Category: The Work of Byron Katie

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Getting Things Done With A Mind Like Water

Many people have heard of David Allen and his book and teachings “The Art of Getting Things Done”.  Allen writes about productivity and work. He writes about the opposite of the state of not needing to do anything.

As we read Allen’s book, even though he has a whole system of ways to organize and guide our activities where apparently we’re interested in “getting things done”, ultimately the core of it all points back once again to a central place where there is no stress.

The way to get a grip on the piles of things you have on your to-do list, and get meaningful things done with minimal effort, is to work with the mind.

“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything“–Shunryu Suzuki (renowned for opening the first Buddhist monastery outside Asia and writing the popular book on zen practice Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind).

When I read David Allen’s book several years ago, it’s the first time I heard the term “mind like water”.

Water just goes where it goes, always down, or to the most natural easy place. It just runs that way. Mind can be like water, knowing there is a naturally easiest flow to any activity. Especially if I’m not holding the thought that it should go up THAT way, which is uphill.

Byron Katie speaks about the fear some people have when they start to question their thinking, that if I really “love what is” then I will lie down on the floor and let people walk over me, doing nothing.

But I love discovering that doing The Work actually creates more energy, action, joy, and creativity than I ever had before. Action comes. Getting things done is something that happens.

The more mind is like water, after questioning beliefs, the more I find that these things I want done, they are all fun to do. No procrastinating or waiting because I believe they will be hard, boring, or stupid.

And I also don’t have to worry about being a doormat or a lazy slug or never achieving anything of value or not accomplishing anything…..it turns out that after I question my thinking, action just happens.

Roshi Bernie Glassman, another interesting zen buddhist, talks about seeing himself take action, get involved with projects and change. He says it’s natural to take action. “If my hand is bleeding, I can’t sit around watching it just bleed and say, ‘I don’t know what the hell to do.’ If your hand is bleeding, you’re going to do something about it.”

I love Katie’s story of hearing a voice which said “brush your teeth”. That’s it. Nothing big, fancy, amazing. It didn’t say “get everything done that you could ever imagine doing”. It was just one thing, then another. Right and perfect timing for it all.

“Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. The Master never reaches for the great; thus she achieves greatness. When she runs into a difficulty, she stops and gives herself to it. She doesn’t cling to her own comfort; thus problems are no problem for her.”—Tao te Ching #63

All those things on your to-do list, what would they all look like to you if your main job was to relax with the list, do the one on top, not worry, empty your mind of the beliefs about what will happen if they aren’t done.

Question the thoughts like “it’s too much”, “I’ll never get there”, “I don’t have enough time”, “I hate doing that”, “I would be happier if…..”

With love, Grace

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Dying Is Exciting

In 1000 Names For Joy written by Steven Mitchell and Byron Katie together, the preface is by Steven, who is Katie’s husband. He is also a famous translator of mystic and ancient works and translated the Tao Te Ching in 1986.

Katie, who had no background in spiritual teachings and studies, asked Steven what Taomeant. He writes that he told her it meant “the way” or “what is”.

So I have a story of the world. We all do. The interesting thing to notice is how this reality changes, constantly in fact.

And yet some of the painful beliefs, if left to their own devices, repeat themselves over and over and get locked into a well-worn path, like the way footsteps get sunken right into stone steps of castles and stairwells that have been there for hundreds and hundreds of years.

If you took a rock and pressed a pin across its surface every day for a year in the same spot, without even much pressure or effort, at the end of the year you would have a groove right across the rock.

The only way out that I’ve really found that feels genuine and authentic, is to look at what my beliefs about the world are, especially the ones that feel depressing, frightening, or frustrating.

Here are a few beliefs I started thinking when I was really young:

  • Bad things can happen unexpectedly, randomly, any moment, night or day
  • Everyone dies, and this is frightening because we don’t know what it’s like after death
  • Dying hurts
  • People can be dangerous, they hurt us emotionally or physically
  • I’m not sure what is really true…and this is alarming! I’m supposed to know!
  • If I don’t inhabit this body, then I might not exist anymore….and that is scary
  • I have to do positive things, get positive things, learn positive things, think positive things if I want a happy life
  • God doesn’t care that bad things happen, since they happen (is God busy? mean? lackadaisical? uninterested? what gives?)

