About Byron Katie

Katie (as she is called), with three children and a career in the real estate business, faced the lowest point of her life in 1986 after many years of rage and depression. One morning she woke up with a completely new view of life. In Katie's words she "woke 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."

She realized that we suffer only when we believe a thought that argues with reality. After she had realized that she had spent years and years waiting for the circumstances of her life to become how she thought they should be - which, by the way, is utterly hopeless - she discovered that she could question her stressful thoughts and discover truth, reality, and the perfection of things as they are. She was and still is filled with an indescribable joy and love for everything life brings. That's right - everything.

The Four Questions of The Work were the result of ending her own suffering combined with invitations from others to share what she had discovered. Quickly realizing that sharing her own insights did not give others the same freedom she had found, the four questions came as a tool to help others free themselves from their own stressful beliefs about the world around them.

"The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want." - Byron Katie

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