:) Byron Katie is the real deal. She is speaking from a place of total appreciation of life. She is the one of the most courages truth tellers I have ever met. :)

Byron Katie is as twisted, magical, illogical and irrational as any LGAT, per the glimpse I've gotten of her at one of her "workshops" (or whatever it was) and the CD we all got a copy of. Later, I'll try to post excerpts from the CD. She's verrrrrrry LGAT-ish, IMO.

I was very glad to find this thread as I recently read Katie's first book and find myself attracted to key elements of her philosophy. I am way over on the skeptic side of the bench, and there are definitely cultish features about Katie and her stuff. The woman is apparently exceptionally charismatic, and it will be surprising if she does not succumb to the appeal of gurudom (if she hasn't already) and wind up as yet another of that exploitative, selfish breed.

There are also, based on my limited exposure to her stuff, some ticklish areas that turn up when you try to apply it rigorously across the board of human experience. For example, doing what is pretty much undistinguishable from therapy on sexual abuse survivors is going to make you a lot of enemies real quick, especially when it takes anything other than the currently fashionable stance. There's plenty more to be said on this topic in particular.

Some of the stuff is, in my opinion, hogwash of the first water. Example: this all-juice diet that people who go to some of the Work multi-day events are apparently asked to undergo. I'm not buying that.

Having said that, she's on to something. To me, the Work, or whatever you want to call it, offers some flexible, powerful easy-to-use tools for examining our own thoughts. It's worth noting that Katie specifically and repeatedly disavows any intention to tell people what to think, or to tell them that what they're thinking is wrong -- although I can certainly see how a person on a stage in the presence of this highly charming woman and an audience of worshipful acolytes would feel pressure to conform. As a matter of fact, I read on her website an article in which the journalist describes precisely that emotion.

Personally, I don’t want to meet the woman. But I like the way doing the work (that upper-case business bugs me) so far has helped me to identify and question some of my own underlying troubling beliefs. I have many years of experience with conventional cognitive behavioral therapy a la David Burns, Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, etc., and it's impossible to miss the parallels with Katie. That’s what attracted me to her stuff when I first heard about it. Katie potentially significantly extends this important science, in my opinion. I'd like to see some studly double-blind controlled research studies to find out if it really works and how well.

Unquestionably, Katie has high cult potential. People who are susceptible to charismatic leaders might want to stay away. People like me, who aren't afraid to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes (which I literally did many years ago in the middle of my single Landmark session) might learn something useful at little risk and no financial expense whatsoever.

I mean, I take some prescription medicines but not all of them. I go to Sears for hardware but not clothes. I use a chainsaw to cut wood but not trim nose hairs. There's potential for harm in any science, any philosophy, any thing. The old saying about baby and bath water comes to mind about now. If you take a look at Katie as a skeptic, I think there is manageable harm to be found there along with a significant quantity of useful insight.

Thanks very much again for this thread. The concerns raised by the original poster deserved to be raised again and again and fully explored.

V

I've been to one of Byron Katie's talks and I enjoyed it. I don't think she should be worshipped as a goddess, as Grace seems to think, but I also don't think her teachings are harmful as Skeptic seems to think.

I also have the same CD skeptic has (I assume), but I confess I've never listened to it.

I have, however, attended a "The Work" workshop that was facilitated by an acquaintance of mine who follows Byron Katie's teachings. I found the workshop very helpful. I'm sorry to hear that the original poster had a bad experience at a similar workshop. I think it depends on the individual leading the workshop, and how they interpret and present Katie's teachings.

It also sounds like the person that Question4truth saw did not ask the Four Questions in the proper format, and/or Question4truth didn't understand the purpose of the Four Questions.

The second question, "Can you absolutely know it's true?" is supposed to make you think about whether the thing you are upset about is a permanent, constant problem, or a temporary one. Something like, "I am angry at my husband for not doing the dishes" could be true for you at the moment, but a part of you also knows that you will not always be angry at your husband about such a small thing because it will blow over.

Besides, "Can you absolutely know it's true?" is a yes or no question, so I don't see what's so offensive about it. If your statement/problem is real and true, then you answer "Yes". The question is not meant to imply that the answer is supposed to be "no".

Also, that "therapist" did not use the proper technique of "switching" the question. Sounds like she was not trained properly.

To quote Question4truth: "There was also a part of "the work" I hadn't known about until the 'session',which entails switching the judgement- so that if you say "I'm angry at _____ for sexaully assaulting me" you say "I'm angry at myself for sexaully assaulting myself". "

You are right to be upset about that, because the "therapist" should have known that there is no ONE RIGHT way to switch/flip the question. Obviously the way she switched it (above) does not make any sense at all. A better, more appropriate switch would have been, "I'm not angry at ____ for sexually assaulting me", which, again, may or may not be true for you, at which point you'd ask yourself "Is this true?" (the answer for you here would probably be "no") and "Can I absolutely know it's true?" (the answer for you here might be "yes" or "no", depending on whether you think a time will ever come that you might not be angry.)

