I’m in Los Angeles for the annual event called the Mental Cleanse with Byron Katie.
Once again, I am touched deeply by what it’s like to do The Work in a group.
And this is a big group–several hundred people in a giant convention room in a hotel near the airport.
There’s an empty chair up on the stage next to Katie, and who knows who will be the next person in the chair.
We get to hear that person’s situation they’re wanting to investigate, the moment in their lives when they felt irritation, sadness, anxiety, or immense frustration.
Yesterday we listened to four brave peeps.
The thing I absolutely love about doing The Work in a huge group like this, is that after the process of inquiry–taking each concept through the four questions and turnarounds–Katie turns out to everyone else and asks….
….what’s your takeaway? Your feedback?
What did you learn from your own life situation?
I love that as I listen, I don’t have to even try to find situations to work on or look at. The other people in the chair are doing it for me!
I can simply trust the process of sitting, being present in the room, hearing a human situation that brings stress, or agony, and suffering through the way it has been perceived.
A woman did The Work on a psychic who told her she would die at age 72.
Another woman did The Work on her boyfriend who keeps suggesting she get a job rather than try to run a private practice.
A man did The Work on a friend who argues too much about dumb things like which app is better, or which car model.
As the people describe their situations, we picture the scenario.
It’s like I’m right there….and I don’t even know these people!
The mind is amazing like that. It creates a movie instantly and fills in the details the more it hears the scene described.
The problem enters when we begin to believe what we see is absolutely true. Taking it very seriously. Holding it as threatening. Chalking it up to a moment on earth that’s dangerous.
Isn’t it amazing, I thought yesterday, that in any of these situations we’ve experienced in life, whether we’re thinking about death or an annoying loved one….
….it’s because we’re threatened in some small or big way.
What is threatened?
Our sense of “me” being here, in tact, living it’s own life.
My identity.
Me, me, me and my survival and success here.
Katie chuckled, looked down a moment, and commented on something so simple, so automatic, so universal, and the source of our anxiety, fear, suffering, emotional pain.
Our thoughts.
The ego mind tries so hard to protect its identity, she said, to keep the identity of the self in place….
….and it will work so very hard to do it, maybe extra hard when it’s particularly threatened, because secretly it knows….
….it doesn’t actually exist.
All that work for nothing!
Ha ha.
The mind is so funny.
So today, I’m enjoying watching the images, memories, and thoughts float by of what I’ve thought to be “bad” or “good” about “my” life….
….seeing how it’s only a movie.
Right now, what’s happening in “my” world is a quiet and beautiful expansive hotel lobby with swirly feathery greenish carpet, screens playing in the distance with people talking about the news and football players running, music on the speakers, murmurs of voices of people in the distance in clumps, and this writing coming out.
And of course, none of it is “mine”.
It was just a flash of life from this perspective for a moment in time.
Grace