Steven Mitchell goes on to say in the preface of 1000 Names that no one knows how to “let go”. Here come the thoughts. You’re already thinking them, you can’t stop them. They flow in like a river.

But we can question the thoughts that produce suffering. As a matter of fact, it seems this is all we can do. Either believe the ideas that come along, or question them. This means looking in a deep way, with courage.

Some of us a hard nuts to crack, so the courage to look and investigate our thinking comes only after very acute suffering (I speak for myself!). In fact, for me, I would say that I’m not sure I even am all that courageous.

If something besides questioning my thoughts had worked that seemed a little easier, then I probably would have taken it. Like a pill. But as I’ve mentioned before, none of the usual devices ever worked, and they sure didn’t last long. Everything that relieved pain did it only temporarily, and then that thing itself caused MORE pain.

So what if I look at the turnarounds to these basic childhood beliefs:

  • Things happen right when they need to, it’s OK, I don’t have to know ahead of time, and by the way, good things can happen randomly as well, day or night
  • Everyone dies and it’s exciting, who am I to say it’s “bad”
  • Dying does not hurt, dying heals
  • People are not dangerous at all, they can’t hurt us emotionally or physically–we always heal, we always make discoveries, people help us
  • I’m not supposed to know, the world runs itself without my opinion
  • If I don’t exist in this body, what’s the problem? It’s “scary” if there isn’t a Grace Bell in the universe anymore? Really?
  • I don’t have to do anything, have anything, learn anything, or think anything to have a happy life
  • I have no idea what God is doing and maybe it doesn’t matter if God cares or not, all is actually quite well…and by the way, maybe those things that I think are bad that are happening all over the place are not actually bad.

Katie says that once she questioned her painful beliefs, they lost their power to cause pain. They became funny. They stopped even arising anymore.

What if the pain is a message saying “you know, you could stop dragging that pin across the rock every single day” or “pay attention, you might be believing something that is not actually true”.

Even the big, all-encompassing, great beliefs like “dying is bad”.

Much Love,
Grace

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Is It True That It Hurt?

“The greatest thing you can do is to tell the truth.”~Benjamin Smythe

“No legacy is so rich as honesty”~William Shakespeare

If you can not find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many great authors and teachers speak about telling the truth. And we all think about the concept of “truth” from a pretty young age, maybe the first time we get surprised by an idea, a person, or an experience that isn’t how we thought it was. We find out the “real” truth.

In the dictionary the word “truth” in English comes from the words “fidelity” and “faithful”. Looking at the word further, it is described as honest, just, steadfast, loyal, legitimate, accurate, typical.

All these words are descriptions of something existing, and then staying the same, holding that pattern. Accuracy even means fitting or forming a standard pattern.

If something moves off a pattern, if it changes from being loyal or faithful to one way, then we think either the new experience is NOT true (doesn’t fit what we’ve known so far) OR the new experience is the REAL truth and we were just not seeing the whole pattern before, we were missing something.

So something difficult happens in our lives. Let’s say we feel physical pain.

Today I was working with a client who had the thought that someone had hurt her physically. We wound up looking at the concept “it hurt”.

When we do the Work the first question is “is it true?”

YES YES YES! With physical pain, boy, that really feels true. I remember how it hurt. I howled, I cried, I had to stop doing what I was doing, I was rushed to the hospital, there was this energy called Pain. And I wanted to make sure to never, ever, ever be in that situation ever again.

I look again at this question to see what it means to ask “is it true?”….. It means I know, absolutely, that when that thing happened, then the sensation that followed, the one I am calling “hurt”, it was accurate, typical, steadfast, honest, legitimate, following a pattern.

Can I really know that it hurt? I’m not sure. I’m calling it “hurt”. What is this thing, this sensation of being hurt?

We use “I got hurt” when describing emotional pain and physical pain. Something came into our world, a person or a freight train or a table corner, and there was a sensation “ouch” and THEN the response was stress: sadness, despair, terror, anger, irritation.

