Reflection

I was looking at the calendar a few days ago and realised that I had been certified to share this work with people for over 12 years now. A whole decade. And with the establishment of Chinese speaking association for The Work of Byron Katie, there are more online workshops and live workshops happening.

People ask me how I could do this for so many years. I tell them the reason how I could continue to do what I do is because I only share, I never teach. I really have nothing to teach. The Work is available and is free on Katie’s website. Everyone can learn to do it on her/his own.

If it is free and available, why do I have to attend a workshop? When you come to a workshop on The Work, you come to understand what is between the space of these 4 questions, you come to meet your own mind, you learn where to find the answers, you get to ask questions when you are stuck on turnarounds, you get answers for your “I-know” mind. And it is a lot of fun blowing up the I know mind. 😉 At first it seems almost impossible and you feel really resisted, but after a few times, you love seeing your mind blown opened. And you wonder how you have lived and settled in this limited “I know” mind.

Welcome to The Work. 😉

Gift of A Body


Starting to turn around from a diarrhea that lasted for 5 days. To me, there was a lot of gifts in this period of time. It was a time for me to slow down, to honor this kind and loving body that I am residing in.

I remembered how I used to disengage from this body with the strict rigid beliefs that the body is impermanent, that I shouldn’t pay attention to it, should evolve beyond the body. In that, I never really checked in with my body at all. I still remembered those days when I had menstruation cramps, I kept asking why I was in a woman’s body instead of a man’s.

It is really very painful to live from a place where we deny what is in front of us, believing that we should be having the opposite of what we have now. We totally cut off from the possibilities of the best experience from what is happening to us.
“Things happen for us, not to us”. Are you brave enough to let go of the victim role and step forward to look inside ourselves and explore how it could be true that what we are experiencing now is best for us?

Why is it best for me to have the diarrhea?
Why is it best for me to be in a woman’s body?

And the best part is, whatever answers I may find within myself and shared with you could only be a reference for you. The gift is you going in to find your own answers. Why is it good for me….

And with that mindset, we embark on a journey of life filled with gratitude and humility.

Why Question our Thinking?

free kid
Someone asked me the other day why question our thinking? Why don’t they learn some techniques to stay centered and calm instead?

To be honest, I think learning techniques to stay centred and calm is wonderful. We can learn meditation, breathing techniques, learning to have body awareness. They are all great ways to have the body-mind connection that people talk about. And I am all for them!

Questioning our thinking is a totally different level of ball game. We are looking at things at the causal level. There is this sequence that people who does The Work recognise —
“The Order of Creation”: Think -> Feel -> Act -> Have

Everything is born from a thought, a belief. So, we identify the emotions that signal us that something is off with the belief that we are attached to and with this indication from the emotions felt, we identify and question the belief that is limiting us. Through inquiry into this belief, we come to understand at an experiential level the truth and falseness of the thought and naturally be free from it. And calmness and centerness is experienced effortlessly.

Do we have to teach babies to breathe naturally, to be calm and centered? That is its’ natural state. Only adults have to learn this and to master how to do it right and sticking to doing the right thing disconnects us from our feelings sometimes. We feel angry with a person and we learn techniques to deal with the person, to handle our anger, but we have not looked at the root of the problem, why we are angry with him/her in the first place. Once we come to undo the cause of the anger, there is less effort needed to learn to handle our anger.

“Free the mind, the rest will follow” i love the title of En Vogue’s song.

Does The Truth Really Set You Free? Pt. 1

A friend talked about not wanting to know the truth, how the truth can do harm than good. As he said that, my mind couldn’t grasp what he meant. I said, “I thought the truth is love and it is the misunderstanding that cause harm”. He frowned as I said that.

As I looked back in my experience, I thought about how is it possible that the truth can do harm than good. I found a really good example.

A married man has an affair and to him, if the wife knows about the truth of him having an affair, she will be devastated and this is how the truth of what he is doing hurts her. It does seems true that truth hurts and harms, if we stay at this level of the truth.

