Indigo Answers - 100th Monkey

The Work

Daniel Amen, M.D, Distinguished Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

Over the years I have found several books and teachers of profound help in my own life. One of the reasons I love psychiatry is I have the opportunity of always improving myself and my own brain. Byron Katie and her book Loving What Is, written with her husband Stephen Mitchell, is such an example.

Last year I went through a relationship breakup that truly broke my heart. I suffered for many months (even though I am a person who is supposed to have tools to counteract such emotional stress). I found Katies book (that is what she likes being called) and found immediate help. Then I noticed her book was published by Harmony Books, who is my publisher at Random House. Though my editor I was able to get her e-mail and correspond with Katie. Since then we have become friends and colleagues. Katie is a wonderful teacher and one of the wisest people I have met. You can learn more by reading her book Loving What Is, which is available at our online store - www.mindworkspress.com. Here is her synopsis of what she calls, The Work&

The Work is merely four questions; it's not even a thing. It has no life, no strings. These four questions will join any program that you've got, and enhance it. Any religion that you have - they will enhance it. If you're an atheist, they will bring you joy. And they will burn up anything that is not true for you. By burning I mean a burning through to the reality that has always been waiting. But we haven't known how to get there.

The Work was born on a February morning in 1986 when Byron Kathleen Reid, a forty-three-year-old woman from a small town in the high desert of southern California, woke up on the floor of a halfway house, at a complete dead end in her life, and began to laugh.

In the midst of an ordinary American life - second marriage, three children, a successful career in real estate - Katie had entered a ten-year-long downward spiral into depression, rage, self-loathing, and constant thoughts of suicide. For the last two years she was often unable to leave her bedroom. Then one morning in February, 1986, at a halfway house, out of nowhere, she experienced a life-changing realization. In the Buddhist and Hindu traditions there are various names for an experience like this, which is the opposite of mystical. Katie calls it waking up to reality. In that instant of no-time, she says, I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didnt believe them, I didnt suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.

Soon after Katies return from the halfway house, word spread about a lit lady in Barstow, and people started seeking her out, asking how they could find the freedom that they saw shining through her. She became convinced that what they needed, if anything, was not her personal presence, but a way to discover for themselves what she had realized. Katies method of self-inquiry, which she calls The Work, is an embodiment in words of the wordless questioning that had woken up in her, as her, on that February morning. It is a simple yet extremely powerful method and requires nothing more than a pen, paper, and an open mind. (You can find instructions in her book Loving What Is). As reports spread about the remarkable transformations that people were experiencing through The Work, Katie was invited to present it publicly elsewhere in California, and then throughout the United States, and eventually in Europe and across the world. She has been tr aveling for fifteen years now, sometimes nonstop, and has brought The Work to hundreds of thousands of people at free public events, in prisons, hospitals, churches, corporations, battered womens facilities, universities and schools, at weekend intensives, and at her amazing nine-day School for The Work.

The Work consists of four questions and what Katie calls a turnaround, which is a way of experiencing the opposite of what you believe.

The questions are&

Is it true? Can you absolutely know that its true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought? These questions, with the turnaround, reveal a fundamental confusion in the state of mind that we call sanity, but most of us have lived with it for so long that we take for granted the suffering it causes. This confusion has nothing to do with the content of our thoughts, but rather with the way we relate to them. The Work clarifies this confusion so fundamentally that one cant call it psychological, and so practically that one may not want to call it spiritual. It goes directly to the root of all human problems. At first it may seem too simple to be effective. But its simplicity is precisely what makes it so effective.

The Work reveals that our everyday thinking the beliefs, concepts, judgments, or stories that we use to control and obscure our actual experience never correspond to reality. All our wants, needs, and shoulds & all the beliefs, concepts, judgments, and stories that we use to shape and control our experience, are distortions of things as they actually are. We impose these thoughts upon reality, and whenever we see them as true, we suffer. The questions first show us the inaccuracy of our thinking, and then show us exactly how we cause our own suffering when we become attached to a thought. Finally there is the remarkably liberating question Who would you be without your story? For those who are ready to answer this question honestly, the painful inner struggle ends. This question allows us a glimpse of reality what is and a realization that what is is always preferable to our story about it.

People begin doing The Work in a variety of ways. Thus far, most have been inspired by participating in one of Katies workshops, at which she brings a loving incisiveness to one-to-one dialogues. Some have read her bestselling books, Loving What Is and I Need Your LoveIs That True?, and begun a life-changing practice by themselves. People who do The Work begin right in the center of their lives with whatever is upsetting or angering or saddening them right now. The instructions fit on a single sheet of paper; Katies nursery-rhyme directions are to judge your neighbor, write it down, ask four questions, and turn it around. People write down the thoughts that express their problem, and these written judgments are met, one by one, with what Katie calls inquiry the four questions and turnaround. Inquiry, by deconstructing our thinking, weakens our attachment to it, and thus begins to eliminate the cause of our suffering. After d oing The Work, many people report an immediate feeling of release and freedom.

But if The Work depended on a momentary experience, it would have far less significance than it does. The Work is an ongoing and deepening process of self-inquiry, not a quick fix. When people remain steady in The Work for a while, Katie says, they often tell me, The Work is no longer something I do. It is doing me. They describe how, without any conscious intention, the mind notices each stressful thought and undoes it before it can cause any suffering. The truth appears inside them, invited or not, leaving them in a progressively happier, healthier state of mind, and in a world where everything finally makes perfect sense.

To Your Brain Health, Daniel