Month: August 2015

Here’s How Doing The Work of Byron Katie Has Shifted This Reader’s Experience in just one month’s time.

For the past ten months I have been offering online webinars. I call them the Two-Hour Taste of The Work sessions. They are a great way to get a taste of The Work, and a chance to work with a different guest facilitator each time. For most of this period, I have offered these online video teleconferences every week. But the time has come for a reality check. Most weeks there are 2-3 people participating. Sometimes just one. At most, eight.

The feet of a dancer keep a steady beat. Yet It’s funny how the mind rebels. Give me a steady beat, and I’ll start tapping the counter-beat or some kind of improvisational rhythm. That’s just the mind. It doesn’t want to be locked-in. It wants to run and be free without rules.

It seems to be an epidemic. I know I’ve been infected too. Infected with the thought that I need to do something important. In fact, it not only needs to be important, but it has to be something that I love too, and it has to pay me well, and not work me too hard either. I call it the dreamer’s job. Because that kind of “perfect” job is a rare commodity in this world.

Some people favor the technical. And some people favor being free-form. This is true in art, in science, in business, and in doing The Work of Byron Katie. Both technique and free-form action are necessary. And they balance each other. If you’re all technique, even if it’s perfect, you lose the heart connection to what you’re doing. And if you’re all free-from, even if it feels great to the heart, you can miss the point of the whole exercise.

My job is facilitator. To me that means my job is to make it easier for you to do your work. The Work is still work. And I can’t do it for you. But I can hold a space for you to do your work. As I look ahead over the next months, some ideas come to mind.

Naturally the mind Is attracted to goodness. And there’s nothing unhealthy about it. But addiction happens when the mind becomes locked in on some particular facet of goodness and uses it to escape.

My partner reads my newsletters. And he made a good point to me on Monday when read the last one I wrote about cleaning the shower. He said that the article made it look like he is unreliable. When he said that to me, I denied it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was right. I was seeing him as unreliable. And even though I was doing some good work on “making peace with unreliability,” I was still missing a very important underlying belief.

It’s the most trivial little point of stress for me regarding who’s turn it is to clean the shower (we wipe it down every day). In May, I discovered that I would be much more peaceful if I wasn’t keeping score. That helped a lot. But I found out last week that my work wasn’t done.