Gulab Jamon,

One thing about BK is that her "work" seems to be about mind games. Very similar to the LGAT I was involved with. Questioning what's true, what's real. Reframing. And while there is good (therapeutic) work in that vein, (BK, IMO, and) LGATS misapply, twist and misuse, as has been so well explained on this board.

I still can't explain it the way I see others explain here. This board is incredibly helpful for me in my attempts to sort out and understand the highly sophisticated mind games that LGATs "teach". I am in awe of the ways people articulate exactly what I think, but just can't verbalize. Without having all the words to describe it, I see strong similarities between LGAT & BK.

This is how I see BK. I need to pull that CD out and post examples of what I'm talking about.

skeptic

Here's a story from the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine from a couple of years ago. I posted a link to it above and thought I sent it to Rick but I don't see it in his data base.


November 24, 2002

How a Self-Help Guru Is Born

Once Depressed, Overweight and Volatile, Byron Katie Awoke One
Morning to the Sensation of a Cockroach Walking Across Her Foot--and
Found Herself Transformed By

By Allison Adato

Two questions in the interview consume me. Although being a reporter
gives one license to ask just about anything, these two questions
knock around my head, unable to escape my mouth. The first feels
superficial, but I have to know: How does this woman achieve such
perfect fingernails? They are natural, unadorned, tapered to exquisite
ovals. The second question would make me appear uninformed. For some
time now I have been talking to her, to others about her, and
observing her at work. Yet still I want to ask, "What is it you do
exactly?" Finally I blurt out a wimpy, deflected substitute: "When
people ask you what you do, what do you tell them?"

The woman fixes her aquamarine eyes on me, smiles and says, "I clear
people's minds." She illustrates the statement with a flick of those
fingernails, as if brushing crumbs from a tablecloth.

Since 1992, Byron Katie, 59, has traveled the world clearing minds en
masse. She is not a therapist, a counselor or a religious leader,
though her work--which she simply calls "The Work"--suggests elements
of all these professions. She gives an average of three free workshops
per month, teaching people her method to end emotional suffering. She
instructs them to write down their troublesome thoughts: My mother
should love me more. My wife shouldn't cheat on me. I need to lose
weight. Then they apply to each thought the following four questions:
Is it true or can I really know that it's true? How do I react when I
think that thought? Can I find one peaceful reason to believe that
thought? Who would I be without the thought? She then engages what she
calls "the turnaround," flipping those initial statements to see if
their opposites don't feel equally, if not more, true: I should love
my mother more. I shouldn't cheat on myself. I don't need to lose
weight.

Resting on this minimalist method of inquiry and linguistic reversals,
her philosophy can be used, say proponents, to overcome troubled
family relationships, problems at work, even the trauma of rape or the
grief of losing a loved one to terrorism.

While Katie is tentative about saying that her method is for everyone,
the promotional literature for The Work isn't shy about making claims.
Her intensive school, which she holds in various places around the
country, is billed as "not only a way to find freedom, it's a fast
way. In just over a week, the school changes lives radically and
permanently."

The number of people who attest to this statement is growing. Over the
course of a decade, The Work has spread from Katie's hometown of
Barstow and spawned both a nonprofit organization (The Work
Foundation) and a for-profit branch, Byron Katie International, which
has ocean-view offices in Manhattan Beach and an outpost in the
Netherlands. It is accepted as continuing education units for social
workers, nurses and marriage counselors by those professions'
respective governing organizations. Her ideas also are spreading
through the sale of videotapes, audiotapes and a Web site that is
translated into languages including Italian, Dutch, German, French,
Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Macedonian. In California, she has
garnered an eclectic celebrity fan base that she says ranges from
actor Richard Chamberlain to the anger-rock bands Slipknot and Korn.
She has held private workshops for donors such as Norman Lear's wife,
Lyn, who introduced The Work to 50 women friends, and former Warner
Bros. Records exec Jeff Gold, who shared it with his industry pals.

Last spring, Harmony Books--an early publisher of Deepak
Chopra--released Katie's "Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can
Change Your Life," which booksellers could display somewhere between
"self-help" and "New Age." The book is a collaboration with author
Stephen Mitchell, whose own works have topped the spirituality list.
Mitchell, 59, is a translator of religious texts from the "Bhagavad
Gita" to the "Tao Te Ching" to "Genesis." A widely respected
pan-religious scholar, he might be a good person to assess the rise of
Byron Katie--were he not her collaborator and her husband of the last
18 months.

