how to de-neurose and un-suffer. The book teaches us to do this not by resisting those things which we experience as the cause of our suffering or the trigger of our neurosis, but by looking at these things with an attitude of profound openness and inquiry. By questioning them we learn to escape from the entrapments of our stories and memories that identify us with suffering.. You can place "Loving What Is" on your bookshelf next to the great spiritual classics. Or better still, you can give it to your grandmother or your boss or even your ex. Give it to Oprah, and maybe she can get copies to Bush, or to Arafat and Sharon. But best of all, give "Loving What Is" to yourself. Put the book in your lap on a daily basis. Whether it's a lotus lap or a zazen lap or just a couch-potato lap, the book will meet you where you sit and help you find the ease of being which you seek.
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Summary: Self-Realization: Katie Shows Us How To Do It
Review: It's about time someone took the woowoo out of self-realization, and Katie's done it, because really, there's nothing mystical about "enlightenment." Realization = getting real, in the moment...and we can only get real when we examine our thoughts and find our own truth. A book or a teaching alone can't give this to you; there has to be the willingness to go deep and not know. LOVING WHAT IS is the beginning of a wild ride, should you choose to strap yourself in. If you think meditation is "spiritual" and mentation is the devil, this isn't the book for you. If you want a way to get real, I recommend reading every single word of LOVING WHAT IS. I facilitate this process, and without exception, everyone I've sat with who has been willing to go all the way "gets" it. Kids do this work. Brain-damaged people can do it. It's simple, so simple that at first glance it can appear simplistic, unappealing to our minds that love complication and drama. If you've been looking for nirvana or satori or samadhi all your life, I invite you to suspend all concepts of how to get there, to read LOVING WHAT IS, try The Work, and use the mind to make friends with the mind. That's really all it takes.
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