Home
Katie... In the News
Events/Schedule
Biography
Press Kit
Image Gallery
Video/Audio
Bibliography
Transcripts

Media Contact
Marketing Guidelines

Snakes and Ropes: A Q-and-Q With Byron Katie
Pure Inspiration
by Ray Hemachandra

When you see Byron Katie in person and hear her speak, she shimmers. Katie seems ethereal—like someone not of this world. She also, not infrequently, comes across as something akin to insane by modern conventions. And then the turnaround happens: The longer you are in her presence, the more certain you become that there’s nothing you would rather share than Katie’s astonishing brand of insanity.

Does she walk her talk? Katie, which is the name she goes by whether a “Ms.” is attached or not, is pure walk. Question her thoughts? When she speaks, she’ll say something, immediately ask intuitively, “Do I know what I just thought—and said—is true?” and sometimes point out in her next sentence that she doesn’t know what she just said. What she describes as inquiry is unceasing for her—it’s simply her basic mode of being.

The Work—the process of inquiry Katie teaches—has five steps. The first four steps are questions to ask about a stressful thought, and the last is a shift in perspective for inquirers to try out:

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
5. Turn the thought around.

Katie has taught The Work to millions of people through books, DVDs, classes, and her website (www.thework.com). Her best-selling books include Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life and I Need Your Love—Is That True? In her recent book A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony With the Way Things Are, Katie reflects on passages from the Tao Te Ching as translated by her husband, Stephen Mitchell.

Ray Hemachandra: At an event the other night in Asheville, North Carolina, you said, “Joy is a natural way of being.” In A Thousand Names for Joy, you write, “Sadness isn’t a natural response.” Katie, if joy is natural, why do so many people need a teacher to tell them they can live in it?

Byron Katie: Well, nobody needs a teacher, though most of us can use a little reminder now and then. Teacher is not a word I normally use. It implies that we all don’t teach equally, and that’s not true. Everyone has equal wisdom. It is absolutely equally distributed. No one is wiser than anyone else.

Ultimately, there’s no one who can teach you except yourself. Each of us needs to look at what our belief system really consists of. Look at the concepts that come across your mind and just notice what you believe.

Ray: But why do so many people feel as if they are sad or suffering?

Katie: If your beliefs are stressful and you question them, you come to see that they aren’t true—whereas prior to questioning, you absolutely believe them.

How can you live in joy when you’re believing thoughts that bring on sadness, frustration, anger, alienation, and loneliness? When you believe those thoughts, you think that the world is making you unhappy. But it’s your thoughts about the world that are making you unhappy.

Ray: Where do we go astray? How do we start down the path of living in thoughts and illusions rather than pure joy?

Katie: It’s like this, to take a simple example: Your mother says, “That’s a tree.” And you’re a little kid, you don’t have a reference for it; for you, the whole world is one unseparated reality. And then she says again, “Honey, it’s a tree.” You still don’t have a reference for it, but eventually you hear it enough times and from enough people that there is a moment when you believe it. And it’s separated out the moment you believe. You actually see a tree.

What are you believing? It seems benign to think, “There’s a tree.” It seems to be a beautiful thought. But the moment you believed that there was a tree, there was the thought I—there was a you believing that there was a tree. And in that same moment, there was a mother teaching you, “There’s a tree.” There was a whole world of separate things, rather than the reality of what is.

And, really, your mother didn’t teach you, “It’s a tree.” You taught yourself, the moment you believed.

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.” No. The moment you believed what she was saying was the moment your suffering began. And it’s not just “mother”—it’s everyone and everything around us. It’s the dream—the dream world.

My mother became a believer, and then I became a believer. But when I was 43 years old, I began to think for myself, somehow—by fluke and by grace. And I thought, “Oh, my, I was so mistaken. The world isn’t what I believed it to be. I am not what I believed me to be, and neither is anyone.” So now I live in a state of grace, where I don’t have to know.

Ray: Would you talk about the fluke and grace? Who were you when The Work was born, and who are you now?

Katie: Who I believed myself to be was a hopeless case. I would wake up in the mornings, notice I was still breathing, and hate God for keeping me alive. I would constantly think of killing myself, but I had three children, so that wasn't a possibility.

