Stressful Thoughts Don’t Get Much Air Time
Most of time, people don’t want to hear about your stressful stories. So they stay bottled up inside.
So when your story finally gets a chance to be heard, when doing The Work of Byron Katie, the mind can sometimes run wild with it.
It wants to tell all the details. How bad it really is. It wants to get it all out.
This is the old way of looking for a sympathetic ear.
It Can Be a Help to Get it Out, But It Accomplishes Very Little
Verbalizing stressful thoughts is probably better than suppressing them.
But if getting the stressful story out was all that was needed to be free, then we’d all have been free long ago.
The fact is that getting it out is just one half of The Work: identifying the stressful thoughts. The other half of The Work is where the transformation happens: questioning the stressful thoughts you identified.
Which Means There Are Two Distinct Phases of The Work
Writing and questioning.
The stressful story that needs to be told is given air time in the first phase only: in written form. That’s where the story belongs. On paper.
The second phase, questioning, has no room for story. This is the time for exploring the opposite side of the victim story. Otherwise, there’s no way out of the endless story trap.
But it takes some discipline to stay on task. The mind wants to jump back into its story.
There Is a Principle for Facilitators That Is Helpful
In the Institute for The Work, Byron Katie has laid out several principles for facilitators. The one that is relevant here is this:
“I agree to bring my client and myself back to the specific situation and one-liner any time they (or I) wander away from the questions; and to remind us that The Work stops working any time they (or I) move into “because,” “but,” justification, defense, or other topics.”
It’s a Simple Guideline
But it’s easy to forget about it, whether you’re facilitating yourself or facilitating someone else.
But the effectiveness of The Work depends on it. The way out of suffering is exactly the opposite as the way into it. Anything other than questioning the story is not The Work, and only prolongs the suffering.
If you notice that you are not bringing yourself back to the questions of The Work when you are doing it, or if you notice that you don’t bring your client back when he or she gets distracted by the mind, then I invite you to write down your underlying beliefs. For example:
He won’t like it if I bring him back.
She needs to get it out.
It’s rude to interrupt.
She’s not too far into her story.
Make a list of why you don’t bring someone back in a particular situation. And question each item with your list.
Have a great weekend,
Todd
“The questions are the path back to your self. They don’t care what the story is. They just wait for you to answer them.” Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy.
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