Byron Katie looks like an ordinary woman, and in many ways she is. In her mid-60s, she wears her silver hair in elfin bangs and radiates down-to-earth warmth. She'll talk about anything and everything over a cup of tea, and because she's so intent on absolute integrity in sharing her knowledge, she sometimes pauses in thought, brow furrowed, until she brightens with a firm answer that can clarify years of confusion in one bold statement.


Katie, as everyone calls her, became severely depressed in her mid-thirties. “To the outside world, there was absolutely no reason why I should have been depressed,” she reflects. “I lived in a gorgeous home, and I had three lovely, healthy children. Yet I was obsessed with thoughts such as ‘Nobody loves me,' ‘I'm not good enough,' ‘My children don't understand me,' ‘I don't have enough money.'”


Over the next ten years, her life spiraled out of control. “At my lowest point,” she remembers, “I rarely left my bedroom. I slept on the floor because I didn't feel worthy of sleeping in my bed. I slept with a loaded gun, awaiting the time when I could summon the courage necessary to take my own life.”


Katie checked herself into an eating disorders clinic because it was the only clinic she could find in her area that accepted her insurance. While there, on a February morning in 1986, she experienced what she describes as “waking up to reality.” “In that instant,” Katie says, “I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but when I didn't believe my thoughts, 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.”


She adds, “If there was anything I knew, it was that God is good, that God is everything, and that the universe is friendly.” For Katie, reality and God are one and the same.


Many people have fleeting glimpses of reality's underlying unity and joy, but in Katie's case it was no mere glimpse. It was a profound, permanent change, so overwhelming that she couldn't identify with the person she had been before. Her children felt she had become an entirely new person. “Before the change,” her son Ross said, “I couldn't look into my mother's eyes; after the change, I couldn't stop looking.”


Back in her hometown of Barstow, California, word began to spread about someone who helped people with seemingly intractable problems by asking basic questions about the thoughts they tend to live by.  Some people referred to her as “the lit lady” because of the glow of compassion and understanding that emanated from her. Neighbors and strangers began calling Katie on the phone and knocking on her door for help. She welcomed them all. As word spread, groups began inviting her to talk to them, first in California, then throughout the world.


Though Katie's impact has grown over the years, changing hundreds of thousands of lives, her method is as direct and effective as ever. She calls it “The Work.” The Work teaches people to identify and question stressful thoughts. By asking these four simple questions, then turning the original stressful belief around to its opposite, you can trace unhappiness to its source and, in so doing, eliminate it.

1. Is the belief true? (for example, “No one understands me.”)
2. Can you absolutely know that it's true?
3. How do you react when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

The individual is then asked to look at the belief in a completely opposite way (from “No one understands me” to something like “I don't understand myself”) and ask the questions again. The results have been life-changing for many people who go through the process.


“My job is to help people question the stressful thoughts that cause all the suffering in the world,” Katie says. “When we can see the difference between what is real and what isn't, we can love what is with all our heart, and we're always happy.”


Katie has brought The Work to hundreds of thousands of people across the world—in hospitals, prisons, business settings, universities, churches, free public events, intensive weekends and the nine-day School for the Work. She has written three bestselling books, Loving What Is, I Need Your Love—Is That True?, and A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are, two of them cowritten  with her husband, the eminent translator and author Stephen Mitchell. The essence of The Work is in these books and is available in free downloads at her Web site, www.thework.com.   


“For me, God is reality,” Katie says, “because it rules. The only hell that can ever exist is what we think about reality. Heaven is wherever you are, if your mind is clear.”


Editor's Note: In conjunction with Unity's SpiritPath Retreats, Byron Katie will present a workshop titled “Living in Joy: Awaken to a Joy-Filled Life,” based on her most recent book, A Thousand Names for Joy. She will show how The Work can eliminate stress, anxiety, anger and fear. “Through The Work,” Katie says, “people come to realize that they are already home. They learn to love what is, exactly the way it is.” Katie's workshop will be held April 24–26, at Unity Village, Missouri. The cost is $299 plus meals and lodging. For more information, call 816-251-3540 or go to http://www.unityretreats.org. To make reservations, call 866-348-6489. For more information about Byron Katie and The Work, visit http://www.thework.com.

This article is from the March/April 2008 issue of Unity Magazine. Subscribe now!