I was clinically depressed. I was agoraphobic, full of rage, so paranoid that I slept with a gun under my pillow. I would go for days and weeks at a time when I couldn’t even bathe or brush my teeth. My self-esteem was so low that I slept on the floor, because I didn’t believe I deserved a bed.

One morning, in 1986, as I lay asleep on the floor, a cockroach crawled over my foot. And I opened my eyes out of this dead sleep—a 43-year-long sleep—and in place of all that darkness was a joy that I can’t describe. No one had told me you could be alive and happy, and if someone had said that, I wouldn’t have believed it. I thought you had to die—physically die—to escape.

In that moment I was absolutely unidentified, so I can’t say “I.” It was without identification. There was no time or space. There was nothing separate. All that was left was amazement and joy. And whenever a thought—whenever any of the thoughts that had depressed me all those years, those terrifying thoughts that told me how worthless and terrible I was—hit my mind, I saw that it wasn’t true.

I began to laugh—or, without identification, we can say that it began to laugh. It just roared. I like to say it was born out of laughter.

The Work was born in that moment. I realized that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but when I didn’t believe my thoughts, I didn’t suffer. And I’ve come to see that this is true for every human being.

So, the first two questions in The Work—“Is it true?” and “Can you absolutely know that it’s true?”—are what I saw when the thoughts appeared. No thoughts are true. They can’t be. I saw that with absolute clarity.

The third question is “How do you react when you believe that thought?” Well, that was obvious: sadness, anger, despair. I saw that all these things are the effects of believing a thought that isn’t even true.

Then I saw that there was no identity until the thoughts appeared, so the fourth question is “Who would you be without the thought?”

Then what I call the turnaround, which is a way of experiencing the opposite of what you believe, occurred. I saw that for every thought, the opposite is just as true, or even truer. I realized that it was all upside down and backward—what was true, what was not true, what was the dream world, what was the real world.

For example, I used to suffer from thoughts like “My husband should listen to me.” The turnaround was “My husband shouldn’t listen to me.” How did I know that my now ex-husband shouldn’t listen to me? He didn’t. That was reality.

So, I had all four questions and the turnaround literally in a moment—in less than a moment. And when I talk about my world, people relate to it, because it’s so familiar to them. It’s them. They’re hearing themselves.

Inviting people to inquiry is much more powerful to me than describing my experience. When people ask me, as you did, I try to describe it, because it’s all valuable. And when people hear me tell the story, they often say, “Oh my goodness, I get it. I get it!” But it’s not enough.

Asking the questions—actually writing down your stressful thoughts and putting them up against the four questions, then turning the thoughts around and finding genuine examples of how the turnarounds are true—that’s what changes lives. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry. And you cannot believe the old thoughts again.

Every mind deserves to be free. When the mind is free, that’s the end of suffering.

Ray: When you describe your realization—the cockroach moment—it sounds almost revelational. Do most people doing inquiry have revelations like that, or is it usually steady work in making the understandings become second nature?

Katie: Steady work, and making the understandings become second nature—or first nature. People don’t need sudden revelations. They get what they need when they need it, thought by thought by thought. It’s a constant thing when the mind starts to wake up to itself.

Mind is infinitely creative. And when it’s not stuck, oh my goodness, that’s where the joy comes from. Something happens, and the way we think about it, understand it, see it, is actually hilarious, whereas before it used to depress us.

It would be like saying, “He told me to go away.” You can experience that in two ways: “He told me to go away” (Katie employs an aching, morose voice) or—and here’s how I would say it—“He told me to go away!” (Katie uses a bright, happy voice).

For me, if somebody tells me to go away, that is an opportunity: for me to give the person a better life, to realize where not to be, and to see what could be even better than being with that person I love.

So, the statements and concepts that used to depress me now bring me joy. That is not easily understood by people who believe what I used to believe.

Ray: What are some especially common stories and beliefs people realize they hold when they start doing The Work?

Katie: When I say, “People shouldn’t lie—is it true? How many of you think that’s true?” everyone in a room of, let’s say, a thousand people will raise their hand. Then I say, “Do people lie?” They all agree, “Yes, they do.” Then I ask, “Is there anyone in this room who has never lied?” No one ever raises a hand.