Byron Katie says “pain is always on its way out”.

The thing presents itself and BOOM, BAM, POW, KNOCK, KICK, OUCH and then people are really upset.

What would it be like if I wasn’t so upset about the hurt moment? What if that sensation that I’m calling Pain isn’t quite what I thought? What if I’ve always seen how others react, and it looks terrible, but I haven’t asked myself yet?

Often with Pain and Hurt, which feel so very true, comes the immediate thoughts to avoid it, arrest it, attack it, make it so it never happens again.

Telling the truth about the sensation of pain and hurt is an amazing investigation. It could indeed be the greatest thing you could ever do, speaking from exactly where you are.

Find out what you think will happen next, if you opened to the sensation you are calling “hurt”. Find out if you really can’t stand it. Find out if you really do want to avoid it forever, stop it, shut it down.

What would it be like, to not be Against Pain?

“Both pleasure and pain are projections…after inquiry, the experience of pain changes. The joy that was always beneath the surface of pain is primary now, and the pain is underneath it. People who do the Work stop fearing pain. They relax into it. They watch it come and go, and they see that it always comes and goes at the perfect moment”.
 

Much Love, Grace

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Does A Friendly Universe Include Cancer?

One of my best friends summed up the experience of addiction recently: More.

This moment, this place, this experience is not good enough, long enough, big enough, full enough. It needs to change. Now.

Eckhart Tolle writes about changes and shifts in life that “some changes look negative on the surface, but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

I find that I used to react to change kind of like this on the inside:

AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! (picture a person falling off a 2000 foot cliff)

I confess, I might have even had this kind of reaction for things as small as missing an exit when driving somewhere on the freeway. Or the phone ringing. Or realizing I’m at the gym without my towel.

Now I really do feel more relaxed, waaaay more of the time. Something changes and I think so soon “Oh! I guess it’s going THAT way…oh, I wonder what will happen now?!” It’s very subtle, but what a different way of walking through the day.

With the Work, we begin to think ‘What could be the advantage here? What’s friendly about this situation, that seems so unfriendly when I first look at it? What is interesting, curious, an advantage even?’

I think about the time I learned I had a cancerous tumor on my leg. Here is what I found so far have been benefits of this experience:

  • I realize my body is doing it’s thing, and it’s not me. I am something beyond this body
  • my former husband and children brought over roses after my operation to cut the tumor out
  • my mother showed up to drive me to the surgery, and take me home, and I realize how she is always there when I really need her, always 100% willing (thank you mom)
  • I know all this is temporary in a way I didn’t before, this body is going to end in its own time, just like everyone else—I’m not getting out alive (ha!)
  • it didn’t hurt that much, the pain left pretty quickly, I could stand it
  • saying I had 45 stitches sounds pretty cool, I survived it
  • I have done the Work on cancer and I realize it’s just doing its thing, living its life, shining its star….I don’t have to hate it, in fact, it feels exciting to feel open to it just like anything else (cancer! my new best friend! OK, maybe not quite but how incredible to even contemplate!)

Living a turned around painful concept is an amazing and exciting practice. It feels creative, crazy, fun, playful…entering into the previously unknown. What if things are not as I believed….what if it’s friendly out there?

I feel the thrill of being beyond this ME, this individual person, this being with a physical body. This is literal, not a conceptual thing…it’s like Life is happening, I’m in the middle of it, and when this body is done, Life will still be creatively being itself.

Adyashanti, the spiritual teacher I mention often who I so enjoy, says “the very thing that’s animating you is very mysterious. It’s not good or bad, it’s simply a mystery. As long as you’re trying to improve yourself or break yourself down, you’re missing this incredible mystery. And it’s always been there. As far back as you can possibly remember. We look away from it because the noise in the mind is so much more willing to tell you who you are. “I’m a woman, I’m good, not so good”…very willing to tell you about yourself. The spiritual journey is about getting fascinated with this mystery rather than the little me.    

