Byron Katie
Byron Katie
Byron Kathleen Mitchell, 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. She is the founder of Byron Katie International, an organization that includes The School for the Work and Turnaround House in Ojai, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth6 December 1942
CountryUnited States of America
Suffering over things that have happened to us is nothing more than an argument with the past.
Fear is always the result of an unquestioned past imagined as a future.
Since the past is unreal and the future is unreal, all your thoughts are about nothing.
The world you live in is 100 percent your own responsibility. If you don't like your world, it doesn't work to say, "Well, it's my mother's fault. She taught me how to think."
If people are living their lives for security and comfort and pleasure, then mind's every waking moment will be plotting those things. That's how it stays identified - as a body, as a you.
Freedom is our birthright.
The world will be at war as long as the mind is at war with itself.
I believe in the power of every human being to end suffering.
Actually, I can't take credit for any of my decisions. I noticed one day that all my decisions were making themselves, and always at the right time. I haven't had to make one decision since then. They are always made for me, and they come from the wisdom that is in us all. I trust that wisdom completely. That trust itself was a decision made for me as inquiry cleared my mind. No decision, no fear.
There is no thought or situation that you can't put up against inquiry. Every thought, every person, every apparent problem is here for the sake of your freedom.
I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn't even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life.
Once the mind is met with understanding, it can always find its way home.
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.
I love what I think, and I'm never tempted to believe it.