So, reality is: Should people lie? Yes. How do I know they should? They all do. This is not to condone lying. But realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies. Then, turn it around: I shouldn’t lie. I’m the one I need to work with. I’m the one who changes the world if I can follow what I think should and shouldn’t be lived in this world.

There are amazing beliefs a lot of people hold, like “They don’t care about me”; “I should be more successful”; “I don’t have enough money”; “I’m too fat”; “They shouldn’t have done it”; “I’m not good enough”—the beliefs go on and on. But when you begin to investigate these beliefs, the question “Is it true?” begins to live in you. It comes alive. It begins to rise as kind of a partner to all these stressful universal beliefs that people have been stuck in for centuries.

Also, the question “Who would I be without that thought?” begins to live, because you learn to identify stress with the concept that’s happening in the moment. And when that happens—oh, my goodness—what a world! In that moment, a state begins to happen that I call unceasing meditation.

You cease to be body-identified. The mind becomes a joy to itself. It dances with itself. It sees that it is its only self. It is its ultimate relationship and love and friend. It dances and sings, and the physical world cannot compete with that.

The nature of mind is that it loves everything once it loves itself—just as it opposes everything when it opposes itself.

Ray: Some people may struggle to disengage the intellect. How do you undo thinking without thinking? Is inquiry not thought engaging itself or deconstructing another thought?

Katie: Actually, it’s mind seeing through itself and understanding itself. I like to say that understanding is the power. The most important relationship is the mind’s relationship with itself. In other words, the ultimate—and, really, the only—relationship you have is the relationship with your own thoughts.

As far as intellect, what else is there? Without intellect, there’s no story and no world. If we are in silence—in absolute silence with no thoughts—for 10 minutes, it’s only a thought that tells us we were silent for 10 minutes. Our only proof is a thought.

Mind is everything. There’s nothing that it’s not.

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. The moment it begins to question itself, the mind becomes so clear that it starts working with itself rather than with the body’s identification.

Ray: At the talk you gave the other night, you explained how easily positive thinking can be turned around, because people still are basing their well-being on thoughts. Affirmations like, “I’m loveable, I’m loveable, I’m loveable,” have something stronger running underneath: “I’m not loveable.” You feel better with positive thinking, you said, until you can’t make your mortgage payment, receive an unexpected bill, or get a parking ticket. “Are you still loveable then?” you asked.

Katie: Yes.

Ray: So questioning your stressful thoughts—the process of inquiry—better supports joy than does trying to think joyful thoughts?

Katie: By questioning our stressful thoughts, we come to see that they’re not true. And if we see that our stressful thoughts aren’t true—if we have questioned them deeply and thoroughly enough—what does that leave? It leaves love. It leaves you completely in love with yourself, and with a mind that can only project love onto everyone else as well.

You can never make yourself believe that you’re loveable, however hard you try, because when the chips are down, what you really believe rises to the surface of the mind to replace what you want to believe. So, after years of “I am loveable, I am loveable,” when your husband lies to you or your mother is rude, the underlying thought “I’m unloveable” overrides all your positive affirmations.

What we really believe is what we manifest. What we believe, we see. So, we cannot see what we don’t believe.

People talk about manifesting with positive affirmations. You can say, “I want a car, I want a car, I want a car,” but if the mind is running, “I don’t deserve it, I’ll never be able to afford it, I’ll never be a success”—if all those things are running—then that’s exactly what you’re really manifesting and what’s running your life. And as long as you believe those things, thinking positively—even though for some people it may be helpful at times—is not strong enough to override your negative beliefs.

If I want something, I go get it. Anything that I believe will stop me, I question. And I might be wise enough in that questioning to appreciate what I already have. I think that’s the trick: wanting what you have, whether you get the car or not.

Really, I don’t know if that’s the trick or not. What I know is it’s a wonderful world when you have what you want at all times.

Ray: Some people might be troubled by your idea of fully accepting world conditions. Let me read a passage from A Thousand Names for Joy: “The apparent craziness of the world, like everything else, is a gift that we can use to set our minds free. Any stressful thought that you have about the planet, for example, shows you where you are stuck, where your energy is being exhausted in not fully meeting life as it is, without conditions.” And, then, “Until you can love what is—everything, including the apparent violence and craziness—you’re separate from the world, and you’ll see it as dangerous and frightening.”

