I ran an online class about getting what we want using The Work.
I created a playground for all of us to set goals for the new year. We look at things that we wanted to achieve, to do, to complete but have postponed, not putting as our priority, things that we are not willing to face it, kept procrastinating on.
I noticed that some of us are so used to be driven by stress, by things that we need to do out of survival and when we have worked and undo the stress, we don’t move forward. It’s like there is no reason to move forward, and people became stagnant, and they wondered what happen to them.
But, if we can simply work on the mental blocks, won’t we be more open to trying new things, freer to explore, play and experience….
And if we set an intention for our goals, and we identify the inner experience we would like to have when we have achieve our goals, then we are playing an inner game. And it becomes a lot more fun and best of all, you can never fail in this little game of life.
Got to share The Work with a group of trainers and we got into a discussion about what The Work entailed.
What struck my mind was when someone mentioned that, when I believe the thought that he hurts me and I do not allow it to happen, then it is not true for me. When I heard this, I had to step back and really imagine what it is like in my experience to hold this thought and live this way.
The thought that one hurts another, can be physical or emotional. For example, if you scream at me and I label that as hurting me, if I do not allow it to happen, I can ask you to stop screaming, but what many people do is to cut off the feeling where we feel hurt by the action and bandage it or disown that part of us. And I come to see how people feel numbed after a while when they have cut off too many parts of them that were hurt and did not move through the painful emotions.
They continue on functioning in life until one day they couldn’t contain all these disowned parts of them and then crashed.
I love how we all get to take our own story and go inside and find what is true for us. To give an answer to an experiential trip is such a disservice to one self.
A dear friend asked the other day how she can understand Katie’s words of wisdom. To me, those words are for the heart, not the mind. When we let the I-Know-Mind try and understand those words, we become more confused.
For example, Katie always says, “forgivenness is seeing what you think happened actually did not.” Just looking at these words, I don’t see how one can understand what it really means. These words are the outcome of one who experiences an inquiry and seeing for itself that whatever it thought happened was actually a misunderstanding, it didn’t happen, except in our minds.
Let’s explore an inquiry here. “She criticized me”, my proof is she said “why are you not doing it” and she gave me the look. Isn’t this a common encounter for us as human. 🙂
Is it true when she said “why are you not doing it”, she is criticizing me?
Can I absolutely know it is true that when she said that, she is criticizing me?
How do I react when I think the thought she is criticizing me?
Answer: I am upset with her, I cut her off, I don’t listen to what she has to say after that, I ignore her.
Who would I be without this thought she is criticizing me? How would I react taking in her words within the thought she is criticizing me?
Answer: I would simply answer her simple question why I am not doing it.
So, by mentally going into the situation and answer the 4 simple questions, I get to experience for myself that when I believe the thought I was upset with her, and when I don’t have the thought, I simple answer her question without stress. So, in other words, I forgive her for something she didn’t do — that is to criticizing me.
I experience for myself that when I have the thought she criticizes me, I am angry with her, I take her words personally, I think she is criticizing me when she could be really wanting to know the reason why I don’t do it.
Could it be that it is just my own interpretation. Could it be that everything I see on the outside is an interpretation of my own beliefs and thoughts?
How would I live my life from this place? Isn’t life starts to get very exciting? Take a moment and contemplate that 🙂
I want to talk about ultimate destination today. I used to really want to get done with this life, to figure life out, to reach an ultimate final destination, and to me that was played out as a desire to be enlightened in this lifetime. And I was a very dedicated Mahayana Buddhist practitioner.
I tried to do everything I learned to be the right thing to do, the right way to be and the more I wanted it, the more I tried, the worst I became; I was less happy than I was before, I found myself talked down to myself, my self-judgement grew stronger. And I found myself falling into a pithole that I didn’t know how to get out.
I am sure you want to know how I got out from that pithole. Basically I have to go against what I believed to be true. I have to put myself before all the beliefs I held so dear. I questioned them one by one. I realized that any good belief is not worth me holding so dear if it was really true. I don’t have to be afraid of losing it, I question them and I am free from it.
So, do I still believe all these good beliefs and teaching? Of course I do. They are equal as all other beliefs I have, not higher or lower. I realized for myself that when I hold them as ultimate or best belief, the “I” would want me to live it, and unconsciously, I would measure myself or people around me to that standard and that is the big cause of stress in my life.
