Byron Katie (b.1942,) fully Byron Kathleen Mitchell, is an American spiritual teacher and self-help author. She teaches a method of self-inquiry known as “The Work of Byron Katie” or simply as “The Work.”
Born in Breckenridge, Texas, Katie was married at age 19, had three children, and started a career in real estate. Suffering from severe depression in her thirties and forties, she realized that what had been causing her depression was not the world around her. Still, the beliefs she had about the world around her.
Realizing that true happiness could be found by reexamining how people force the world to meet their expectations, Katie established “The Work,” a self-help program that guides people to a mindset for making peace with their reality.
Katie’s works include Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002, with Stephen Mitchell) and I Need Your Love: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead (2005, with Michael Katz,) and Peace in the Present Moment (2010, with Eckhart Tolle.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Byron Katie
Every story is a variation on a single theme: This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t be having this experience. God is unjust. Life isn’t fair.
—Byron Katie
Topics: God, Experience, Life, Sin
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, Truth, Light
When we try to be safe, we live our lives being very, very careful; and we wind up having no lives.
—Byron Katie
When you realize that every stressful moment you experience is a gift that points you to your own freedom, life becomes very kind.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Freedom, Experience, Stress, Kind, Become, Gift, Life
An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Suffering
I’m a lover of reality, not because I’m a spiritual woman, but because it hurts when I argue with what is. And I notice that I lose, 100 percent of the time.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Cause, Spirit, Love, Time, Spiritual
What I call “doing the dishes” is the practice of loving the task in front of you. Your inner voice guides you all day long to do simple things such as brush your teeth, drive to work, call your friend, or do the dishes. Even though it’s just another story, it’s a very short story, and when you follow the direction of the voice, the story ends. We are really alive when we live as simply as that—open, waiting, trusting, and loving to do what appears in front of us now…What we need to do unfolds before us, always—doing the dishes, paying the bills, picking up the children’s socks, brushing our teeth. We never receive more than we can handle, and there is always just one thing to do. Whether you have ten dollars or ten million dollars, life never gets more difficult than that.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Life, Work, Aging, Live, Follow, Practice, Doing, Trust, Act, Now, Yin, Friend, Children
When you run in fear, it’s square into the wall.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Fear
The nightmare always becomes laughter, once it’s understood.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Laughter, Become
That’s what every uncomfortable feeling is for—that’s what pain is for, what money is for, what everything in the world is for: your self-realization.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Feel, Money, Pain, World
Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back to you.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Age, Think, Thinking
We’re all looking for love, in our confusion, until we find our way back to the realization that love is what we already are.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Love
One day I noticed that I wasn’t breathing—I was being breathed.
—Byron Katie
I saw that we’re all doing the best we can. This is how a lifetime of humility begins.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Life, Responsibility, Time, Doing, Best, Humility
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: Beauty, World, Work, Heart
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, Work, Try, Right, Think, Problems, Business, Fear, Anxiety, Best, Now, Sin
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: Love, Heart, World
Gratitude is what we are without a story.
—Byron Katie
Do you want to be right more than you want to know the truth? It’s the truth that set me free. Acceptance, peace, and less attachment to a world of suffering are all effects of doing The Work. They’re not the goals. Do The Work for the love of freedom, for the love of truth.
—Byron Katie
Topics: World, Suffering, Truth, Freedom, Now, Goals, Goal, Right, Work, Doing, Peace, Attachment, Love
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: Joy, Questions, Religion, Will, Work
There is no mistake in nature.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Nature, Mistake
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: Act, Mind, Right, World, Now, Think, Thought, Thinking, Thoughts
Do you know anyone who hasn’t changed his mind? This door was a tree, then it will be firewood for someone, then it will return to air and earth. We’re all like that, constantly changing. It’s simply honest to report that you’ve changed your mind when you have. When you’re afraid of what people will think if you speak honestly, that’s where you become confused.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Change, Earth, Will, Mind, Become, Think, Now, People
If I had a prayer, it would be this: “God, spare me from the desire for love, approval, or appreciation. Amen”.
—Byron Katie
Topics: God, Love, Desire, Prayer, Appreciation
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, Cause, Decide, Thought
Once the mind is met with understanding, it can always find its way home.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Mind
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: People, Time, Right, Love, Mind
A teacher of fear can’t bring peace on earth. We have been trying to do it that way for thousands of years. The person who turns inner violence around, the person who finds peace inside and lives it, is the one who teaches what true peace is. We are waiting for just one teacher. You’re the one.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Live, Fear, Try, Peace, Teach, Earth, Yin
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: Think, Thinking, Thoughts, Control, People, Thought, Letting Go
If I think that someone else is causing my problem, I’m insane.
—Byron Katie
Topics: Think, Problems, Sin
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