Change comes along and something new emerges, who knows what. Unknown, magical. Just questioning the horrors, injustices, disease, death….what else is there besides all that? Could this be a friendly universe? I used to be so positive that it wasn’t, or so it seemed. But I couldn’t really know it was true, not even before I had the Work.  

Now, even if I’m unsure or afraid, I see if I can find examples of how the thing I thought of as terrifying might have something to offer. This is not playing be-positive games, this is seeing what’s actually true for me. Wow, I really don’t know if it’s 100% terrible or not. And this alone is lighter, even if I don’t think I LOVE something.

Once upon a time, there was this bad experience that entered the kingdom….what exciting adventure will happen next, if I remember that it’s just a story? It’s a Mystery. 

Much Love,

Grace

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Harry Potter and Byron Katie

I don’t know if J.K. Rowling knows anything about The Work, but it seems like she might. She certainly has been drawn to the idea of investigating one’s thinking.

In The Goblet of Fire, book four of the Harry Potter series, there’s a scene that could be right out of Loving What Is and step number one of the work: seeing what our judgments and thoughts actually are. Admitting them. Getting them out of the murkiness of a busy mind.

Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, Harry’s school, has an amazing magic “thought collector” in his office called a “pensive.” It’s a stone basin with a silvery substance where you can put your thoughts and memories.

Dumbledore says: “I sometimes find that I have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.” (Gosh, I’ve never felt like that before!)

“At these times, one simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links when they’re in this form.”

I know the feeling…having had so many thoughts whirling so fast and furiously in my mind, that it seemed like I couldn’t stand it, and I certainly couldn’t spot patterns and links. It all seemed like a cesspool!

I worked with a client yesterday who was having this experience. Each thought led to another image, and another…ideas, warnings, worries, fears, impulses. It’s almost like they’re humming like a huge hive, each buzz a different thought.

It can feel so chaotic, and then on top of THAT there are thoughts like “I have to find the right thought to question, I have to get to the bottom of this, I have to understand myself, I HAVE to get it!”

Which leads to more frustration and more agonizing.

So what is our version of the “pensive”?

Putting our thoughts on paper, of course. This is the only way I know to examine these thoughts at my leisure.

When we write, we can stabilize the whirling dervish of a mind and look at what’s true and what’s not…to find the freedom underneath.

The Work really is for me slowing down the mind, putting it in a solid place, like paper (which is kind of funny to say when I think about it, but it’s true). I can see it there. I refer back to the sentence, it doesn’t slip past and get tucked under something in the dark.

Then I love trusting the process of answering the questions.

And then, through this inquiry….where once there was lots of chaos and clutter, there is a great, simple, and vast space.

Adyashanti spoke not long ago about Inquiry and said that all that is not true tends to fall away, to decay.

Once we just look, sit, stay with it, then we see the magical mystery of it all. The mind has actually been an amazing thought collector, without the “pensive” nearby, until we find out how to use a “pensive” by slowing down and doing The Work.

That mind has been so fascinated with all the details and the thinking and the “facts” and explanations about ourselves. But then as we question and see all the ways we define ourselves, and find out that we can’t really KNOW….

We enter the unknown, we know less rather than more. The excess thoughts really are all abstracted and somehow, they fizzle away.

The Tao Te Ching #48: “In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less do yo need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone….”

Much Love, Grace

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Leaving Everything You Know Behind

This morning I was reading letters and responses that people have written to an author named “Sugar” which were printed in a magazine called The Sun. One of my favorite magazines of all time. Well, the only magazine I’ve ever continuously received and read each month for many years.

Someone had written to this woman named Sugar wondering if it was OK to NOT be speaking to her dad. This woman had HAD IT with her father.

Most of us have had the experience of wanting to shut down communication with someone else when we disagree or argue with them, or feel very hurt by them, or just too scared of them. It just seems like too much, too hard, too stress-producing, too uncomfortable, too painful.

I myself have had this experience, not so long ago even.

There is no right or wrong way to be around stopping talk with someone, of course, each experience is unique. But I liked how Sugar answered this writer. Sugar said “I will tell you about my own situation with my own father” and she told that story.

