Byron Katie: Change Yourself and You Change the World

When I won a scholarship to study on the Rotary Peace and Conflict Studies Program, I had no idea this would change my life.  I found myself musing about positive peaceful transformation rather than a focus on disarmament, conflict and the woes of the world.  I really felt inspired to find transformative peace.  I did a google search on this word and found Byron Katie.  I got very excited.  That was 2008.  Ever since I’ve been seeking to understand The Work.  I’ve intuitively known it is one of the ways to peace and it feels right for me.  However, in practice it is not so easy as we have so many conditioned beliefs from our families, societies and world.  We have grown up to believe certain cultural stories, economic stories, personal stories and on it goes.  The beauty of The Work is to question the negative story we have told (infinitem) to find freedom.  I often think of The Work in all situations mentally.  What I now see is that if anyone is causing me a problem it is something within me that is not healed.  Rather than see them as a problem I see them as a liberator.  I had a conflict for 12 years which I was sure was caused by another.  There were rules and regulations I could use to back up my story and I told myself it truthfully to find only recently that I was in a lie.  An innocent lie, but nonetheless a lie.  How do I know that?  I was not happy and caught in a conflict that went on for years.  Energetically it pulled me in, I kept ruminating over it and finding the evidence to prove why I was right and the other wrong.  I really see myself as pretty easy going but it was fascinating to learn that in reality I was in a dream and believing a story that took me out of bliss from time to time because I believed it.  So now I am quick to scan my emotions, quick to see if there is a tightening in the belly, quick to see when I am in judgement because I know I have slipped out of reality and into the dream of right and wrong.  Now for those who have strong moral codes or senses of justice (like me), it is not easy because we cry ‘it is not right’, ‘it is not fair’ and we fight for what is.  Yet The Work is a universal minded system which is really about reality now.  Not about the past or future that doesn’t exist.  It is about looking into reality.  Most of us do not live in reality.  I can provide evidence for that really easily.  I went to a Vipassna retreat.  Now this is a universal mind meditation.  All you do for three days is watch your breath go in and out and then trace your body with consciousness and do not judge any pains or twinges you feel.  You are trained moment by moment to observe.  Now I found it hard for one second to stay in reality, my mind kept pulling me into dreams, stories, past events, future ideas to entrain itself.  It did not want to stay in the moment.  Yet my life is moment to moment.  So that was a big realisation for me.  I am also into a universal intelligence some may call god and what I saw clearly was that intelligence is aware and observing, that is it.  There is no judgement.  So I realise that is what I must learn.  Undo thousands of years of conditioning.  I’ll make it fun!

Here is a good video of Byron Katie and The Work.  Perhaps this is the beginning of freedom for you.  That would be my dearest wish for you.  If you are here, you are meant to be here.  Welcome to The Work.