So, war, genocide, poverty, hunger, environmental degradation—you love all parts of the world because you love what is. Can lovers of what is still be agents of change, and how can they do so without the “should”—that something should be other than what it is?

Katie: Let’s take the example of war—the war in Iraq. If I have the thought, “They should stop fighting,” then I can’t know that that’s true. Who do I think I am, God? Who am I to say what’s right and what’s wrong? Who am I to say what is good for me or you or the planet in the long run?

When I turn the thought around, one turnaround is “I should stop fighting.” Is there any place in my life where I am making war? Am I fighting with my husband or my children or my parents? Every time I read the newspaper, am I fighting with the President in my head? Am I fighting with myself? Let me work on that. That way war is ending somewhere in the world.

If I think the environment in the world needs to be cleaned up, let me clean up my own environment. Let me clean up the environment in my head—let me work with the pollution in that ecosystem. And that’s huge: just to clean up one ecosystem.

The power of one is magnificent. Look at what Gandhi did. He was clear. Well, I don’t know if he was or not, but he was certainly clear enough for me. So, it’s obviously possible, when we really love and respect people, for them to affect our lives. And we want to know: How is it that courageous, fearless people like Gandhi are possible?

The power of one! If you can’t stop war in your life, how can you expect politicians to stop war in the world? You can’t. And we all have equal wisdom, so if you can do it, then you know that everyone can do it if their minds are open to answering just four simple questions and beginning there.

Ray: Here’s a personal sticking point: identification with my child’s well-being. If I get cancer, I can accept and love what is, and even approach it joyfully, I think. But if my child gets sick—I have a son who was born in 2000—I think I would be devastated.

Katie: Ray, what makes you think that you could handle cancer any better than he could? How do you know that he couldn’t handle cancer at least as well as you could? If something happens to your son, your thoughts about not having him in your life are what your terror is about. It’s not about his life.

When your son is healthy and happy, you’re happy. And when you’re son is not healthy, you’re unhappy. But that doesn’t make sense. When you question your thoughts about a time when your son is not healthy, you come to see that you’re the only one you’re worried about. It’s all about your happiness. You want him to be happy so that you can be happy. You want him to live for you.

It’s like this: If you’re okay with dying, your son could be at least as enlightened as that. If you’re okay with cancer, your son could be at least as enlightened as you are. And if your son is afraid to die, it’s because of what you’ve taught him. Some children are afraid to die because their parents are afraid to die. My own children have come to understand that it’s totally okay with me if they die. They don’t have to live for my sake.

What happens when you’re afraid for your child’s well-being? How do you react when you think the thought that something terrible could happen to your son and he’s out of your sight at 7 years old? How do you treat him when you think the thought that he’s not okay?

Look at that. You become frightened. You become overprotective. You begin to teach your child some very fearful things.

You don’t even realize you’re teaching them, because you try to hide your fear. You think you’re doing a good job of it. And yet your child picks up all your concepts.

Who would you be without your fear—without the fear of losing your son when he has cancer or he is dying? Who would you be without the thought “I need my son to be alive”? You would be present with him, not missing one second, not one moment, of your lives together.

It’s just too valuable to take time out for your fearful thoughts about what would happen to you without him. It’s all about you, you, you. I invite everyone to question their thoughts about their children and allow their children to be free. That’s when we stop teaching our children fear.

Ray: Katie, what do you think the world looks like when everybody comes from a fearless place of pure love and joy—when everyone lives with that depth of understanding?

Katie: It’s amazing. We all begin to do what we can do—what you and I are doing now—to clean up the planet and to find solutions rather than fight. It just happens everywhere. We begin to become human in a different way than what we’ve known before. We begin to be creative in a whole new way. Right now our minds are confused with thousands of untrue beliefs, and we act out of those beliefs, and our environment mirrors that confusion back to us.

We have the opportunity to—oh my goodness!—it’s unspeakable. All of us would be doing the most wonderful things, and we would never know who did them. Like pollution right now—we never really know who’s doing it, although if we’re awake enough, we can know our own part. So, it would be like living the opposite of the pollution example, where all day long you do something that is a contribution and helpful, but you don’t ever get found out. No one knows it’s you.

