as said, its just cross-posting from the other massive thread about BK, for convenience of reading.
I think the intent of the thread, was not for analysis by anyone, but just for the basic text excerpts from participants, as they get lost in the jungle.

I just found this story by clicking on the the comments link on janaki's blog. I'm including the link to the comment.

I am reposting this here to give it wider distribution and also to prompt more people to come forward. Just the few stories we've come across have done so much good! Telling your story matters-- not just to you but to others around the world.

I'm also trying to get info about culteducation.com to the woman who left this comment; she's looking for more info, and she can certainly find that here.


*****************
Gisela Says:
March 20, 2009 at 3:21 am
hello, maybe you can help us?
Our aunt has become very too much involved with Mrs. Katie in California. she has borrwed many thousands of dollars on her visa card, to go to the School, and all she talks about now is doing those papers all day long, and talking about this Katie person. It never stops.
now she has said she is going to sell her house, so she can also take that certification that you took, and supposedly work for this Katie person!!!!
We showed her where it says, that it is no way to make a new job, as the certification can be taken away anytime, for no reason.
We are trying to help her instead get back her training as a nurse, so she can work again. she liked being a nurse.
She was very moved by your stories here, and cried allot. and she asked if she could also hear more of what happened. Maybe there could be another section of your book, where its more about those personal stories, that you say have left out so far.
thank goodness, she has decided to wait a bit before she sells her house, and spends all her money, and has nothing!!!! She was very scared after reading what happened to you, and how it can all be taken away.
its not like being a nurse, where you can just get anotehr job at another hospital!!!
so please, could you tell us more of the personal stories with this Katie, so our aunt can read them too? She read your stories three times already, its a very good book. thank you.


[janakisstory.wordpress.com]

Excellent find, Christa. Thanks. I feel encouraged to know that the info critical of BK is getting around. I really hope the woman on the fence is able to cease getting pulled deeper into the BKI Machine.

There are more participant reports buried here and there, if anyone sees them, then a cross-post would be helpful.

regardling the links...one finds out very quickly with anything culty, that links often tend to be Disappeared very rapidly. One could point to hundreds of examples. there are even examples of books being bought-back and burnt and shredded!

also, every website is constantly indexed by search robots. For example, there are entire robot-blogs and sites, which just index from keywords. So some posts from this forum about Eckhart Tolle end up in robot-blogs about the ET, which exist for the blog-owner to make a few cents on clicks to books.

Its all about open public education and discussion, so informed consumers can make informed decisions with full disclosure, which is NOT happening at this time. There is almost a complete information vaccum and total lack of knowledge, about what is really going on.
The knowledge about what is really going on is being actively suppressed.

I've read Janaki's story. In her place, I wouldn't touch Gisela's comment with a ten foot pole; there's something fishy there.

And something has certainly brought THIS thread to a screeching halt. Wonder what that could be?

Here are two excerpts from Janaki's lengthy behind-the-scenes-with-Byron-Katie story (Byron Katie & Janaki):

33 - The End of Suffering

‘The end of suffering’ brings me to my own personal loyalty conflict that I have been experiencing towards Katie for several years. I would hold back when addressing this, because I didn’t want to contradict her publicly.

I find it highly misleading to promise people ‘The End of Suffering’. It is a sublime marketing phrase. As I am typing this, I can almost hear Katie say, ‘not to end it forever, just for now’. Wonderful words, and they still hold a promise of a lifetime of everlasting joy.

Katie says that The Work isn’t about improvement and you shouldn’t do it with any other motive than the love of truth. For a long time I would faithfully repeat this, however I can see now that saying the only motive is the love of truth, is the same as saying it will bring you the end of suffering, only with more evasive and misleading words.

Even though answering the questions will bring about a relief in suffering; suffering will continue to arise. You may learn to look at it in another way that is more productive, you may learn to deal with it in a way that is less self-destructive, but it will arise.

I object therefore to the way The Work is being promoted on Katie’s website. This is what it says about The School: ‘This is the ultimate inner adventure. Unlike every other school on earth, this one isn’t for learning-it’s for unlearning. You’ll spend nine days losing the fear-based stories you’ve innocently clung to all your life’.

I have heard Katie talk about a planet without war through ending the war inside of you. I have heard her talk about the end of violence. I look at nature and I see violence. Are we going to end earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis?


37 - Downsides of The Work

There are people who think they are doing The Work wrong, because they still get angry or sad. After all, Katie says she hasn’t gotten angry or sad since 1986, and she is the role model for The Work. She also says that unless you love your enemy like your dearest friend, your work isn’t done. These are lovely words, but they paint a picture of what you should look and be like in order to reach the final destination. If you don’t, then the implication would be that you haven’t understood it properly or haven’t mastered it yet.

I have met people who use The Work to shame themselves with the turnarounds.

I have met people who use The Work to make right what isn’t.

A friend told me recently that someone scraped together $ 20.000 to attend the Turnaround House in Spain. This person’s sole reason for doing this is because he wanted to be close to Katie for a month, because he loves her so much. Apparently it was never clear through the marketing for this particular Turnaround house that Katie wouldn’t attend this event in person. Unless of course they counted her Skype sessions as being actually present.

