Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Esther Hicks, and KASHI :

The purpose of this post is to look at the area where ' religion' and "LGAT' may overlap.

I went to a few Byron Katie meetings. My chiropractor was a fan. I also knew someone who went to Barstow for a training with BK and went up front on the hot seat and ran from Barstow in tears.

The friend who went to BK also played me some E Hicks tapes. She ' channeled ' in the most improbable accent! hahaha...sad to know they make 10? million $ a year. Guess fools and their money are soon parted.

I went to Joya [ kashi] for about a year. AT LEAST THERE THE MONEY GOES SOMETIMES TO A GOOD CAUSE.

Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Esther Hicks, I assume they are all multi millionaires. 30,000$ for training with BK. is it really 30,000$ ????

Byron Katie, Eckhart, Hicks are all making the ' new age circuit' and really separating the fools from their money!

ANYONE HAVE ANY HORROR STORIES OF FINANCIAL MANIPULATION THERE?

this is a long one/printed with permission of the author



Byron Katie & Janaki
This story reads like a journal and to get the full gist of it,
you may want to read the chapters in sequence.
I am fully open to feedback and comments, which you can send to me at

–

A Work in Progress
Introduction – chapter 01
I worked for Byron Katie for about 12 years. The larger part of those years as a volunteer, and some years as a paid employee. When Katie started the Certification Program in 2008, I was among the first 20 certified people who were placed on the website. In May 2008 I noticed that my name and profile were taken off of the facilitators website, initially without notification or explanation. As I discovered later, Katie had already removed my name a month before I discovered it myself. Many people want to know why. I receive a lot of questions about this through email, phone calls and during my workshops. The answer to those questions is not easily given, as the story is quite complex and goes back so many years. That is why I decided to write it down and publish it.
For 8 of those 12 years, I built my company, The Working Company, based on The Work. I always had Katie’s full support in this. My training program, The Working Coach, became quite successful throughout Europe, and sharing The Work with people became a full time job. When Katie removed my name from her website, the enrollment for my workshops dropped with 85%, almost overnight, and thus my income.
I am involved in an interesting process, to say the least. Part of this process is how it heals itself, and that is through the telling of this story. The story reads like a journal. It starts with my first meeting with Byron Katie and travels through some of my experiences with her over 12 years.
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My life’s story is about Gurus. The first two were traditional Indian, the third one contemporary western.
The story with Byron Katie began in the spring of 1996 and lasted until the spring of 2008.
“Every human being has a built in capacity for self healing.
The healing is in the sharing” - Ken Keyes
“The truth sets you free” - Byron Katie
Meeting Katie – chapter 02
Katie and I have a very close friend in common. My friend and I were both part of Baba Muktananda’s staff in the late 70’s and early 80’s. After Muktananda died in 1982, I went back to Holland and my friend and I stayed in regular touch with each other.
In 1995 he told me the story of a woman he had heard about. He told me that she was from a desert town in California, and once when she was sleeping on the floor of an attic room, a cockroach crawled over her foot. When she woke up, she was everything and nothing at the same time. He told me that it reminded him of the state described in Kashmir Shaivism, that Baba always used to talk about.
I remember him telling me this story, and that I failed to see the point of the cockroach.
About a year later I was on the phone with him again. He asked if I remembered him telling me about the lady with the cockroach. He told me that she was in Amsterdam, right as we spoke. He said her name was Byron Katie and I should go and see her and take part in the workshop she was offering. I told him that I never went to workshops of any kind, that my Guru was enough for me, even after his death, and the only exception I had made to this rule was a workshop by my dear friend, Willem de Ridder. He kept insisting. When I asked him what happened in her workshops, he told me she would ask you to judge someone. It became even less appealing after his description, but I said that I could call her, and ask if she would be interested in doing a tv interview with Willem for a local television talk show.
So I called her on the phone. She sounded sweet. She said she would love to do the interview and asked if I would come the next day to play, and I agreed.
When I got to the house in Amsterdam, I found myself in someone’s living room with about 20 people I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I realized that I had come to the workshop after all. I was just coming out of a period of a severe depression, and socializing wasn’t my strong point in those days. I was into Native American stuff. I made dream catchers, painted
