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Summary: Great Truth in Human Life and Experience
Review: The power of this book is not it's enlightening message; many many books have been written on the essentials that are covered here. The power is far more the simple words, the closeness of the message and the true authenticity of it all. Byron is capable of reducing the extreme complex to the essentials... and still make sense. She has not learned these truths from noble men that spent decades in the woods or on a mountain, she has truly found these truths in her own life. And remains, more then I could imagine, with both feet firmly on the desertground. Great, just great! Indeed, four questions is all it takes.
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Summary: Beyond Change
Review: I titled my review Beyond Change because that is how I feel about Katie's work. Using The Work has been life altering for me, in ways I find hard to express in words. What I've found is that I opened to a new way of exploring myself and the thoughts I attach to and my life has continued to unfold in the most beautiful ways. I was able to see myself and my loved ones in a new light with more love and acceptance than I thought possible.
I have totally changed my life in the past 5 years since I was first introduced to Katie and her work. I've shed the excess 250lbs of weight that I used to keep people at a distance...and I was able to see how it was "I" that was creating that distance rather than "them."
I am also now in a beautiful relationship...one that continues to provide me with the most enlightening work of my life. Each day I learn more and more about myself, and at last I have found the beauty within me to love myself and others. As Katie says...when I notice what I attach to, I begin to notice how these thoughts unattach from me. Simple and beautiful.
My suggestion is to purchase both the book and the audio tapes read by Katie and Stephen. Hearing their words in their own voices is a gift you will treasure. There is simply no substitute for hearing the loving words spoken by Katie herself. And Stephen has a way of expressing concepts and ideas that clearly and distinctly fill in any gaps. Enjoy!
If you are in the Pittsburgh area and would like to talk more about The Work, please feel free to look me up to chat.
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Summary: As my mother was dying
Review: I read Loving What Is while I was caring for my mother dying of cancer. I remained calm, peaceful and filled with insight as to what to do next in her care. The book is one of the most life changing books I have ever read. I practice "The Work" minute by minute, day by day and have found great peace and spiritual joy in it. I am recommending the book to my clients who see me for spiritual direction.
Thank you for The Work!
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Summary: Please let OPRAH know!
Review: I have experienced enormous transformation in all aspects of my life from Katie's work, along with Eckhart Tolle's practices. Oprah just endorsed Eckhart's book. She read it six times. This shows that this beautiful process towards wholeness is reaching the mainstream. Please do your part by e-mailing Oprah from her website and asking her to endorse Loving What Is. That's www.Oprah.com.
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Summary: Correcting my correction
Review: Below I corrected someone's mistake about Katie and Stephen Mitchell being married, and then I made a mistake about how they met. It wasn't through an article he was assigned to write; it was through their literary agent. Oh, well. ;)
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Summary: Weird
Review: I've participated in all kinds of new age kind of stuff. Gestalt, EST, Hypnosis, etc. and have been able to find value in most of these. However, these tapes are weird. The basic idea: that expecting that things should be different and feeling badly about this isn't going to help an individual is straight forward enough. I expected more, but if the only thing these tapes had done was reinforced this idea in a memorable way, they might interesting enough. However, they failed to even meet this minimal standard. I was disappointed. Here are the four questions: 1. Is it true? 2. Can you absolutely know that it's true? 3. How do you react when you think that thought? 4. Who would you be without that thought?. The four questions are presented with the self important phrase "the work". I can imagine a simple discipline consistently applied could be worthwhile, but I don't see this as the one. The book got some good reviews, you might check out those reviews to make up your own mind.
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Summary: The Motherlode
Review: I have a large number of self-help books on my shelf, and it'd be worth trading all of them to get a copy of Byron Katie's Loving What Is. This book gets right down to the absolute fundamentals of human suffering -- it's all in our thoughts -- and how to undo that suffering.This is what it comes down to: Nothing *ever* bothers you except your thoughts. It's not the fact that you lost your job that makes you miserable, it's the thoughts running through your head, like "I'm incompetent," "I didn't deserve that job," "I'll never get a job like that again." Who would you be, newly unemployed, without those thoughts? (Question #4.) The questions help you see with your own eyes that your suffering is *always* over a painful thought that's running through your head, and this firsthand knowledge eventually leads you to automatically drop that thought. Your suffering has nothing to do with reality. Katie likes to say, "The worst thing that could happen is a story." On another note, one reviewer below says that Katie and Stephen Mitchell aren't married, since Katie talks in her tapes about her husband being uninterested in spiritual matters. I recently attended the School for the Work, and they are certainly married. She explained that her previous husband was not very happy living with her after her transformation, and she eventually decided that the kindest thing she could do would be to spare him from "that woman" that he thought she had become. She and Stephen met when he was assigned to write an article on her, and the rest is history. This is the single most transformative book I've ever read. It contains the very essence of wisdom as I understand it, and I never felt I had to make myself believe anything or translate her words into something resembling reality, as I do with some authors, because she was already there. Simply incredible.