If we take it another level of truth “it is never about what a person does that hurts you, it is what you think he/she is doing that hurts.” So, in the same scenario, a married man has an affair, the wife is hurt by what he does because she attaches many stories to his action.

“He lied”
“He promised me that he will love me forever”
“I have sacrificed so much for him”
“He is ungrateful”
“I am not worthy of love”

And to our minds, the above are all legitimate reasons to stay justified with our hurts. Until we take each statement to inquiry, we will remain hurt with our justification in our minds.

Does the truth really set you free?

In my experience, not the truth that the world gives you but the truth that you find at the end of your inquiry into what you think hurts you.

Overflowing and Half Cup

cupThere was a poem that was shared by a friend that I took it to my heart for many years.

In the poem, the poet referred us human as cups. It talked about how important it was to fill up our cups, to be an overflowing cup instead of a half cup.

“An overflowing cup need not do anything, it is full of abundance and it can’t help but to share freely the water overflowing its rim.

A half cup has to tilt over to share its water, and often it tumbles over and break.”

It just came to me today that I have been working on giving myself what I want to give to others. What I realized long ago was, I wasn’t able to give honestly, I gave with the motive of having you like me, thank me, so that I can feel good about myself.

Since doing The Work, I give myself what I want to give others. Totally selfish! And after doing that for many years, i think my cup is starting to be full and coming to overflowing.

I now feel absolutely ecstatic when I give or help someone. I no longer have have to wait for the response or return. I feel great when it was never found out. It is so effortless, it feels like I am doing it for me, I so love myself. That’s how I could describe it.

And I love that it is always for me. I am the projector.

Inquiry on Being Ignored

ignoreA dear friend told me that she is aware of a deep fear of being ignored. She had a conversation with her boyfriend and towards the end of the conversation she noticed that she was ignored AGAIN.

“What can I do? I just couldn’t stand being ignored. It’s just too painful!” she said.

As we look deeper, we found out that throughout the 7-minute phone conversation, they were both laughing and were having great exchange. And it didn’t come to her to feel being ignored until the minute when he had to hang up the phone.

So, what happen to the 6 minutes when you were not ignored, when you were having a good time with him? Isn’t it strange that you were waiting to indict him, to live out your belief that “you will always be ignored”.

Maybe we can see what is truer?

“He did not ignore me”
Yes, he didn’t ignore me. He was giving me his full attention for the 6 minutes.

“I ignore him”
When he said he wanted to hang up, I was angry with him and ignored him totally.

“I ignore me”
I wasn’t taking good care of myself. I wanted him to do that for me.

Life can be a lot simpler when we take time to inquire the truth.

“I shouldn’t think about him”

A dear friend was confused and angry with herself.  She told me that she was afraid of the truth, she didn’t want to see it.  When asked what is her truth that she was so afraid to see, she shared about her inquiry of “my daughter shouldn’t think about him (her father)”.  She felt frustrated when she discovered the turnaround, ” I shouldn’t think about him.”  She saw that she still thought about him sometimes and she couldn’t control that part of her.  “How could I still think about him when we are divorced and he already has someone else in his life.”  reasoned the mind.

As I saw this, it reminds me of a part of me that wants to control and get it right.  “Can you control who you think about?  Can you control who you are attracted to?”  I asked.  To think that we can do that is quite a painful place to be.

And with The Work, arriving at a turnaround like this, “I shouldn’t think about him” puts me in a state of humility, it allows me to see that I don’t have control, that many things in life is a happening.  And when we have the courage to go deeper, we find that it is not thinking about him that frustrates us.  It’s what we are putting onto the thought. For example:

If I still think about him, that means:
I am not over him.
I am weak.
I am still in love with him. (which I am not supposed to)

As we spend time inquiring this list above, we may enjoy the image of him appearing in our mind when the thought, “I shouldn’t think about him” comes.  You may come to find equal truth in the opposite of what your list says — If I still think about him, I am over him, I am strong and I am not in love with him.

