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With Our Thoughts We Make the World AN APPRECIATION OF BYRON KATIE
In our everyday life, our thinking is 99% self-centered. “Why do
I
have suffering? Why do
I
have trouble?”
—SHUNRYU SUZUKI
SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE I GOT SICK, I attended a retreat in Northern California led by Ayya Khema. In it, she gave a talk on the nature of thought. According to my notes, she said at one point: “Thoughts are just there, like the air around us. They arise but are arbitrary and not reliable. Most of them are just rubbish, but we believe them anyway.”
I took her words to heart and, before getting sick, had become quite adept at applying this teaching. Especially while in formal meditation, I could watch a thought arise in the mind, treat it as impersonal energy, and let it pass through. I knew I couldn’t control the content of thoughts that arose, but I also knew it wasn’t the content that led to suffering. Suffering arose when I “believed” the thought, when I believed its content was a valid reflection of reality. I knew, for example, that the thought “My Torts class won’t go well today” didn’t mean that the class wouldn’t be just fine. “Believing a thought” is another way of saying that we’re clinging to it, continuing to go round and round on the wheel of suffering.
By the time the Parisian Flu hit, I had a good understanding of the nature of thoughts and the circumstances under which they gave rise to suffering. But put me in the sick bed all day and suddenly my thoughts seemed anything but impersonal. As for Ayya Khema’s statement that thoughts are arbitrary and not reliable, I now believed every one of them held the force of Absolute Truth:
“I’ll never feel joy again.”
“No doctor wants to treat me.”
“All my friends have abandoned me.”
“I’ve ruined Tony’s life.”
Thoughts and suffering were now marching hand in hand in my life.
As I often do when I’m overwhelmed by dukkha
,
I turned to the Buddha for help. One of the most famous lines from a small book called the
Dhammapada
came to mind: “With our thoughts we make the world.”
With my thoughts, I had made a world of suffering to live in. And the thoughts had a stranglehold on me because I believed they were true—that I
was
ruining Tony’s life, that I
wouldn’t
feel joy again. In confronting the suffering that my thoughts were causing, I was helped by an inspiring teacher named Byron Katie. Katie, as everyone calls her, encourages us to question the validity of what she refers to as our stressful thoughts. I highly recommend her books and her website. Using what she calls “The Work” or inquiry, she sets forth a five-step method for revealing the suffering that follows when we believe our thoughts. Along with the Buddha’s teachings, Byron Katie’s inquiry is the most powerful tool I’ve found to help with the challenges of being chronically ill.
When I became house-bound, it wasn’t long before I started to worry about the fate of my friendships. But instead of examining the possible reasons why friends might not be visiting, I kept thinking over and over, “My friends should not stop coming to see me.” Each time the thought arose, it was accompanied by hurt and anger. This one thought became an ever-present source of suffering in my life.
Inquiry Practice
Byron Katie shows us how to question the validity of thoughts that are a source of stress or suffering.
In the first step, we ask whether the thought is true, and in this case I answered, “Yes, it is true that my friends should not stop coming to see me.”
In the second step, we ask whether we can absolutely know that it is true. On this, I was not as certain: “Do I
absolutely
know it’s true? Hmm. Maybe this requires a bit more investigation . . .”
The third step in questioning the validity of a stressful thought is to notice how we react when we believe the thought. When I believed the thought, “My friends should not stop coming to see me,” I reacted with anger and I felt hurt, almost as if I were being wounded physically.
The fourth step is to reflect on who we’d be without the thought. I closed my eyes and imagined who I’d be . . . and my answer was: “I’d be living this day as it unfolds—seeing what it has to bring, instead of just being focused on who may or may not visit.” Without the stressful thought, “My friends should not stop coming to see me,” I felt liberated, as if a heavy burden had been lifted—the burden of constantly worrying about the state of my friendships.
Then comes the counter-intuitive
fifth step
, when Katie asks us to come up with a “turnaround.” A turnaround is a statement of the stressful thought in a way that’s opposite from its original expression. So I tried saying, “My friends
should
stop coming to see me.”
On first read, that sounds absurd, but when I turned the original thought around this way, I saw that there were genuine reasons why my friends might not be visiting. Many people are uncomfortable around others who are sick—they may be afraid they’ll get sick or perhaps seeing someone who is sick reminds them of their own mortality. They might not be visiting because they think it will be too hard on me. Maybe they feel bad about sharing all the enjoyable activities they’re involved in since I’m stuck at home. In addition, people get caught up in the busyness of their lives; they often barely have time to spend with their own families. Perhaps they’re having medical problems themselves; how would I know since I’m no longer in contact with them?
Working on the turnaround led to two other unexpected insights. First, while generating all these possible reasons why friends might not be visiting, it dawned on me for the first time that just because they weren’t visiting—or even calling me—didn’t mean they weren’t thinking kind thoughts about me and hoping that I’d get better. Over the years, hadn’t there been people I could have contacted when they were sick but didn’t? Absolutely.