You realize, “My life is a contribution.” Even breathing is a contribution. Low self-esteem is not possible when you understand the nature of everything. Depression is not possible. The universe is absolutely friendly.

If everyone lived that way, it would end up with all of us living as our true nature. And if we weren’t fearful, we would live that way.

Ray: Katie, do you still need to do The Work consciously—subjecting your thoughts to inquiry purposefully—or does releasing thoughts come effortlessly to you now?

Katie: Effortlessly. Because when you don’t believe something, you can’t make yourself believe it. There’s nothing you can do to believe it again. You either believe it or you don’t.

Let’s say you’re out walking in the desert and you see a snake on your path, and you’re terrified of snakes. You jump back, and your brow is sweating, and your heart is racing—you’re paralyzed with fear.

Then, maybe the sun shines through the clouds a little differently, and through your fear, you look down again and you think, “Oh, that’s a rope! How could I ever have thought that was a snake?” Your whole body shifts. It begins to relax. You realize that there was never any danger. It was just a misperception, a misunderstanding.

Then other people come along, and scream, “Watch out! It’s a snake!” And you smile. Those people are terrified, suffering, in pain, afraid for their lives, afraid for your life—how can you smile? Well, because you know that there’s no snake. It’s just a rope. But they’re yelling or running, and if you say, “Don’t worry, it’s okay,” they won’t believe you. They have to see it for themselves.

When you question what you believe, you leave behind the world and what the world believes. It puts you in a very interesting position. When people are suffering, you don’t suffer. You know that every stressful thought is untrue, that every snake is a rope. And you understand people’s terror, because you once thought that ropes were snakes, too.

How can I fear what is harmless? I can’t make myself fear that rope again, even if I stand over it for a thousand years. It’s impossible.

That’s what The Work does. It challenges every problem in the world. It invites everyone to discover that every snake is a rope. There’s no exception to that, Ray.

But this work is for people who are open to it. It’s not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be, and that’s what this work threatens. It threatens the ego.

Ray: You say when people start to do The Work, it’s best to do it on paper. Why?

Katie: Because the mind is tricky. If you don’t write down your stressful thought, the mind will slip and slide around it. The mind is very clever. It will start defending its sacred concepts. It will qualify and justify and soon you won’t be able to give simple answers to the questions. The mind will outsmart you, so that it can keep all of its concepts intact.

But if you identify the stressful thought that you’re believing and put it on paper, there it is, in black and white. It’s stopped. It’s mind on paper. Your fearful mind never has been stopped before. It’s brought into the world and stabilized in the world—on paper. So, by putting mind on paper, you can put the four questions and the turnaround up against it.

When people do The Work, they need to notice when they begin to justify, defend, or go to a story. When you defend or justify, The Work stops working, because in that moment you’re no longer answering the questions. You’re doing what mankind always has done.

So, I invite people just to notice that and come back to The Work, and simply answer the questions. Be still, and take your time with each one of them. Your life depends on it. Your entire joyful life depends on it.

Ray: The first question is “Is it true?” The second question is “Can you absolutely know that it is true?” When you start doing The Work regularly, does the second question eventually fall off, because you fully probe things when you ask the first question?

Katie: Sometimes the second question doesn’t even apply. And sometimes with the concept you’re questioning, it makes more sense to ask just the second one and not the first one. For me, I wouldn’t miss one of the four. I like to say that the first question is there, and just in case you miss it, there’s another one to back it up.

Some people sincerely answer yes to the first question, but with the second question they have to go deeper and see if they can absolutely know what they’re so convinced of. For example, if the concept is “John shouldn’t have hit me—is that true?” your answer may be a quick yes. Of course it’s true; we all know that violence is bad. But then, when you ask yourself the second question, your answer may be different. You may find that you can’t absolutely know what is best for you or for John or for the world. And if your answer is yes, then just move to the third question: “How do you react when you believe that thought?” And just trust the questions and the inquiry.

People sometimes believe that every answer to the first two questions should be no. That’s not true. This is personal work. It’s meditation, and you come out with the answer that is yours. When you’re not defending and justifying, and you’re being very still, your answers can and do shock you.