The story went like this: father gets mad, daughter gets hurt, daughter gets mad, no communication for many years, daughter reaches out, father gets mad, no communication again for years, father reaches out, daughter gets hurt, father gets mad, no communication again.

As I read the story, I realized that I expected the daughter and father to reconcile, to talk, to fall into each others’ arms at the end.

But it didn’t go that way. It doesn’t always go the way we like. Sometimes people need, apparently, to not communicate with each other. I’ve been the one myself to say I need a break, I can’t do this, I need to be quiet for awhile.

Doing The Work is like laying every idea I have down about what would be MY idea of a good outcome. It is seeing who I would be without my stories. It is leaving everything I know behind. It is opening to the wide sky, the vast earth, the limitless mind.

One of my favorite recordings, that I listen to every few months, is the haunting and beautiful poetry by David Whyte. A dear friend sent this one to me again recently, so I knew it was time to hear it once more.

Communication, silence, waiting, re-connecting, silence. Who knows how it will unfold, but it is all Love in the end. All of it.

In this high place

it is as simple as this,
leave everything you know behind.

Step toward the cold surface,

pray the old prayer of rough love
and open both arms.

Those who come with empty hands

will stare into the lake astonished,
there, in the cold light
reflecting pure snow,

the true shape of your own face.

David Whyte Tilicho Lake

Much Love,

Grace

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More! Less! Now!

The Tao Te Ching from 64 “…the Master takes action by letting things take their course. He remains as calm at the end as at the beginning. He has nothing, thus has nothing to lose…”

But I want “this” to be faster, bigger and more! Like my business, my bank account, my bicep muscles, my dance moves, my wedding, my children.

And I want other things to be slower, smaller and less! Like the flu, cancer, my neighbor’s noise, bills, natural disasters, problems, my journey to death.

I have found that questioning these concepts one by one, page after page of concepts I’ve written down, I find it pretty amusing the way my mind is so interested in piping up around what there should be more of and less of in my world.

Letting things take their course is revolutionary to this voice that loves to evaluate and diagnose everything it sees.

But wow, is it worth it.

One thought I had recently was that I should have more money. I chuckle to think of this thought right now….but if someone knocked on my door within the next five minutes and said “would you like some more money?” I would probably say yes. If there was no catch.

How amazing, though, to really ask myself, is it true that I want more?

I ask this in my teleclass on Money, Work and Business…and it’s an exercise I’ve heard variations on before in studying money and our beliefs about it: What do I really want more money for? I mean really? Security? Peace? Freedom? Joy? Power?

What do I want more of anything for? Or less of something for? And if I want it to be bigger or smaller than it actually is, if I’m not relaxing and letting things take their course, all I get is the Not Relaxing part.

It turns out things always take their course. I don’t get a vote.

This does not mean I have no importance, I have no influence, that all is random chaos and it’s terrible, meaningless.

In fact, when I find who I am without the thought that I need something to be MORE or something to be LESS, for anything to run a different course than it’s running, at first I catch a glimpse of excitement.

If I let myself really see who I’d be without the thought that I want more money, all afternoon, all the next day, and let my mind work with this idea, this imagination, this picture…

I see how all I really thought I wanted that money would give me is either already here, or perhaps impossible. I don’t have to go “get” it. There is no security that can be guaranteed by money, there is no peace that money brings, or freedom, or joy. I cannot keep it or pin it down. I have no control over it. Money does nothing, is nothing but a story. I can’t even keep it, if I had it I would put it out there again. It comes, it goes…it runs its own course.

What is here, is peace, joy, silence, love, security, freedom, a great hum of unknown. Just here, with me listening. Can you hear it today?

“The master has nothing, thus has nothing to lose.”

Much Love, Grace

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Sneaky Little Rascally Mind

The mind can be so tricky, slippery, sneaky! That rascal!

I thought this today as I remembered Cheri Huber’s quote “you cannot be non-violent if there is any part of yourself that you are in opposition to”.

Then the thought comes in “oh boy, I have a bit of work to do still, I notice I am not perfectly THERE all the time, all self-accepting and non-oppositional”.

