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104 of 110 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Tao Meets The Work, March 5, 2007
"To think that we need sadness or outrage to motivate us to do what's right is insane. As if the clearer and happier you get, the less kind you become. As if when someone finds freedom, she just sits around all day with drool running down her chin. My experience is the opposite. Love is action. It's clear, it's kind, it's effortless, and it's irresistible." - From A Thousand Names for Joy
Several years ago, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie hit the bestseller list and introduced thousands of people to The Work. Katie then took readers further into this simple, but profound, process in her book I Need Your Love--Is That True?, whereby Katie invited individuals to question everything they say, do or think in order to secure love, approval, or appreciation from others.
Now, in the book A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are, Katie provides an intimate glimpse into a subject that she doesn't normally talk about--her everyday life. From babysitting her grandchild to experiencing painful corneal blisters, sipping a cup of tea to sitting with a dying friend, Katie show us The Work in action--and how she exquisitely inhabits a fluid world without boundaries or demarcation.
Teaming up with her author/translator husband Stephen Mitchell, Katie elaborates on short excerpts from the Tao Te Ching from her own unique standpoint. At core, Katie challenges us--and our most cherished beliefs--by reminding us that unquestioned thoughts are the source of all stress and suffering. No person, lack, diagnosis, death, accident, tsunami, war, or illness causes suffering--only our unquestioned thoughts about such things.
Granted, this idea is a radical one because, for Katie, reality equals what is, and reality is God and reality is always good. A Thousand Names for Joy reveals a sweet, guileless woman who is nevertheless an equal opportunity offender. When she relates the story about a well-known Buddhist teacher describing how appalled and devastated he felt on 9/11, Katie observes that "his suffering had nothing to do with the terrorists or the people who died...[he in that moment] was terrorizing his own mind, causing his own grief."
Katie also addresses Christians and the idea of "knowing Jesus". She says, "I know what it is to enter heaven and not look back, and I know the arrogance of thinking that people need to be saved. If I can walk into the light, so can you. You can't help us with your words: `There it is, over there. Follow me.' No. YOU do it first, then we'll follow. This savior thing is lethal."
At 280 pages, A Thousand Names for Joy reads like part memoir and part devotional--but 100% contrary to almost every book lining the bulging shelves of the Self-Help section. With The Work, individuals embrace everything and resist nothing, for resistance is not only futile, but the root of suffering. Physical pain, love, success, money, abuse, death--Katie address all these topics and more by showing what happens when our thoughts about such issues are met with understanding--and inquiry.
Here are but a few of my favorite passages that I highlighted in the book:
"It's not possible to have a problem without believing a prior thought. To notice this simple truth is the beginning of peace."
"Forgiveness is realizing that what you thought happened didn't. You realize that there was never anything to forgive, and that's what The Work makes evident. It has all just been a misunderstanding within you."
"When you try to be safe, you live your life being very, very careful, and you may wind up having no life at all."
"People will write off even the clearest, most loving person in the world when he opposes their belief system. They will invalidate him, negate him, obliterate him, prove that he's wrong, he's a fraud, he's dangerous to society, so that they can protect what they really believe is important. They'd rather be right than free."
"If I think that I'm supposed to be doing anything but what I'm doing now, I'm insane."
"Of course, freedom doesn't mean that you let unkind things happen--it doesn't mean passivity or masochism. If someone says he's going to cut off your legs, run!"
At the end of A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie briefly describes the four questions of The Work, and provides the "Judge Your Neighbor" template from Loving What Is. She also points readers to her website, http://TheWork.org, for obtaining free worksheets for applying The Work to stressful thoughts.
A Thousand Names for Joy reveals what's on the other side of investigated thoughts--past the stress, the confusion, and the suffering. I am so grateful for The Work because it has helped me come to terms with my Autistic-spectrum son. Instead of meeting his "delays" with frustration and panic, I've been able to (mostly) meet him with patience, love, peacefulness, compassion and clarity.
If you have an affinity for the Tao Te Ching and would enjoy eavesdropping on Katie's wild (but entirely stress-free) world, then A Thousand Names for Joy will no doubt delight you. However, having used The Work for years--and having read all three of Katie's books--I feel that Loving What Is would serve those new to the process of inquiry better than A Thousand Names for Joy.