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medicine shields, practiced shamanic journeying and was dressed in full Native American attire: coats and boots with fringes, long hair with feathers, braids and beads and of course a hat.
I met Katie. She looked wonderful. Round face, lovely smile and of course those radiant blue eyes. I didn’t know what to say to her. Before the program started we sat close to each other, there was a buzz going on in the room, as people were still coming in and getting their tea. Our eyes met and locked. Very slowly it appeared as if everything around me slowed down and then came to a full stop. Like in a movie, when they do a flash back of someone’s dream. The noises faded into the background and the room started to fall away. Then everything else started to fall away, her face, her body, everything except the eyes. We stayed like that to what appeared a timeless moment, and it probably lasted for at least 15 minutes. Later on, when I read ‘A cry in the desert’, I found out that the eye-locking is something that frequently happened between Katie and people who visited her gatherings.
We got worksheets, and I filled one out. Didn’t know what to write on, or how. I wrote on my throat, but it didn’t feel like anything. Katie started to speak. She was saying things I had never heard before, and her words resonated deeply. She said, ‘life is not about making money, or having a relationship… it is about finding truth’. My world fell from underneath my feet. Of course, that’s it! I had been struggling for so many years with precisely those things, and now I heard that they were not what my life was about. It felt like a huge turning point, and a great relief.
During lunch she asked me if I wanted to go for a walk, and so we did. We walked the streets of Amsterdam. Again, I didn’t know what to say to her. In the distance a woman was approaching. She took my arm. ‘Look’, she said, ‘look at her’, as we walked towards her. ‘Sometimes there is a gate’. I looked and the woman didn’t look back at us. We passed her. ‘Ok, she said, this time there wasn’t a gate’.
My friend had told me that she loved to hear stories about Baba, so I told her about my life with him, about my love and devotion for him. He had told us that after his death we would never miss him, because he would merge with our hearts. And it felt true. But I told her how I had loved his physical form, and how I missed having that. She stopped and turned to me. Her face very close to mine. She looked into my eyes and put her hand on my cheek and she said: ‘my thought is, I am here now’.
A shock went through me. What was she saying? I didn’t understand.
That afternoon in the workshop, Katie was speaking. I was sitting on the floor, staring at her beautiful face. I can’t remember what she said, but I know I had never heard such words before. They were like a healing for my soul, which had felt in pain for as long as I can remember. At some moment tears were flowing down my cheeks. Katie noticed and said, ‘What’s the sound of it?’ Something stirred way down below, in the region of my toes, and
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wanted to surface. I pushed it down. No way was I going to give in to this in a room full of strangers. She kept saying this a couple of times, ‘what’s the sound of it?’, and I kept pushing it down. Then she straightened her back and said, ‘I haven’t been in her presence for a long time’. All hell broke loose inside of me. In that moment Katie became Baba Muktananda incarnate, and I was back with my Guru. The floodgates opened and tears poured, it felt like they had been sitting there, waiting for this precise moment, for years and years. Along with the tears the sound came, it was a deep wailing and sobbing. It didn’t come from my toes, it came from far beyond my toes. I fully let go. Along with the tears and the wailing, of course there was the spit and the snot that also poured out. I lost full control. It was as if in that moment a lot of pent up pain, sadness and rage came out.
The Guru – Chapter 03
I was brought up in an Indian Ashram (The Bihar School of Yoga) from age 14 to 19. The guru in charge, Swami Satyananda who came from the Rishikesh Divine Life tradition, started to raise and educate me as an Indian girl. I was taught to speak, read and write Hindi and Sanskrit. I was taught Indian music. I worshipped Shiva every morning in the temple, and was told to fast every Monday, so I would get a good husband. Quite soon after that I received Sannyas initiation, and was trained in Indian scriptures, the Vedas and Upanishads, the Puranas and the Bhagavat Gita, and all the aspects of Yoga, together with all the Yogic practices. Every full moon I recited the entire Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. Renunciation was a big issue. I had no personal belongings, my head was kept shaven, and our clothes were communal. Our food was extremely simple, and often consisted of the same stew made out of corn. In India, the Guru equals God. Complete devotion, dedication and obedience are in order here.