This sneaky little thought is actually an opposition in itself. I need to change, to adjust, to fix something. I need to be just a wee wee bit more purely non-oppositional.

How very, very strange it is for the human mind to consider having nothing to do, nothing to fix, nothing to change, nothing to say, no new way to be.

I can hear the thoughts getting nervous right now, like a hen house at night when there’s a fox creeping around. What would become of us! We’d all go to hell in a hand basket! Life would be meaningless! Nothing to do? Nothing to fix? No! Impossible!!! Cluck Cluck Cluck!!

  • If I stop trying to improve my business, I’ll sit around all day watching Puppetiji on youtube
  • If I let go of protecting myself or I don’t set good boundaries, I’ll get hurt
  • If I really don’t think I need to do anything, I’ll be worthless this lifetime
  • If I let go of all control, I won’t have a schedule to follow
  • If I don’t oppose my fat butt, then I’ll never exercise
  • If I don’t oppose the dandelions in my yard, I won’t pull them up
  • If I don’t feel like going to work (that boring job) then I’ll lie on the couch all day and eventually, I’ll starve to death (which is bad)
  • If I don’t oppose those wealthy people, they’ll take over even more and I’ll never get what I want

This effort to control things, to control yourself, takes a lot of energy. And it believes underneath it all that you can make a mistake, other people can make mistakes, and very bad things can happen unless you get a handle on yourself!!

Cheri Huber writes “Pay attention. Self-hate is slippery. It will even say things to you like, ‘you shouldn’t believe the voices of self-hate. If you are still believing them, there really IS something wrong with you!”

We believe that if we exert enough control and stay “good” people then we’ll have a good life. If we have a bad life, then we must be doing something wrong.

What if we really let go of control…even in our thinking, and found that life moves and ebbs and flows and creates without our personal control or lack of it.

What if we opposed nothing and let go?

Katie says, if you put your hand into a fire, do you have to decide to move it? No. When your hand starts to burn, it moves.

Maybe we don’t have to dictate to ourselves how we’re going to behave today, what we’re going to say or do, or plan. We will sense easily how to be, and our nature is very loving. It doesn’t want to get burned.

What if it’s possible that what lies beneath your opposition is a life force stronger than you could imagine? What if you won’t lie there like a log if you let go of all control and planning?

Katie writes in Loving What Is “people new to the Work often say to me, ‘but it would be disempowering to stop my argument with reality. If I simple accept reality, I’ll become passive. I may even lose the desire to act’. I answer them with a question: Can you really know that that’s true?

Much Love, Grace

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I Can’t Stand It!

One of my favorite thoughts to question is “I can’t stand it!!!”

It’s one of those simple, short, instant thoughts that comes to my mind if I really don’t like something that’s happening or something someone is saying.

Can you feel the sensations in your body that match the idea of not being able to stand it (whatever it is)? Tension, frustration, agony, fear!

A place that I’ve had this thought before is when I’ve had very little sleep and I’ve been awake many hours, and maybe I see that I’m probably going to be awake many more hours still….the thought comes in “I can’t stand it, I have to sleep!”

But if that were really true, I’d fall down right there, wherever I was, and start sleeping.

It turns out I always “make it” through the day. So far in life, I’ve always stood it, I’m still here.

Let’s take a harder circumstance. I was reading Byron Katie’s book this morning Who Would You Be Without Your Story? and there is a woman whose husband had left her to go be with another woman. The woman believed “I can’t stand it”.

I remember when I was waiting in the doctor’s office after getting a biopsy of a funny mole on my thigh. The doctor had checked the stitches from the biopsy and then said “why don’t you get dressed and then I’ll come back and we can talk about this”.

Suddenly, this wasn’t going the way most other doctor’s appointments went. We’re going to TALK about this? My mind was off like the race horses! Before knowing anything! Adrenaline, alertness, anticipation, intuition.

And, I also had The Work. I watched my mind within 10 minutes only, before the doctor even returned, question the belief “I can’t stand it, if it’s cancer”. It was cancer.

