Day Seventeen: The Work of Byron Katie, Question #1

A sort of “death” needs to take place to achieve real happiness and emotional freedom. The Byron Katie work offers simple, though life and heart changing, tools to achieve this. Today the first question: IS IT TRUE?

Other people sometimes drive us crazy. Sometimes we drive ourselves crazy. Sometimes the world seems “awful,” “unfair,” or just plain “too hard.”

Good. All this unhappiness is Reality’s gift to us.

And a grand incentive to learn and master this path of undoing emotional suffering and bondage: the Work of Byron Kaite.


The work of Byron Katie leads us back to the one person who can make us happy or unhappy--- ourselves. It does this by suggesting that we:

Judge our neighbor.

Write it down.

Ask four questions.

Turn it around.


Today’s work/ game / play/ learning is this: notice all our thoughts that are of the ilk, “So and so should be different.” Write these –in one sentence form -- down on paper. Cut to the chase: puteither a should or a shouldn’t in the sentence. Like “X should be nicer to me.” “Z shouldn’t be so angry at me.” “T shouldn’t ignore me.” “My Mother/ Father/ Brother sister should have…”

Write them down. This is judging. This is writing it down.

And ask the first question after you write it down: Is it true?

Don’t get too fancy, and work at opening your heart and mind to this distinction: true vs. an opinion. If I hold out a rock and let it go, my opinion makes no difference in the truth of gravity. If I have the opinion that X should be nicer to me, that is not the same kind of truth. It’s what I want. Other people might agree. Agree that I am “right,” and X is “wrong.” Oh, well. Their agreement or disagreement, though the source of much gossip and social backbiting, doesn’t make my opinion true.

Spend the day noticing your thoughts that want others to be different, write down the should/ shouldn’t sentences about these “wrong” people, and then begin to come to freedom by asking, Is it true?

This work can be “gotten” from the Website: thework.com, and from Katie’s books, all of which are wonderful on CD listening form. Find the books and CD’s also at her site.