At the tender age of 14, this all went down without a lot of resistance on my part, and it became the normal way of life. The central focus of the disciple is to please the master and to gain his or her praise and approval. Nothing else in life matters, as the Guru is the gateway to God and to enlightenment. At the same time, enlightenment was presented as something quite unattainable: it will take you many lifetimes of complete selfless service and devotion, and even then enlightenment needs to be deserved, takes a lot of discipline and long hours of meditation. Baba used to tell a story about his dog. He would say, ‘In his last life he was a very great Yogi, he just made a tiny mistake…’. However, if you succeed in pleasing the Guru, then his or her grace can provide you the much sought after shortcut, and therefore many prefer to choose the path of complete devotion and dedication, called Bhakti Yoga. This was engrained into my cells, in the form of deep and strong neurological patterns.
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Our oldest programming is one of obedience and reverence. When we were young, our parents seemed invincible and capable of anything. Quite a God like image. We learned to obey them and obedience to an authority became a neurological pattern. To please them, could mean the difference between heaven and hell. To keep them happy could mean the difference between feeling good about yourself and feeling guilty. This authority appeared to be faultless and therefore became untouchable in our minds.
Later in life, whenever we give status to an imagined authority, this same neurological pattern is triggered and we follow suit. It also appears that we follow the authority with the best and most appealing marketing.
So the moment Katie merged with the Guru (in my belief system), I fell back into the pattern of wanting to please, complete selfless service, total dedication, obedience and devotion, which was of course accompanied by a total awe and fear. I was hooked, and my mind was set: I was going to serve her, day and night.
Doing The Work – chapter 4
When Katie left for the States, I went into a panic. In those days there were no websites, no email, no discount phone calls, and at best there was the fax machine. There wasn’t a lot of literature either and Cry in the Desert hadn’t been published yet. There were worksheets, a little book and some tapes.
So I took to doing The Work. I wrote worksheet after worksheet, day after day. At home, as I was making the dream catchers, I would play the few tapes that I had, over and over again. I felt a strong need to imbibe everything there was to imbibe about Katie.
After a week, it felt like I had stepped into an emotional roller coaster. The floodgates that opened the week before, never closed down again. So I faxed Katie. I told her that I went from rage to distress to sadness to fear to frustration to depression to anxiety, etc. I still remember her reply, as it came rolling out of my fax machine: ‘You shouldn’t be naming all these things, love Katie’.
I was unstoppable in the beginning, sort of like a steamroller. Everyone I knew had to hear about this thing called The Work. I started several Work groups, did one-on-one sessions where and whenever I found someone willing to inquire, and of course I was doing The Work myself all the time.
Setting the Stage – chapter 05
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Katie came back to Amsterdam about 6 months later. She had cut off her curls and the short hair made her look a bit sterner. Instead of someone’s living room, they had hired the lobby of a local school. There were about 40 people. I was in bliss, sitting at her feet, listening to her do The Work with people, and of course with me on the stage. She left for Stuttgart after three days.
Again the panic came back. How could it be that I found this miraculous love in my life, that I re-found my Baba, and that she would leave again? A woman I didn’t know rang me on the phone and said that she felt like driving to Stuttgart to sit some more with Byron Katie and would I be interested in accompanying her? Of course I was.
We drove all night. We had a phone number and no address. We drove through Stuttgart in the dark, until we stopped to call them. It turned out that the house she was staying in was right around the corner. Michael, who was taking care of Katie and a friend who travelled with her, didn’t know if it would be ok for him to let us in, so we slept in the car in front of the house.
The three days with Katie were fabulous. We stayed with her in the house, took walks in the morning, had long talks, went to the workshop, and went food shopping. Food shopping with Katie was an experience. When she would see the stalls on the curb filled with fruits and vegetables, she would rush towards them, address and greet them very enthusiastically, and touch them in such a way, as if she was blessing them. Actually she wouldn’t just touch them, she was all over them. I witnessed this many times, until one very cranky German shopkeeper came running out and started yelling at her: ‘IN GERMANY WE DON’T TOUCH THE FRUIT!!!’ After that I never saw her touch the fruits again. Or I would find her inside the shop, in the fresh vegetable section, holding a big bunch of lettuce in her hands, staring at it and shaking her head in wonder, and mumbling, ‘this is so amazing’.