Katie writes “You believe you can’t stand it because you haven’t inquired. You haven’t enlightened yourself about how the mind works. So you have to live out I CAN’T STAND IT’. “

A friend who loves doing The Work emailed me a new title of a book he’s reading “The Guru Next Door” by Wendy Dolber. I live across the street from a bookstore (my personal addiction….we’ll talk about that later) so I’ll be looking for it today.

In the book is a list Wendy calls The Seven Understands of All Unhappiness. One of them is so simple:

“Believing something causes unhappiness is the very reason it seems to “cause” unhappiness”.

When I think about the things I can’t stand, I am CERTAIN that they cause unhappiness. Duh! Lack of sleep, lack of money, the cancer thingy on my leg, running out of gas in my car, not enough time, getting the flu, people dying, war, earthquakes.

Do these experiences REALLY cause unhappiness? What if they don’t? Almost hard to imagine, right?

But that’s what The Work brings. Even if it’s just the possibility that what I’m believing isn’t actually 100% true, and peace is possible, even in this “difficult” experience.

What if I CAN stand it? What if my life goes on? Or even if it doesn’t? Am I sure I couldn’t stand THAT? 

So I watched what happened with the thing called cancer on my leg. I cried on the surgeon’s table as I was being wheeled in, but it was like my tears were not 100% serious. I thought about Jesus when he knew what was about to happen with the whole crucifixion situation and he said “God, do I HAVE to? Are you sure I can stand it?”

Now there’s just a big 3 inch scar on my leg where there was once 45 stitches. I like to say I got in a sword fight with a pirate. What if having a cancer tumor cut out of your thigh is just as exciting as getting stabbed by a pirate? It’s a pretty good story. The key word being ‘STORY’.

“We’re using mind to enlighten mind, because there isn’t anything else….When we realize that it’s our own mind that is causing our suffering, then The Work begins, then the fun begins. It’s living in a whole other polarity, a whole other realm. And what I love about it is we no longer believe that the world is causing our suffering, that it CAN cause our suffering. It can’t not ever—no chance of it.”—Byron Katie

Much Love, Grace

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Grateful For The Ones Who Hurt Me

Do you ever say to yourself “If it weren’t for those mean, nasty, rude, bossy, critical, judgmental, fuming, volatile, emotional, crazy people that have been in my life, I would be having a GREAT TIME here on planet earth!!!”

Have you ever noticed how this sentiment enters…sometimes in such a subtle, quiet way?

If only those people would not have hurt me, bothered me, influenced me, attacked me…I would be OK.

If only that person hadn’t cut me off in traffic, if only that store clerk had been more cheerful, if only that ticket vendor had been faster….I would be better off than I am right now.

Walt Whitman wrote  “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

Today as I do the Work and remember the people I’ve done the Work on I become aware that these moments of great feeling, even when full of stress and sadness and anger, have been some of the most important interactions of my life.

One of my favorite poems I share with you today:

Suppose that what you fear

Could be trapped,

And held in Paris.

Then you would have

The courage to go

Everywhere in the world.

All the directions of the compass

Open to you, except the degrees east or west

Of true north

That lead to Paris.

Still, you wouldn’t dare

Put your toes

Smack dab on the city limit line.

You’re not really willing

To stand on a mountainside

Miles away.

And watch the Paris lights

Come up at night.

Just to be on the safe side,

You decide to stay completely

Out of France.

But then danger

Seems too close

Even to those boundaries

And you feel

The timid part of you

Covering the whole globe again.

You need the kind of friend

Who learns your secret and says

“See Paris first.”

—M. Truman Cooper

Suppose the greatest friends we have are the ones who have pushed us to enter Paris, helped us get there faster perhaps, didn’t even have to know our secret.

The Universe will give you exactly what you need to face your fears, to discover yourself, including all those people who were not apparently loving and kind.

Thank you grandpa, co-worker, boss from 20 years ago, dying father, eating disorder, former husband, alcohol, absence of all money, cancer, tobacco, car accident, suicide of friend, drunk friend, porn addict man, enraged man, the person who stole my luggage…..

Much Love, Grace