Why? Well, unless you're quite familiar with The Work, statements like "I see the common good. The common good looks like entire villages being wiped out by one tsunami" may seem disturbing, heartless, and repugnant. On the other hand, Katie would attest that such stressful thoughts would be the perfect time to apply The Work--but only if you want!
Janet Boyer, author of The Back in Time Tarot Book: Picture the Past, Experience the Cards, Understand the Present (coming Fall 2008 from Hampton Roads Publishing)
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85 of 90 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A GUIDE TO FEARLESSNESS, February 6, 2007
Katie's work is absolutely different from anyone else's. Most self-help books aren't really about anyone's "self" except the author's. They provide you with their ideas about how you can be happy, and these ideas are supposed to work for everyone. But instead of offering a one-size-fits-all strategy, Katie has shown me how to craft my own solutions, under any and all circumstances. The value of this really can't be overstated.
In addition to helping me with problems after they've arisen, Katie's work showed me how to stop the problems from arising in the first place. I've learned that the way to counterbalance difficult emotions is not necessarily to explore or analyze them, but to catch them as they present themselves, question their validity, and then simply let them go. Once I examine any thought whatsoever, I'm struck by what it really, truly is in the first place: a thought. A thought has no bearing on reality. If you're suffering from a broken heart, for example, when you look, you see that your heart is not really broken. No matter how hard you try, you literally cannot find a broken heart. There is only the thought that a broken heart exists. The funny thing is that if you stop thinking that thought, the heartbreak also stops--not because you've healed it, but because it was never there anyway.
It can be difficult to believe that it's this simple, but it is. Most self-help strategies are detailed commentaries on complex psychological or spiritual theories. But Katie's suggestions are almost pre-psychology and even pre-spirituality. They're about how the mind naturally works, no matter how you were raised or what you believe. She helps you step off the merry-go-round of newer, better, perkier self-help strategies and instead relate plainly and directly to your life as it is, without a lot of sturm und drang. It's so incredibly practical.
Katie's emphasis on self-inquiry shines a light on the present moment, something all spiritual teachers tell us we should do. However, they usually don't tell you how. But Katie does. She taught me how to set aside my beliefs and philosophies about what is going on and instead relate to what is going on. That's pretty deep when you think about it, but it also may be the reason you may not get the power of her work right away. It's so stripped down and essential. It's not a system of belief, and we're not used to things that aren't assigned to a particular school of thought. But because it's a living tool (not a system or belief), it's always relevant and can be customized to meet any situation.
One way this has shown up for me is with my husband. Even though I don't always succeed (ahem), I've learned how to separate my projections about who he should be and how I need him to act from who he really is. It actually strikes me as funny to realize that up until I could do this, I was probably having a relationship with my thoughts about my husband instead of a relationship with him. I like him much better than I like my thoughts about him.
Just like Katie's method of self-inquiry, the Tao Te Ching is not a checklist of actions you can take that will solve all your problems. Instead, it's an uncannily accurate description of how reality works and what the mind responds to. Just as our Western scientists have mapped and catalogued the physical world, the Tao explains human nature. What Katie and the Tao have in common is that both explain how to step out from behind the veil of calcified belief systems and instead meet your world directly. Both explain how the mind works when left to its own devices and that if we can just get out of the way, its natural wisdom will reassert itself and provide exactly the right solution in all cases.
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63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This book doesn't make as much sense to me, October 30, 2007
I wrote a glowing review for "Loving What Is," so it only seems right that I give my impression of this book. I didn't enjoy it as much, and it left me with a very confused impression of who Byron Katie is, and what she actually believes.
I'm not discounting Katie's experiences, but in reading it I occasionally got a sense of contrived ingenuousness. Sometimes it's innocent enough ("I trip and fall down. It must be time for a rest!") other times it's almost heartless, such as when she runs into friends of the family she hasn't seen in several years, and when they ask "how is your dear mother" she replies, "She's wonderful. She's dead." She goes on to write: "Silence. The smiles were gone. I saw that they were having a problem, but I didn't know what it was. When [my daughter] and I were outside the store, she turned to me and said "Mom, when you talk to people like that, they can't handle it." That hadn't occurred to me. I was just telling the truth."
This is a sixty year old woman writing. No matter what happened to her to change her worldview so substantially, surely she still has an idea of social mores and compassion. When my mother dies someday, and if I run into some old friends of hers, I would expect to tell them the news in a kinder way.