At the end of the Stuttgart workshop Katie told me she was coming back to Europe in 6 months’ time for a proper tour, visiting many different countries, and she invited me to accompany her. She had noticed me cleaning the apartment, helping to set up the workshop room and serving wherever I could, and she told me she could use people like me. This was nectar to my ears, especially since one of the trademarks of a devotee is the longing to be needed, be useful and to serve.
The First European Tour – chapter 06
The tour was a great experience. Katie had brought along American friends, as well as her daughter and grandson. And we all fitted in the van, together with our luggage and traveling bookstore. She called it ‘Havanna White’. On the way we listened to Katie tapes and the
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Rolling Stones. Destination: Germany, back to Holland, back to Germany, Switzerland, Portugal and back to Amsterdam again.
Wherever we went, Katie was doing The Work with us and inventing all kinds of games and exercises (mainly around feedback) along the way. We slept together on the floors of people’s houses and stayed with new friends.
In Portugal it turned out that no program had been organized. We ended up in a half finished, extremely child-unfriendly center on a mountain top, in the middle of the rainy season. On our way up we were warned by our host, that if it started raining heavily the road would wash away and there wouldn’t be a way down. When we woke up the next morning, the mountain top had disappeared inside a huge rain cloud. The view was awesome as well as the fact that there was no food in the house. Very early in the morning we all piled into Katie’s room. The big bed was pushed into the middle, as the roof was leaking all around. She asked us what we wanted to do. The options were very simple according to her. We could stay there and fully shut down everything. No food, silence, and just staying there until it was safe again to move. Or we could pack up and get the hell out of there. We all voted for the last option (except one).
When we came to Faro, we all got to see Katie’s creativity and inventiveness. We checked into a hotel. Adam had a laptop, and we put together a flyer. We went into a computer shop to ask if we could use one of their printers. We printed the flyer, cut and pasted it into a proper leaflet, had it copied and hit the streets to distribute it. We had rented a work room at the hotel, and 2 days later there was a program, 20 people showed up, there was a translator and Katie did The Work. Life can be so simple!
After we had left the center, without staying for as long as we had initially promised, and without doing a program there. It seemed that the owner wanted money from Katie. He had written her a letter. There were long discussions about whether she was supposed to give him money or not. At some point she said, ‘is this getting boring?’ And then I said, ‘Yes it is, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore’. I couldn’t believe I said that, and I don’t understand how I could have said that. It just came flying out of my mouth. I guess I was just trying to please her as always, and was catering to her statement about boring. She looked at me, and I actually saw her eyes grow cold. She said in a very curt voice: ‘Well, that’s why the letter said dear Katie, and not dear Janaki, so you don’t have to talk about it anymore’.
I felt completely misunderstood, and was too afraid to say so, or to apologize. After that I was excluded from most conversations. It felt dreadful inside. I didn’t understand this. After all, if she was the Guru, she should be able to see through me, and know that my intentions were all right.
By the end of the tour Katie had decided to give me a laptop, so that I could be of service by being the contact person in Europe, and helping organize the next tour. I was so
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overwhelmed by the fact that I was given a computer, and felt so undeserving of this, that I literally worked day and night.
My relationship with Katie – chapter 07
Throughout the years there appeared to be an interesting routine and pattern to my relationship with Katie. After each of her visits, when I was in the Netherlands, and she was in the U.S., I would call her on the phone a couple of times during the year. These phone calls were hardly ever work related. They were chats between two friends who loved each other dearly. I loved those phone calls. She was open and accessible, we would talk about our children, about stuff that had happened, about both of our sick and dying mothers, etc. It always felt like I was so close to her, and we were equal friends.
Then she would come to Amsterdam, and I would pick her up from the airport. That first moment of meeting her again after a year was always such a delight. We would hug and look into each other’s eyes, sometimes cry and laugh at the same time. She would appear vulnerable and I just loved to take care of her. Often we would go food shopping first at the health food store, then I would take her back to the apartment and make her bed and massage her feet. By the next day everything had changed. Katie would be all business and the feeling of friendship and the sense of connections were gone. Later on I learned that they called this ‘work mode’.