Ray: The third question is “How do you react when you think that thought?”—the cause-and-effect part. On what level do people react? Is it a gut reaction? Is it emotional? Is it thought?

Katie: It would be like you coming home expecting to see your son running into your arms. You’re very happy walking through the door, and then he’s not there. You look around, and you can’t find him. You look more and, if you’re married, your wife says, “Uh-oh, I haven’t seen him in a while,” and then you both begin to panic.

Notice the emotions that happen, on a scale from 1 to 10. They can go from mild discomfort all the way up to real panic. Nothing’s actually happened, except that you’re believing thoughts like “I need to find him,” “He’s missing,” “He’s in trouble,” or “Something terrible has happened to him.” Whatever your thought is in that situation—“He could be hurt” or “He needs me” or “I need to call 911”—how do you react when you believe that thought?

And then you find him—maybe he fell asleep in the closet and you find him there. How do you treat him if you’ve been believing those thoughts? While one person might simply be relieved, another person might wake him up and start crying and holding him, or someone else might yell at him for causing all that worry. Just imagine the little guy and his fear and what that would mean to someone who was just taking a nap, after all.

So: “How do you react when you believe that thought?” How does it feel in your body when you believe the thought? How do you treat other people and yourself? Is this where addictions kick in? Is this where you begin to overeat or smoke the cigarette you said you’d never smoke again?

That’s all in the third question. It’s meditation. You sit and you watch what happens to your life as a result of that thought. You go back to your childhood and then all the way up to the present. “How do you react—what happens—when you believe the thought?” It’s an amazing question. Your whole life will just appear in front of you in images.

And then the fourth question: “Who would you be without the thought?” The result is calmness. You can watch your life without the thought. Let’s say, for example, the child is asleep in the closet, and you are afraid something has happened to him. Who would you be without the thought “Something terrible has happened to him”? The thought is like a nightmare that has surfaced. Even though you don’t really want to admit it, it’s always present for some of us. It surfaces when you can’t find him after the first five minutes.

So, you watch: “Who am I without the thought ‘Something terrible has happened’?” And then you get to that closet a lot quicker because your mind is clear. It’s not panicked. It’s more intelligent and calm without the thought. It does the same work, but it’s so much more effective. Our children and the world deserve that kind of clarity.

Ray: Do people sometimes struggle to answer the fourth question? Because you’re having the thought—it’s become part of you—so you are essentially imagining yourself as someone else, even if that’s your true self you’re imagining.

Katie: No. What I invite people to do is to look at their lives just the way they have lived them. Not to change anything, and not to do positive thinking at all. Just look at yourself going to the market yesterday. Look at yourself going to work yesterday. Look at yourself having breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Just look at your life without that thought.

Look at your life without the thought “Something terrible is going to happen” or “No one cares” or “I’m not good enough.” It’s the same life, but without the thought. It’s quite an amazing experience to see the same life with and without the thought. You come to see how crazy a thought can make you when you believe it.

And then you turn it around. For example, the opposite of “Something terrible is going to happen” is “Something wonderful is going to happen.” You can now find genuine examples of possibilities without being crazy—genuine, real possibilities of what can come out of a situation you’re experiencing. Your little child is asleep in the closet, and instead of thinking “Something terrible has happened to him,” you’re thinking “Something wonderful has happened to him.” Then, you start looking for examples and possibilities. It really helps when you’re looking for a little guy.

When you call the police, and they say, “Did you look in the closet?” you can honestly say yes, and let’s look again, but without the panic. With the panic, sometimes you can’t even answer: “I don’t know where I’ve looked.” You’re just panicked, and then you’re blind.

Fear is blind. There are some options in it, but they’re very limited compared to the options available to the fearless mind.

Ray: So, the turnaround is important because it shows other possibilities?

Katie: Yes. It also shows the mind what is as true or truer than the original thought. People usually find that the turnaround is as true or truer than the stressful thought they began with.