Personally speaking, if this were my reason for attending such an event and I had to borrow a lot of money to do this, I would definitely make sure, before transferring the money, that Katie would actually be there in person.

But what really baffled me is this, my friend then told me that this person did The Work a lot to make this feel right again. And my thought was, ‘so that is what people use it for? Wow’. And I can also see the bigger picture. Doing The Work could bring him to the place where he thought he had to spend a lot of money so as to get something. There is no doubt about that. However, I think they should have been very clear in their marketing that Katie wouldn’t be physically present in this particular Turnaround House.

Another person has done The Work for a very long time and is very dedicated to the cause of spreading The Work worldwide. She had sold her house, moved to another country and became miserable. I was on the phone with her once and I said to her, ‘I bet you are writing worksheets all day long, then you do The Work, you feel good for about a minute, and then it starts all over again’. She told me that that was exactly what was happening.

I know people who made the conscious decision to stop doing The Work and who felt greatly relieved. One particular person I am referring to here was doing The Work all day long, to get out of her anxiety. She said that she found a therapist who claims that he is treating a lot of people whom he has advised to stop doing The Work because it doesn’t seem to help them and it increases their sense of shame and guilt.

There was a girl in one of the recent Schools in the States. During one of the sessions Katie had done The Work with someone. Afterwards this girl stood up and gave Katie feedback. She commented that she actually didn’t experience Katie as kind and that she also didn’t feel it was very appropriate what Katie had said. Later on in her room, she was visited by a staff member who gave her the message that Katie wanted her to pack her bags and leave immediately. I personally have witnessed this before, that people were asked to leave a School. Katie’s explanation was, ‘it can hurt the curriculum’.

What I have seen around Katie, is that this kind of behavior is being justified by, if they don’t like it, they can always do The Work.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2009 09:32AM by helpme2times.

Speaking of screeching halts to contributions to venues offering consumer reports on BK, there have been no new posts to the guruphiliac/lefora thread since April 8th by 'joanieg'.

In fairness, the last person who posted, gave URLs for two posts on RR.com..

[guruphiliac.lefora.com]

Corboy,

Saw that. This wasn't a rhetorical question, either. What dries the discussion up at some point? On this thread, there's not new material available at the moment. On the guruphiliac thread, looked like things got contentious between a couple of participants. If the desired outcome is new participation, fresh involvement, continued dialogue about BK, opportunities to help others question that sort of program, then maybe helpful to examine what happens.

Okay, I dug up a School for the Work report by someone very much enamored of Byron Katie. Interesting to look at and see how some not necessarily loving characteristics of BK are rationalized away.

It's a recent report, dated October 12, 2008, but the School appears to have taken place in the spring of 2007, since the author mentions that news of the Virginia Tech massacre was arising in the midst of the School.

This is a link to the entire report: [[url=http://www.douban.com/group/topic/4372439/]Who Is Byron Katie?[/url]]

Some excerpts:

Although she never raises her voice and is always a model of courtesy and empathy, at times I think I sense a bit of annoyance in her (this is a projection on my part -- because everything is) when people don't get it or when they don't follow the simple directions in an exercise. She can be hairsplitting about the words she has said or the words she has heard a student say. I sense that aspect of her as annoyance but not impatience: she will let you keep on not getting it. She can question a student sharply in exploring the student's self-justifying stories. She doesn't buy into victimology. She needs the truth.

"I'm not nice," she said at one point. "I love you."

(H: Mixed message much?)

She sends volunteers to do The Work with sufferers in trouble spots, such as New Orleans after Katrina. She has spent a lot of time bringing The Work to prisoners, meeting them in person, especially at San Quentin. (One of her prison students told her that he and his fellow Katie-ites have to very careful not to hug each other in the yard.) She makes clear that for her, the penultimate goal in spreading The Work is to end war. (What the ultimate goal is - well, that's my interpretation.) She said, "It's a peace movement. And it's a secret."

(H: A secret?!)

This brings up Katie's view of ethics, which differs from the conventional view in some ways and which is, as far as I can tell, thoroughly consistent and grounded in a sort of Buddhist sense of unattached compassion, an unblurred, unsentimental vision of peace. My own vision has not arrived there yet, and I would like to experience it.

She says she has not had a negative thought in twenty years: they're all positive. In other words, the negative ones are positive too.

What if your plane crashes on the way home from the School, she surmised. "What is the worst that could happen? On the way down, you'll be thinking."

A little more...

Toughness is one of her most evident and surprising qualities, and in this respect I think her own legend and her promotional materials (and two of the three book jacket photos) don't do her justice.

Found something else... a discussion by members of a group called "The Work of Byron and Unschooling". Mostly pro-Work, but in the thread there's a link to this board's reports from BK event participants and several mentions of Janaki's blog.

[[url=http://tinyurl.com/d7k5f9]The Work of Byron Katie and Unschooling[/url]]

(Note: comments are ordered with the most recent one appearing first.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2009 10:00PM by helpme2times.