I wished I had heard this phrase before. Whenever this happened, even though I knew on a rational level that it wasn’t personal, I always took it personal. It reinforced my sense of being unworthy, and my only remedy was to keep working, try to anticipate what she wanted from me and do The Work.
More European Tours – Chapter 08
More European tours followed. Each tour was more extensive than the one before, and attendance would double nearly everywhere. I found an apartment in Amsterdam for Katie and company to rent. It belonged to someone who would vacate the place whenever Katie wanted to stay there. On the first morning of this tour I had already made several trips to the airport to pick people up and bring them to Emmaplein. I had been told that I would help Katie answer her emails and I was very excited about this. It was lunch time, and we were ready to go out for something to eat. Katie was working. I said, ‘we can do the emails when we get back from lunch’. I saw her eyes flash, but she didn’t say anything. When we got back, I was informed that I was taken off of that duty and that someone else would be doing the emails with her. I felt I had failed, and didn’t know why. Later in the tour, towards the end, I was in fact doing her emails with her. It was before wireless internet connections, and I
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needed to go to a separate office in the particular hotel to go online. I had mentioned that I wanted a cup of tea. As I walked out of Katie’s room, carrying the laptop, she called after me. She said, ‘Janaki, are you going to send the emails first, or are you going to get tea first?’. I had learned my lesson. ‘I am going to do emails first, Katie’.
At the end of one of the tours, Katie and company would often spend a last few days at Emmaplein in Amsterdam. We would relax, go out to lunches and dinners, walk through town, go shopping, etc. An American friend of one of Katie’s assistants had asked if she could also stay at the apartment. I told her that there was enough room, so it was ok with me. We were walking through town with Katie and Stephen and some others, when we met up with the American girls. Katie said to her, ´Roz, have you noticed that you are feeling uncomfortable? That is because Emmaplein is mine. I never invited you to stay there. This means that I have to go into another room to discuss private business. Emmaplein is mine.’ The girl was completely baffled and didn’t know what to say. Then Katie turned to me and said, ‘Can you see Janaki, how this is not personal?’ I said yes at the time, but only because I didn’t want to disagree with Katie. The truth is that I didn’t. I remember looking at Roz’ face and noticing the fear in her eyes, and also thinking that I was so glad that it wasn’t me.
By this time Katie had already set up the Certification program (this later became the School). It was a 15 day program, and at the end of it certificates were issued. I was certified in the United States in February 1999.
Once we were in the kitchen of a German apartment in Cologne. I stood in the doorway and Katie had just gotten a little jar of yogurt out of the fridge. She shook it vigorously, the top was unscrewed, and a moment later I was covered in yogurt. We both started to speak almost at the same time, but she was just a split second ahead of me. I thought she was going to say sorry, and I wanted to say, ‘oh never mind honey, I’ll just clean it up’. What came out of her mouth was, ‘I wanted to see if it was open, and I guess it was’ and she walked away. One thing I leaned in India, is that you NEVER criticize the Guru, so I didn’t.
One night we were having dinner in Germany at an Italian restaurant. There was a habit of sharing and tasting each other’s food. Katie had a different pizza than mine, and I asked if I could taste a piece of hers. She said, ‘to tell you the truth, this is a big piece for me. It is mine, I ordered it’. I immediately felt ashamed. Later on she offered me a piece.
Every year she came to visit Europe, she would take me along with her on tour. Every year the organization grew bigger. In the beginning it was hanging out with friends, but soon it had turned into a travelling office. After 3 years, it was very time consuming for me to go on tour, as there was always a lot to do in preparation for the Schools, to be held at the end of each tour. So I would stay home to work, as Katie travelled with her company. There was now a book store which traveled separately, lots of events throughout Europe and Israel, there were 2 schools each summer, one in Holland, were I would serve as a translator and
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one in Germany. I answered all the phone calls and emails, and there were so many from all over Europe, that this job in itself was full time. I would travel ahead to visit several locations to see if they were fit for the programs. I did all the PR, the mailings, setting up interviews with Katie, setting up the Schools, finding the hotels, book flights, putting together the itinerary booklet, getting the supplies, etc. When it came close to the tour, 14 hour work days, sometimes 7 days a week, were normal. During her visits to Amsterdam I would pick her up from the airport, as well as all the friends and staff from the U.S. who travelled with her, drive her around, take her shopping, translated all the public programs. I also edited the Dutch translation of the books, and translated all the written materials for the workshops, website, PR and the Schools into Dutch.