What’s an example? Let’s say the thought is “John should apologize.” Turned around: “I should apologize to John.” And if your mind is closed, you might not be able to see how that turnaround is true: “Me? But he’s the one who hurt me. He owes me the apology.” Or: “I should apologize to John? Well, okay, I really did do this and that to him. But he deserved it!” But if you’re really doing The Work, you’ll be able to see how every turnaround is true: “I should apologize to John. Let me do what I expect him to do. Let me get my own house in order here.” Even more, you’ll find genuine examples of why apologizing to John is a good thing. And if you think it’s difficult for you to apologize, then you begin to understand why it’s so difficult for John to apologize to you.

Your job is to turn it around; to see what you have done, what your part is; and then to apologize and go back to that person and ask how you can make it right. Usually you don’t even have to ask—you know.

One thing about inquiry is that it is the end of gossip. It is the end of passing on negative thoughts about people. It is the end of talking about a world that’s so terrible. Rather than making judgments like that, you begin to live in observations that can be worked with intelligently and changed and shifted.

I have an expression: “I’m in a hurry.” Of course, that’s not true in one sense. I have all the time in the world, because I have seen that there’s no such thing as time, or the world for that matter. But what I mean is that it’s so easy to break through the suffering on this planet, if the mind is open to doing so. I just want to make this work available to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Everyone has a right to know it exists, and that’s my job. I don’t want anyone to suffer the way I suffered before I found this work.

If you’re in a hurry, too, if you want enlightenment, it’s so simple when you really listen to people. For example, if someone says to me, “Katie, you’re wrong,” I immediately think, “Could she be right? Is it possible she’s right?”

I find it inside rather than attacking outward through my defense. I go inward, not outward, and realize for myself—self-realization—to see what’s true for me. And I can say, “You know, you’re right. I just came to see that I’m wrong.” Or, if I can’t find it, I can say, “I’m not able to find that right now. I really believe I’m right. So, tell me, how am I wrong? I’m open to hearing your reasons. I really want to know.”

I’m standing there with a friend—no one is an enemy—who can give me information and really enlighten me. She can add to what I’ve got. It doesn’t mean I’m going to lose or change what I’m believing. But I’ll have more information, so what I’m believing or not believing will be much more intelligent. Who knows? I could be wrong.

I love to not defend—ever—and to open my mind and receive what can always add to me, not take away from me. So, if someone says, “Katie, you are out of order,” over something I’ve said, if I defend myself or justify myself, then I have just started the war. If people say, “You’re wrong,” and you react with, “How dare you say that?” or, “No, I can prove that I’m right, and here’s why,” or, “No, you are wrong, and I think you’re rude”—and even if you don’t say it out loud, maybe you think it, and even that’s stressful—that’s the moment you’ve started the war.

Defense is the first act of war. I see that clearly.

Ray: You entered doing this work—teaching and writing books, giving seminars—quite by accident, I think, as a byproduct of your cockroach experience. People asked you questions about how you changed, and then they started to follow the same path, didn’t they?

Katie: Yes. People just wanted to know what happened to me. My husband at the time was so confused after I had that experience in 1986. It was as if he was living with someone who looked like his wife, and that’s where all the similarities stopped. That was very confusing for him. He preferred the unhappy, suicidal woman, because that’s what he was familiar with, that’s whom he could help. He was terrified by the one who didn’t ever have a problem, who was happy all the time and deeply, deeply quiet. He used to go through the house saying, “What have you done with her? Where is she? I didn’t marry you. Who are you? I want my wife back.” My children were the same way. They were astounded. But little by little they came to trust the new one, and they were so glad that the old one never returned.

People wanted to know what happened. What was it? And then word of mouth happened, and people would invite me to come and talk.

Ray: Katie, often when I end an interview, I ask, “What’s next?” or “What goals do you have for the future?” I imagine you might not be able to answer that question right now. Is that true?

Katie: Well, as as far as I know, we’ll eventually end our interview. That’s all the future that I can project—and I don’t even know that that’s true.

Ray Hemachandra has interviewed many of the world’s great spiritual teachers, including Eckhart Tolle, Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Sakyong Mipham, and Masaru Emoto. A book editor and freelance spiritual writer, Ray lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and partner, Loree Hemachandra, and their son, Nicholas. Learn more about Ray and Loree’s work at www.hemachandra.com, and contact him at ray@hemachandra.com.