Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

by Byron Katie

“we are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens.”

The deeper you go into The Work, the more powerful you realize it is. People who have been practicing inquiry for a while often say, “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.

We don’t attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.

When we stop opposing reality, action becomes simple, fluid, kind, and fearless.

A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It is not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.

Internal war is a reason. Internal war makes external war.

The Work always brings us back to who we really are. Each belief investigated to the point of understanding allows the next belief to surface. You undo that one. Then you undo the next, and the next. And then you find that you are actually looking forward to the next belief. At some point, you may notice that you’re meeting every thought, feeling, person, and situation as a friend. Until eventually you are looking for a problem. Until, finally, you notice that you haven’t had one in years.

I love question 3. Once you answer it for yourself, once you see the cause and effect of a thought, all your suffering begins to unravel. You may not even realize it at first. You may not even know that you’re making progress. But progress is none of your business. Just keep doing The Work. It will continue to take you deeper. The next time the problem you worked on appears, you may laugh in astonishment. You may not feel any stress; you may not even notice the thought at all.

You could also say, “I’d be clear enough to understand the situation and act efficiently.”

The Work is not about shame and blame. It’s not about proving that you are the one in the wrong. The power of the turnaround lies in the discovery that everything you think you see on the outside is really a projection of your own mind. Everything is a mirror image of your own thinking. In discovering the innocence of the person you judged, you eventually come to recognize your own innocence.