Feedback – chapter 09
In the early years, feedback wasn’t called feedback yet. It was called ‘roasting’ or ‘bullets’.
Back in those days, feedback meant nothing short of pure criticism to me. I believed then that it was aimed at hurting me, and it confirmed and reinforced the belief that I was unworthy. The consequence was a perpetual state of shame and guilt. The way out of this was doing The Work. Making amends took on the form of obedience, dedication, devotion and doing what I thought was expected of me.
I was after love, approval and appreciation. Not just from Katie, but from most other human beings. It became very visible to me that I had been doing this my entire life. I think we all do this, and I think we all know that we do this. I did too, but it started to become more apparent, and I noticed how painful this kind of seeking is. I also noticed that I couldn’t help myself.
Now I can see that feedback is only a way of reporting myself, without aiming at hurting, accusing or correcting the other person. It is giving a voice to thoughts in a very honest and shameless way.
On the second European tour, after the Amsterdam programs were over, we headed south to Venlo, and after that on to Germany and the rest of Europe. Jan and his family live in Venlo, they had discovered Katie that year and invited her and the group to their lovely home. Katie had told a friend she was going to ‘roast the hell out of Janaki’. During our last afternoon, Liesbeth did The Work on Jan. About 25 people were present in the room. At some point Katie asked us for feedback on Jan. When it was my turn I told him that I didn’t believe his spiritual attitude, that I wanted to wipe out the sissy smile on his face, and that I didn’t buy all his spiritual bullshit. To enforce my words, I kicked at one of my shoes (I was sitting on the floor). Katie said, ‘Oh Janaki’, and at that point she shifted the entire focus to me. She said, ‘and that is how we all see you’. She said, ‘You give us your dripping devotion,
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and you keep the smile on your face as long as you think we are looking at you. You are filled with self hatred. I introduce you to my daughter, and you take advantage of that by striking up a close friendship with her’. She said a lot more, that I can’t remember now. I was devastated and my world collapsed. Then she asked everyone to give me feedback, and they did. Apparently people saw me as untrustworthy, and undependable.
And she was spot on. It hurt as hell, and it was the truth. I wasn’t serving people out of a desire to serve. I was serving people because I thought that was the only way to be acceptable. It came from a very deep rooted sense of being unworthy.
That was the beginning of a tour that would last another 6 weeks. The next morning, when we were in Germany, she had called me to her room and said, ‘Just in case you didn’t get it, I will run it by you again’. And she did. I started to say something and she said, ‘Janaki, you don’t have to say anything, because I already know everything you are thinking’. In hindsight I can see how this was a crucial point for me. In India I was taught that the Guru equals God and is All-Knowing, Omnipotent and Omnipresent. Her statement only proved that this was true, and I firmly locked myself in our Guru-disciple relationship-prison.
We went for a walk in Cologne. Just before we entered the great Cathedral, Katie took my arm and stopped me. There was a beggar in front of the church. She said, ‘look at him, just stand here and look at his face. That is who you are’. We stood there for at least 15 minutes looking at the beggar. And she was right. Looking at that beggar in Cologne, I saw myself, and how I had been the beggar all along.
This giving of feedback continued throughout the tour on a daily basis. I felt frightened, unsafe and the need to constantly be on guard.
When we were at the house in Kirchberg, I had written a worksheet on Brian, and I asked him to facilitate me. Brian is one of my most wonderful friends. I read him my worksheet, and he could find everything. Then he facilitated me and I answered the questions and did the turnarounds. When we went back inside, Katie was sitting on the sofa. Brian told her about our work together and he gave Katie some of the keywords that came up in my worksheet (without the context). The keywords were: cold, distant, arrogant and superior. Katie looked at Brian and said, ‘Bri, I have never experienced any of these words with you’. Then she turned to me, looked at me and said, ‘And Janaki, I have experienced all of these words with you’.
Again she was right, and it also felt like I did something wrong again, even when I had been doing The Work.
After this experience I was forever on guard with Katie. I felt like I couldn’t trust her anymore and refrained from giving feedback to anyone in her presence. I felt traumatized. The fear inside of me ran very deep. And God knows I did The Work on this. I still have stacks of