Byron Kathleen Mitchell (b.1942,) better known as Byron Katie, is an American speaker and author who teaches a method of self-inquiry known as “The Work of Byron Katie” or simply as “The Work”. She is married to the writer and translator Stephen Mitchell.
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I love not rushing the process. Mind doesn’t shift until it does, and when it does shift, it’s right on time, not one second too late or too soon. People are like seeds waiting to sprout. We can’t be pushed ahead of our own understanding.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Mind, People, Love, Right, Time
You can’t drop concepts. You can only shine a little flashlight on them as you do inquiry, an you see that what you thought was true wasn’t. And when the truth is seen, there’s nothing you can do to make the lie true for you again.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Thought, Light, Truth
Everything happens for me, not to me.
—Byron Katie
I saw that we’re all doing the best we can. This is how a lifetime of humility begins.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Responsibility, Time, Doing, Best, Humility, Life
If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Suffering, Decide, Cause, Thought
A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Suffering, Cause, Belief, Attachment, Thoughts, Believe, Thought
One day I noticed that I wasn’t breathing—I was being breathed.
—Byron Katie
I came to see that there was nothing to forgive, that I was the one who caused my own problems.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Problems, Give, Cause
Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.
—Byron Katie
Topics: World, People, Mind, Give, Joy, Think, Work, Time, Try, Suffering, Change, Cause, War, Sin, Yin, Age, Beginning, Happy
There is only one problem, ever: your uninvestigated story in the moment.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Problems
All suffering originates from the mind, not the world.
—Byron Katie
I’ll tell you that for me, one when someone used to say something that was true, one way I knew it was true was that I immediately felt defensive. I blocked it off, and I went to war with them in my mind and suffered all that goes with it. And they were only saying what was true.
—Byron Katie
Topics: New, War, Yin, Mind
To think that I know what’s best for anyone else is to be out of my business. Even in the name of love, it is pure arrogance, and the result is tension, anxiety, and fear. Do I know what’s right for me? That is my only business. Let me work with that before I try to solve problems for you.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Love, Problems, Work, Business, Best, Now, Sin, Anxiety, Think, Right, Fear, Try
You are the effect of your story, that’s all.
—Byron Katie
That’s where the fear comes from—from your uninvestigated thoughts.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Fear
Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Good, Thinking, Live, Think
When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Age, Work, Thought, Reflection, World, People, Think, Thinking, Thoughts
As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Cause, Suffering, Think
You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Reason, Believe
If I think that someone else is causing my problem, I’m insane.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Sin, Problems, Think
God, as I use the word, is another name for what is. I always know God’s intention: It’s exactly what is in every moment.
—Byron Katie
Topics: God, Now, Act
You might believe that it’s only for their own good, but how does it feel when you try to manipulate the people you love? Are you teaching them that your love is conditional? Maybe through inquiry we can find another way.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Try, Feel, Love, Good, Teach, Believe, People
Without our stories, we are not only able to act clearly and fearlessly, we are also a friend, a listener. We are people living happy lives. We are appreciation and gratitude that have become as natural as breath itself. Happiness is the natural state for someone who knows that there’s nothing to know and that we already have everything we need, right here now.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Become, Appreciation, People, Happy, Fear, Friend, Right, Live, Gratitude, Happiness, Act, Now
After you’ve been doing inquiry for a while, if you have the thought “She doesn’t love me,” you just get the immediate turnaround with a smile: “Oh, I’m not loving myself in this moment”.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Doing, Thought, Smile, Love
No one has ever been able to control his thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don’t let go of my thoughts?—I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Thoughts, People, Thinking, Thought, Letting Go, Think, Control
Without an uninvestigated story, there’s only the perfection of life appearing as itself. You can always go inside and find the beauty that’s revealed after the pain and fear are understood.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Perfect, Perfection, Fear, Life, Beauty, Pain
Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Mind, Act, Thought, Light
The Work is the end of the world as we understand it to be, sweetheart. And it’s the opening to reality, as it really is, in all its beauty.
—Byron Katie
Topics: World, Beauty, Work, Heart
We don’t attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.
—Byron Katie
Topics: People, Believe
Reality doesn’t wait for your opinion, vote, or permission, sweetheart. It just keeps being what it is and doing what it does.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Doing, Heart, Opinion
The Work is merely four questions; it’s not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It’s nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you’ve got ad enhance it. Any religion you have—they’ll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they’ll burn up anything that isn’t true for you. They’ll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Questions, Will, Joy, Religion, Work
No one has ever been angry at another human being – we’re only angry at our story of them.
—Byron Katie
Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back to you.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Age, Think, Thinking
Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean. We don’t even realize that they’re just theories.
—Byron Katie
In reality, there is no such thing as a “should” or a “shouldn’t”. These are only thoughts that we impose onto reality. The mind is like a carpenter’s level. When the bubble is off to one side—“It shouldn’t be raining”—we can know that the mind is caught in its thinking. When the bubble is right in the middle—“It’s raining”—we can know that the surface level and the mind is accepting reality as it is. Without the “should” and “shouldn’t,” we can see reality as it is, and this leaves us free to act efficiently, clearly, and sanely. Asking “What’s the reality of it?” can help bring the mind out of its story, back into the real world.
—Byron Katie
Topics: World, Think, Mind, Now, Thoughts, Thought, Act, Thinking, Right
When a thought appears such as “Do the dishes” and you don’t do them, notice how an internal war breaks out… The stress and weariness you feel are really mental combat fatigue.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Stress, Thought, War, Feel
When you realize that suffering and discomfort are the call to inquiry, you may actually begin to look forward to uncomfortable feelings. You may even experience them as friends coming to show you what you have not yet investigated thoroughly enough.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Act, Suffering, Friend, War, Friends, Feel, Experience, Feelings
I came to see that the world is always as it should be, whether I opposed it or not. And I came to embrace reality with all my heart. I love the world, without any conditions.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Heart, World, Love
The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Perception, World
We’ve been looking outside us for our own peace. We’ve been looking in the wrong direction.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Peace
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