And the funny thing about an ultimate destination is it is imagined. To know it in the mind and in the heart is totally two different experience. One is buying in to another person’s experience and the other is through your very own direct experience. And once you know it for yourself that there is no where to go except in this moment, many dreams start to shatter away. It is a raw naked experience. Not fun to be in but a really sweet place to be. Because it is a place where you are moving closer to your heart, your dearest self.
Finally got a dear friend to fix the wordpress error for me and I could write again.
I want to talk about our divinity as human. Many years ago, I was told by someone that the word “Namaste” means the divine in me salutes to the divine in you. When I heard that explanation, it was like a nectar to my soul. I thought to myself, what a beautiful expression that was.
And it always stuck me how that would look like living out in this physical world. In order to salute your divinity, I would have to acknowledge my own divinity. And I come to see that in this world that we live in, the systems we have running shun that off from us. If we look at religion, say, the Christianity, in order to be one, you have to accept the basic belief that you are a sinner. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned”. How can a sinner ever acknowledge its’ divinity? Especially when I have to constantly be conscious of my wrong doings in order to repent?
I am not saying that repent or confession doesn’t work, but if I think there is really something outside that is watching me and judging me other than my own conscience at work, I would be living in a lot of fear.
And it would take another level of responsibility to move beyond an almighty entity to living out my life relying on my own conscience. One would have to be conscious of all levels of hideouts that the ego does. And really come to terms with all levels of self-responsibility. One would have to be very vigilant and yet gentle as gentleness is the door to our hearts.
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.
A dear dear friend is torn between his job and his family. According to him, he took up the job because his parents thought that was the best job for him and they wanted him to work there. On the other hand, he didn’t like the job at all.
Sometimes in life, we do certain things to gain love, approval and appreciation (LAA) from people whom we love. We were so attached to gaining the LAA from them that we never asked the one that matter the most —— our dear self.
We could go on like that for a while and one day we just couldn’t take it anymore. We want a way out. And we think we need a very good reason to justify our actions. We start to blame them for making us do what we don’t like, we feel angry that they never care about what we like. That’s usually how the story goes.
Like Katie says, “Until we take responsibility for our thoughts and actions, the world would be our enemy”.
Met up with an old friend last weekend. Â She was very excited as she just received her certification in yoga. Â She started to teach part time in her friend’s studio. Â It’s a joy seeing her finally getting to do what she enjoys.
So often in life, we just hold on to what we wanted to do. Â And we give excuses like:
Wait till I am rich…
Wait till I have this XXXX amount of money…
Wait till my kids are grown…
Wait till my wife approve of it…
There is really nothing wrong with holding off… I always believe that there is a time for everything. Â However, Â many people hold that dream far away, it seems to help them to stay anchored in this dream. Â The ego feels safe thinking it has an unfulfilled dream that it needs to do whatever it is doing now to work towards it.
This is when death comes as a great teacher. Â It takes out right into the core of who we are. Â Given this amount of time that we think we have, what is it that is really important to us? Â Do we still want to continue this way of life we are living, do we still want to sweat over this stuff that is bothering us, do we want to carry this emotional burden to our death beds?
Death and sickness allows us to take an honest inventory into our lives on earth. Â And we start to make amendments in our lives and start anew NOW. Â We never ever lose when death comes, birth always awaits on the other side. Â Without the concept of death, would there be life?
A dear friend told me she constantly judged herself as stupid and dumb when she found herself not performing at the level that she wanted herself to be at or when she found herself not knowing what to do.
Our mind tells us that if we scold ourselves enough, we would change for the better or smarter. And this concept has been carried down for generations without inquiring into the truth of it. Does it help if we scold ourselves?
When we inquire into the truth of our stupidity, we may come to see that we are forcing ourselves to be good in something that we have no interest in or something that we think we have to do and not something we want to do. We live in a confused state.
We can be very skillful in something and absolutely “stupid” in another field. But, if we hold the thought that we have to be good in everything or in a field that we hold as a goal for us, we fail to recognise our gifts in life, we deplete ourselves the energy and motivation to excel and be the best that we can be in areas that really interest us. Instead, we walked around trying to be everything for everyone.
Maybe instead of judging and scolding ourselves, we may start to pay attention and notice what we are good at and what we really don’t want to involved in. We may spare ourselves lots of time in finding and pursuing our passion in life.
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.
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