Get real

I love Byron Katie.  Warning:  she’s not Scientific.  But she does have an incredibly deep feel for what Mary Baker Eddy called “aggressive mental suggestion.” Katie’s life work, in fact, consists of springing people free from their own negative fictions.

When Katie was in her early 30s, she spiraled into a severe depression that lasted nearly a decade.  For the last two years she couldn’t leave her bedroom, and thought constantly of suicide.  Then, literally overnight, she had an experience she calls “waking up to reality”:

I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being.  Freedom is as simple as that.  I found that suffering is optional.  I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment.  That joy is in everyone, always. ¹

From this “awakening” Byron Katie developed four questions that structure her dialogues with suffering people.  The theme of each dialogue (and the title of one of her books) is:  Who Would You Be Without Your Story?

“Reality,” Katie says, “is always kinder than the stories we tell about it.” ² Questioning their own habitual fictions, a black woman begins to release a lifelong terror of white people.  A gay man learns to show what he calls “Christ-like love” for others, whether or not they feel the same for him.  And financial stress loses its grip as Katie walks audience members through some very dark fears, then concludes:

We have a right to be happy.  That’s our birthright.  If peace is dependent on arms and legs and houses and cars, there’s no possibility of peace.  But…peace has no conditions. … That’s what this work is about.  What is imagined, and what is real.  Reality, I’ve come to see, it is always kind.  That’s its nature.  But when we superimpose our stories upon what is beautiful, fear happens.  Until we question what we believe about reality….

Again, Katie is not Scientific.  She’s all about Loving What Is - another book title — by which she means finding beauty and blessings in our current circumstances.

Nonetheless, I’ve gotten no end of benefit from watching real people shed the grand illusions that distort their lives.  There’s some subterranean kinship between Katie’s practice and ours.  Grace is present here -- and abundant lessons for us all.

By Nina deCordova