Second, I realized that the reasons friends weren’t coming to see me had to do with what was going on in their minds, not mine. I can’t control the thoughts that arise in my
own
mind. How could I imagine I could control what my friends were thinking? No wonder when, in the fourth step, I reflected on who I’d be without the stressful thought, I felt as if a heavy burden had been lifted. As the Buddha said, with our thoughts we make our world. I had created a bitter and resentful world.
Working with Byron Katie’s inquiry showed me that I had spun so many emotionally packed tales about why friends weren’t visiting that I hadn’t stopped to examine what the true reasons might be. It wasn’t my friends who were the source of my suffering; it was my own unexamined thinking about them. That wound I was feeling turned out to be self-inflicted. Now it could begin to heal. I stopped blaming friends for not visiting and I no longer assumed they didn’t care about me.
I use Byron Katie’s inquiry all the time. I even used it when I was stuck-like-glue on a stressful thought about her! Tony was planning to attend a daylong session with her at Spirit Rock. I really wanted to go. I felt like I knew her personally from her books and from videos posted on her website, where I could watch her in one-on-one dialogues with people in which she guides them through the “four questions and a turnaround.”
So, as Katie would have suggested, I wrote down the thought that was causing me so much stress: “I really want to go to Spirit Rock on Saturday to see Katie.” Then, I subjected the thought to her five-step process. Not only was it true that I wanted to go, but, unlike my example with friends not visiting, this time I thought it was “absolutely true.” Katie says that starting with these two questions—Is the thought true? and Can we absolutely know it’s true?—forces us to commit one way or the other. Then we can watch how the mind acts to defend our response. “Don’t tell me I might not want to go to Spirit Rock. I absolutely do!”
Then I moved to the third question and asked how I reacted when I believed the thought “I really want to go to Spirit Rock on Saturday to see Katie.” I reacted with anger and resentment. I felt like a victim in an unfair world. But when I moved to the fourth question and asked who I’d be without the thought, I immediately saw that I’d be a person living in the present moment, which happened to be a beautifully sunbathed Tuesday—days away from the Saturday event.
Working through these four questions was helpful, but, as can happen, the stressful thought persisted until I got to the magical turnaround. I turned the thought around to “I don’t want to see Katie on Saturday.” Then, following Katie’s instructions, I looked for at least three genuine reasons why the turnaround might be true. I actually came up with five. First, it would take me a week, maybe several, to recover from the trip. Second, the event was going to be very crowded so I might not be able to find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. Third, I might catch a cold or the flu from someone who was there. Fourth, by seeing Katie in person I might not improve my inquiry skills any more than I would by continuing to watch her videos on my computer. Fifth, she could be a big disappointment! (I know from watching her in dialogue with others on video that Katie would have loved that last turnaround.)
After putting all this down on paper—as she suggests we do because of the power of the written word—I was fully content not to go on Saturday. I had let go of the stressful thought and it never returned, even as I saw Tony off to see her.
One day, I wrote down a thought that, understandably, was a great source of suffering:
“I hate being sick.”
It was true, and I felt it was
absolutely
true. But how did I react when I believed the thought? Bitter, frustrated, singled-out by the world. Who would I be without the thought? I’d be a woman, lying on a comfortable bed in a quiet room, enjoying the exquisite play of sunlight on the tail of the squirrel who was visible outside my window. Katie says she isn’t telling us to give up the stressful thought but to drop it just long enough to see who we’d be without it.
Then I turned the thought around:
“I love being sick.”
Could I possibly come up with three genuine reasons why this turnaround might be true? I thought not, but I let ink from my pen flow onto the page anyway. When I was finished, I’d come up with twelve reasons. Here’s what I wrote, unedited, and in the order I wrote it:
▶ I don’t answer to an alarm clock.
▶ I have the perfect excuse to avoid events and people I don’t want to be with.
▶ I have lots of time to be with Tony and Rusty, our dog.
▶ I’m getting to know Bridgett, my daughter-in-law, really well for the first time in over a dozen years.
▶ My life is pretty quiet and peaceful.
▶ I’m never stuck in traffic.
▶ There’s nothing I have to read or study.
▶ My “To Do” list is very short.
▶ Most of my day is unplanned, so in summer, I can lie down in the backyard before it gets too hot and in winter, wait until it warms up to do so.
▶ I’ve met some people I wouldn’t have otherwise known.
▶ Being home sick allowed Winnie, our previous dog, to live another year since, in that last year, she couldn’t be home alone.
I can’t say that since performing this inquiry, I haven’t again believed the thought “I hate being sick” and suffered as a consequence. I have dozens of times—this work is not necessarily about ridding oneself of stressful thoughts but rather about examing their validity. But the work I did that day on “I hate being sick” is right there, on paper, and re-reading it is always helpful.
Then came the day when I tackled this stressful thought:
“I am sick.”
I was surprised at the number of genuine reasons why the turnaround was true:
“I am not sick.”
My mind isn’t sick—I’m able to do this inquiry. My heart isn’t sick—I can express love and be of help to others. Not all of my body is sick—I can walk, I can type, I can see the birds, I can hear Beethoven. I came away from that exercise simply not feeling like a sick person. In fact, I realized that the more I believed the thought, “I am sick,” the sicker I felt.