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Summary: An American Classic
Review: I took Eckhart Tolle's advice and read "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie. The book represents a profound renewal of American wisdom. Comparisons with works from the great wisdom traditions are tempting. Stephen Mitchell is certainly familiar with most of these traditions. He is a writer and translator of impeccable discernment. His translations and adaptations have given us works of the highest human achievement rendered into exquisitely readable American language. Mitchell has made works such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Job and the Tao Te Ching accessible to us while maintaining the integrity of their sacred message. You can trust him to pick only the best and present it to you like a lover offering the highest gifts. Now Mitchell's gentle and loving collaborative presence has helped to bring Byron Katie to a wide audience, while maintaining the integrity of her simple yet profound process call The Work. The book is structed around dialogues that Byron Katie has had in various settings doing The Work with people, many of whom are in a state of extreme suffering. The dialogues are flanked by explanatory text into which are wondrously woven aphorisms of profound and practical wisdom. Someone once said that Katie sounds like Rumi being channeled by Mark Twain on estrogen; short sentences of common-sense mystical insight flow through the text to help deepen the understanding revealed in the dialogues. Yet it is the dialogues that best reveal The Work. They possess a newness and a timelessness that invite you to enter into freedom. Yet The Work cannot be dismissed by the more cynical among us as navel-gazing passivity or mysticism, because it is a product of the action-oriented, do-it-yourself culture in which we live. We invented the do-it-yourself manual. You could say that, in keeping with the grand American tradition of practical self-reliance, "Loving What Is" is the first undo-it-yourself manual. In explaining this technology of freedom to us, Byron Katie travels with us to the minutest and most intimate corners of our lives to greet the things which we mistakenly identify as our unchangeable core of suffering and stuckness. We are invited here to get stuck in freedom, to learn how to de-neurose and un-suffer. The book teaches us to do this not by resisting those things which we experience as the cause of our suffering or the trigger of our neurosis, but by looking at these things with an attitude of profound openness and inquiry. By questioning them we learn to escape from the entrapments of our stories and memories that identify us with suffering.. You can place "Loving What Is" on your bookshelf next to the great spiritual classics. Or better still, you can give it to your grandmother or your boss or even your ex. Give it to Oprah, and maybe she can get copies to Bush, or to Arafat and Sharon. But best of all, give "Loving What Is" to yourself. Put the book in your lap on a daily basis. Whether it's a lotus lap or a zazen lap or just a couch-potato lap, the book will meet you where you sit and help you find the ease of being which you seek.
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Summary: Self-Realization: Katie Shows Us How To Do It
Review: It's about time someone took the woowoo out of self-realization, and Katie's done it, because really, there's nothing mystical about "enlightenment." Realization = getting real, in the moment...and we can only get real when we examine our thoughts and find our own truth. A book or a teaching alone can't give this to you; there has to be the willingness to go deep and not know. LOVING WHAT IS is the beginning of a wild ride, should you choose to strap yourself in. If you think meditation is "spiritual" and mentation is the devil, this isn't the book for you. If you want a way to get real, I recommend reading every single word of LOVING WHAT IS. I facilitate this process, and without exception, everyone I've sat with who has been willing to go all the way "gets" it. Kids do this work. Brain-damaged people can do it. It's simple, so simple that at first glance it can appear simplistic, unappealing to our minds that love complication and drama. If you've been looking for nirvana or satori or samadhi all your life, I invite you to suspend all concepts of how to get there, to read LOVING WHAT IS, try The Work, and use the mind to make friends with the mind. That's really all it takes.
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Summary: One Student's Experience with Katie
Review: Katie is an amazing teacher to sit with. She practicies what she preaches. She is sharing the authentic Work that took her out of suffering so many years ago and is showing us the way. Whether it's her books, tapes or The School for The Work of Byron Katie she is worth your time and money. The Work is a life changer helping one detach from frustrations and struggles of everyday life and access Peace. The Work has also allowed me to reawaken creativity that was dormant for a long time and I am sharing from my authentic self in the form of essays and poetry.
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