Later in the book she talks about the fact that loving what is can seem heartless, and says that no matter what happens -- no matter how terrible -- she rejoices in it. "When I woke up from the dream of Byron Katie, there was nothing left, and the nothing was benevolent. It's so benevolent that it wouldn't reappear, it wouldn't re-create itself. The worst thing could happen, the worst imagination of horror...and it would see that as grace, it would even celebrate, it would open its arms and sing "Hallelujah! ... It cares totally, and it doesn't care at all, not one bit...it's in love with what is, whatever for that may take."
And yet, she also talks about the fact that she would speak from a place of compassion to a woman hitting a child. But, if the mother is hitting the child, and the child is in pain, obviously this "is" and must be "the best thing that can happen." Why try to change the best thing?
I believe wholeheartedly in accepting reality, but I can't accept that just because it "is" that we are to rejoice in it. When a child is molested and thrown into an outhouse toilet to die, as happened in Colorado about 10 years ago, should I say "Hallelujah!"? I can accept that it happened, and that things like this happen, but I do not see that just because they are, that they are cause for joy. I can agree with Eckhart Tolle ("The Power of Now") when he writes that we should either accept situations completely, or take steps to change them. If I can do anything to protect the children in my family from predators, I will do so. If one of them, god forbid, is kidnapped and hurt, then I will accept that and move forward. But, rejoicing seems wrong.
Katie writes about "being lived" instead of living, about watching her hand move to "hold a cup of anything and drink it, a liquid I call tea, for example, but I can never know that either." Her job, she writes, is to delete herself.
But it sounds as if she was deleted already. She didn't do "the work" to experience her life transformation. By her own account she was in utter despair and unable to be around anyone. She woke up one day no longer "Byron Katie." "At the beginning" she writes, "in 1986, I lived in a state of continuous rapture ... if someone asked what my name was, I might say, 'I don't have one.' They would say 'your name is Katie,' and I'd say 'No, it's not.' The would say 'you're a woman,' and I'd say 'That's not my experience.' ... It's mature now. When people ask me my name, I'll say 'Katie.' I'll say, 'It's cool this evening,' or 'Come look at the clouds, sweetheart' ... if you tell me its a tree, I'll agree with you."
So, it seems that Byron Katie was obliterated one night in 1986, and some non-being, some universal "now" took her place and had to learn to communicate and live in human society. In doing so, she's now teaching anyone who will listen how to get to the same point. But, I don't want to be deleted. I like having an identity, and thoughts, and at least the idea that when my hand moves I'm moving it, not that it's being moved for me.
She implies that such behavior as inviting people to look at a sunset, giving people her name, or putting on clothing is something superficial and even silly, and something she only does because not to do so makes other people uncomfortable. She describes being in the height of ecstasy when she realizes she's been sitting for two hours without one single thought. I get the impression of a person so caught up in the spiritual world that she completely forgets about physical necessities, the sort of person who needs to be reminded to bathe, and dress, and who can't be trusted not to give away all of her money and credit cards to people on the streets; the sort of person who would've been one of those medieval saints who lived in caves and relied on donations of food from the local villagers.
But, I don't think the real Byron Katie is like that. When I've watched her in action on her website, she comes across as occasionally gently sarcastic, she obviously has pretty strong opionions, and judging from her well kept hairstyle, clothing and jewelry, she hasn't completely given up on the finer things of life and moved to the sort of ascetic lifestyle that her self-described mental state would seem to automatically create. That's fine. I believe she should enjoy the fruits of her labors. It's just seems to contradict her self-professed mental state. Maybe it's part of the "show" that she's had to learn to put on after her transformation into whatever she is now. I suppose people in modern society would be less likely to listen to a spiritual leader with matted, unkempt hair and tattered clothing.
My mindset is to accept what works for me, and hold the rest in a state of "I don't know." Byron Katie's "work" really has made a dramatic difference in the way I'm living my life; and even though a lot of what she says appears crazy to me, I also know that she's operating from a completely different viewpoint. I also know that, if what she writes is the truth, she would completely agree with me that she's insane, or wonderful, or evil, or enlightened, or completely lost, thereby allowing me to make my own conclusions and develop my own growth.
I know "the work" works because it's making my life better. As far as the rest of her philosophy, well, I guess if it's true I'll evetually come to realize the truth. If it's not, I'll forget it, and continue with what works for me as I continue to seek truth and health.
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
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by Byron Katie
by Byron Katie
