How I Found The Work of Byron Katie Through Sibling Rivalry:
When one of my sisters announced during family Christmas dinner that she had gone to the School for the Work of Byron Katie in Los Angeles, I suddenly stopped my conversation with another sister and turned my head towards the one speaking.
Now wait just a minute! Who’s the one on the search for personal growth, psychological understanding, and spiritual enlightenment?
That would be ME!
I just got the book “Loving What Is”—I’m the one with the comparative religion undergrad major, the graduate counseling degree. I’m the mental health professional…She’s a statistician. What?!
I casually made my way over to sit next to her, just to ask a few questions….nothing too heavy.
My sister was so open, I hadn’t heard her say this much in our big loud family where everyone talks at once for ages. She spoke of our father’s early death with peace! I wanted some of that, too.
As soon as I could I was flying to the School for the Work of Byron Katie leaving my two children and husband for ten days for the first time since my children were born.
With Katie’s encouragement, I became vividly aware of how deeply I had been afraid of so many things about life….and that I might be mistaken about what was scary.
I looked at absolutely everything….my demanding parents, my mean grandparents, the life of my eating disorder as a teenager, my hellish relationship with food, my experiences in using addictive escape behaviors like drinking a ton of beer or smoking camel cigarettes in the past, my feelings about god and reality, earthquakes, cancer, murder, the cosmos, my hopes and terrors in parenting, my confused attitudes about sex, the bitter, critical voice I had towards so many things, but especially myself.
This School was a point in my life at which it would never be the same thereafter.
Questioning my thinking was so astonishing for me that I couldn’t stop. It changed my life and now it’s amazing how much of the time I feel peaceful, like there is a quiet, joyful silence present in everything I do and everywhere I go. I simply do not feel concern or fear as often as I did in the past. That’s why I do this Work. It’s just amazing, beyond words.