Whole Life Times: From Barstow Housewife to Self-Help Guru

February 2006

From Barstow Housewife to Self-Help Guru

“The Work” of Byron Katie

by Lea Lion

I turn into the hotel parking lot and wonder if I am in the right place. There are no signs of anything out-of-the-ordinary taking place at this standard-issue airport hotel—that is, until I spot the tote bag. The canvas tote, casually slung over a woman’s shoulder, is embroidered with a heart and the words, “The Work of Byron Katie.”

I park my car and follow the tote-carrying woman into a large conference room filled with hundreds of chairs. Soft, new-age music is being pumped into the room and there are flowers everywhere. I navigate an obstacle-course of tables covered with merchandise: The now-familiar tote, books, backpacks, CDs, candles, hats, mugs—even fleece jackets with the telltale heart logo neatly sewn on the front. A sign designates this area as “The Bookstore,” and it is filled with people—lots of people—smiling beatifically and offering assistance.

“Have you read Katie’s new book?” a middle-aged woman dressed in a dark-colored shawl asks. She holds up a book titled I Need Your Love—Is That True? with a photograph of another smiling, silver-haired woman on the cover. The book is authored by Byron Katie—the woman we are all here to see.

Katie, as everyone calls her, is a grandmotherly 63-year-old woman with blue-eyes (often described as “twinkling”), a sweet voice and an easy laugh. She’s become known as a self-help guru, and travels the world teaching her signature method of problem-resolution, known as “The Work.” The Work is a set of four questions and what Katie calls “a turnaround” that she claims can be universally applied to any situation “and when used correctly can end emotional suffering.”

“People all over the world are using it and teaching it and passing it on—in hospitals and prisons, therapeutic and medical situations and barbershops,” Katie says. “It’s traveling at a very fast rate because it is so powerful. A lot of books, a lot of people tell us how to live and they show us what it is to live a happy life, but how do we do that? The Work is how. It is a key.”

Byron Katie started her adult life doing a very different kind of work. She grew up in the small town of Barstow in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, where she lived “a typical average life.” She married young and had three children, because that is what she was raised to do. She divorced, married again and somewhere along the way spiraled into severe depression. And then she became paranoid and slept with a gun under her pillow. “I became agoraphobic, paranoid, very, very confused,” Katie recalls. “My self-esteem became so low and my self-hatred so great that I began to sleep on the floor because I believed that I didn’t deserve a bed.” Katie turned to drugs, alcohol and food—lots and lots of food.

At more than 200 pounds, a grossly overweight Katie checked herself into a residential center for women with eating disorders because that was the only treatment her insurance would cover. And it was in this unlikely place that she had her awakening—or what her followers might describe as spontaneous enlightenment.
In the halfway house, Katie continued to sleep on the floor. In fact, that is where she was when everything changed. Less than two weeks into her stay, Katie awoke one morning to the sensation of a cockroach crawling over her foot and had what she calls “a moment of clarity.”

“I saw that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered; but when I didn’t believe my thoughts, I didn’t suffer,” she says.

And in that moment, as the story goes, the four questions were born.

Back in the hotel conference room, everyone has taken a seat. I look out over the sea of mostly female, mostly Caucasian ex-hippies to the stage set with two armchairs facing each other. Katie sits calmly in one of the chairs. She is dressed in a loose-fitting, robe-like outfit with a patterned shawl thrown over her shoulder. Her voice is steady and her sage-like presence silences the room. She expertly holds a cordless microphone in one hand. The stage is hers.

Everyone is the audience has filled out the provocatively named “Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet” that was passed out and now Katie asks for volunteers to share their writing. Lots of hands go up, but Katie picks a man sitting near the front of the room. He stands and with some hesitation reads from his worksheet.
“I am angry at my mother because she uses her mental illness to manipulate me and my family.”

The room is silent in anticipation of what Katie will say, but really it should come as no surprise. It is what she always says: “Sweetheart, is that true?”

Katie invites the man onto the stage (or into “her parlor” in Katie-speak) and runs through the other tough-love questions with him: Can you absolutely know that it’s true? How do you react when you think that thought? Who would you be without that thought?

Eventually, Katie asks for the turnaround. This comes after you question the original statement enough times to poke a few holes into the premise. To find the turnaround, you flip your statement around to consider the opposite of what you believe to be true.

Jim (the man onstage) is in tears. He and Katie have been role-playing—Jim as Mom and Katie as Jim—and now it is time to wrap things up.

“I look forward to (Mom) thinking I’m the bad guy in her life,” Jim says, and breathes a sigh of relief as if a great weight has been lifted from his shoulders.

Everyone claps as Jim takes his seat. It seems to be the general consensus that we have just witnessed a breakthrough.

Katie excuses the crowd for a 15-minute break and I follow another tote-bag clad woman outside. She turns out to be Mary Laffey, a 55-year-old seamstress and Bryon Katie enthusiast from Los Angeles. Laffey describes her own experience with Katie in the parlor.

“I did the Work with Katie once,” she said. “I had huge issues with men controlling me. I was up there for about two and a half hours…I was scared to death. She kept controlling it. I kept wanting to move on and was like ‘[expletive deleted] she is doing it to me right now.’”

But Laffey, like most Katie-supporters, does not like to question the questioner. “I imagine that Katie was doing what she sensed she should do. She is not a manipulative person.”

And as Laffey says this, I resist the urge to ask her Katie’s first question: Is that true?

Katie’s devotees claim that the only way to ‘get’ the Work is to try it. Maggie Carter, a Fort Collins-based personal life coach, who uses Katie’s techniques in her work summed it up: “Nobody can tell you about it, it’s like putting your hand on a hot fire. You have to feel it for yourself.”

Lea Lion is a Los Angeles-based journalist and co-creator of spoken-word poetry forum Drumwordspokenbeat.

For info about Byron Katie’s workshop on relationships starting 2/3, go to thework.com.

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