Yes, you can wake yourself up from the nightmare.  😉

Working with Limiting Beliefs Pt 3

Let’s say you are aware that you have a belief about money, “I need to work hard for money“.  In fact, there is nothing wrong with this belief if it is not stressful for you.  It’s working when we know we want money and we work hard to get it.  We only investigate and inquire this thought/belief if it is stressful.

So, let’s inquire into this thought using The Work:

I need to work hard for money
Is it true?
Yes, it feels true.

Can you absolutely know that this is true?
No

How do you react when you think the thought?
When I am not working hard, I blame myself.  I feel pressured.  I feel lousy, I think about people who has money and I get upset with them for not sharing their money with me.

Who would you be without the thought?
I would go with what feels right for me.  I won’t push myself so hard. I would be more open to be around my friends who have money.

Turn the thought around.  I need to work hard for money.
I don’t need to work hard for money.

Is this thought true or truer?  Three genuine examples in your life?
My parents paid for my accommodation and food when I was young.
What I am doing is not very hard to do. I actually am having fun.
I had good returns from investment.

So now, the mind comes to realize for itself that there have times in my life when I didn’t work hard for money and still had money.  It also comes to witness the suffering that it brings upon itself when it believes the thought.  Either way, the amount of money I have hasn’t changed.

We can go on telling ourselves that I don’t need to work hard for money over and over again.  But, without realizing this truth inside ourselves, we will still go on living life with the stress and fear of not working hard enough for money.

We have to live out what we believe, not much choice in that.  This is the power of thoughts!

Working with Limiting Beliefs Pt 2

So,the next question you may ask is, “how do we get rid of the limiting beliefs?”  Before we do that, let’s understand how our mind work.
“As man thinketh, so is he”.  Yes, beliefs are the beginning of all creation; manifestation in all forms start from a thought, that when left unquestioned, will form a belief and over time, becomes our religion, and who we are.  And these beliefs are programs that have been installed in us at our early days.

So as an adult, we really don’t have a choice, we just live out beliefs that have been filed away in our mind and whenever the files of belief are triggered in life, we will act accordingly to these underlying beliefs.  Our minds are like tape player or mp3 player, it only has rewind, fast forward and play functions.

In my experience, limiting beliefs were adopted in the past, that used to work for us for whatever reasons, and may not be working for us now.  So, they are really not our enemies, not something that we have to get rid of!  What we can do is to take time to understand it, then it will let go of us.  And using The Work of Byron Katie (4 questions and turnarounds)  to investigate the validity of this belief has helped me to undo many beliefs that are not serving me in my life now.

So, here are the 4 questions from The Work:

1. Is this thought/belief true?
2. Can I really/absolutely know that this thought/belief is true?
3. How do I react when I believe this thought?
3a.When do I first believe this thought/belief? (sub question)
3b.What do I get for holding on to this belief? (sub question)
4. Who would I be without this thought?

Working with Limiting Beliefs Pt 1


Every now and then when I attend a talk, a class or a workshop, I would always hear speakers talk about the conscious and subconscious mind, about how the limiting beliefs in the subconscious mind would take over our conscious mind.

And during this past weekend, I attended a workshop on internet where the trainer talked about replacing the negative beliefs with the positive ones.  He had us close our eyes and ran a positive affirmation meditation with us.  And the participants were left to think that if we believe in these positive beliefs hard enough, our beliefs would be replaced.

But, seriously, does that really work?  If you ask me, my answer is, “yes, it may”, during good times in our lives, when things are going the way we want, affirmation always works.  But, what happens when things are not going our way, when we lose our job, our loved ones, something of great value to us.

It’s during these time that we get to find out what our beliefs really are and how much we really believe what we have been affirming all along.