The word "guru" comes to mind. But, says Mitchell, "Gurus are a dime a
dozen. There are people saying, 'Live in the now' or 'There really are
no problems.' It's nothing like what Katie's doing."

So what is she doing? And how does a woman with no psychological,
theological, spiritual or therapeutic training, and who once earned
her living as a landlady, get taken seriously as a self-help
authority?

It helps, for starters, to have a cockroach walk across your foot.

From Aimee Semple MacPherson to Ram Dass to Marianne Williamson,
California has attracted gurus like medflies. But Barstow, the Mojave
desert town where Byron Kathleen Reid spent much of her youth, was a
virtual woo-woo-free zone. Raised by a housewife and a train engineer,
Katie grew up to be a fairly unhappy woman. As she tells it, by the
time she was 43 in February 1986, her life had hit a nadir of
hopelessness. What happened between then and now is an oft-alluded to
but little-probed story in Byron Katie circles.

Every religion has its founding myth. All gurus have a saga of how
they came to know something from which the rest of us could benefit.
Who would buy Richard Simmons' "Deal-A-Meals" if he couldn't credibly
point to his own struggles with food? Katie's story appears in
abbreviated form in her book. Quizzed on many of its particulars, she
is at first cordially hazy.

This is what her friends and family confirm: In 1986 Katie was a
mother of three, on her second marriage and had spent a decade falling
into depression, agoraphobia, overeating and addiction to codeine and
alcohol. They say she rarely left her bed and grew so paranoid that
she sometimes slept with a loaded gun under her bed.

"She was probably one of the saddest, angriest people I've ever
known," recalls her daughter, Roxann Burroughs, who was 16 at the
time. Her sons, then ages 18 and 23, had moved out of the house. "She
was very closed up and volatile," says her eldest son, Bob Robinson.
"Her mood swings were incredible. She came down on me with a lot more
intensity than the other two siblings."

Katie desperately needed help, but the idea of seeing a therapist or
even a religious or spiritual advisor didn't square with her
upbringing. "We're like Barstow desert people," explains Burroughs,
who still lives in the Mojave, where she and her husband own a
construction business. "We didn't know about therapy or 12-step. So
Mom stayed in bed, and we ordered pizza and watched TV."

Eventually, Katie says, she called her insurance company, which
referred her to Hope House, a Los Angeles residential treatment center
for women with eating disorders that has since closed. While there,
she slept in the attic because the other residents were afraid of her.
"It was run like a home with a house mother, so there was some
democracy," recalls Pat Scales, who was a therapist at Hope House but
did not live on the premises. "I remember that she was very emotional,
both with anger and with tears. When she came into my group, she was
so emotionally fragmented there didn't seem to be a self there, which
is not the case with most people with eating disorders. They're fairly
functional. She could easily have scared people."

Less than two weeks into her stay, Katie says she awoke one morning to
the sensation of a cockroach crawling across her foot. She opened her
eyes and, she explains in her book, "It was as if something else had
woken up. It opened its eyes. It was looking through Katie's eyes ...
it was intoxicated with joy." At that moment, she claims, the four
questions appeared in her consciousness.

Applying the questions to her life, she challenged long-held beliefs,
such as "my children should respect me," and felt her emotional
suffering lift.

Scales says that she had never seen anything like it in a therapy
setting. "There was definitely a personality shift," she says. "I was
on a spiritual path at the time. I recognized that something rather
extraordinary had happened to her. She wasn't the same crazy person
that she had been the day before."

"It was like they dropped off a completely different person--the most
innocent, sweetest child you've ever seen," Burroughs says. "There
just aren't programs that produce a different person." Katie's son
Ross Robinson adds, "She seemed like an alien to me."

Katie attributes this difference to waking without memories. She
claims not to have recognized even her own husband and kids at first.
She also forgot conventions of contemporary life. "She would walk out
the door in pajamas," says Burroughs. "I'd say, 'You can't go out in
pajamas,' so she would change. She did it for me."

There were other changes. She dropped 75 pounds. She says she found
that if she ate meat, her tongue spontaneously bled in a stripe down
the center. She meditated, sitting stone-still for hours a day and
perplexing her family.

"I am one of the most down-to-earth, flat-footed people ever, so I had
a really hard time with it," Burroughs says. "We knew nothing of
Buddhism, Hinduism. I thought you were straight-up weird if you
meditated. I'd look at her and think, 'What is she doing?' I went with
the idea that she had had a nervous breakdown."

Katie began taking long walks to rediscover Barstow. On these walks
she would embrace strangers. While some were put off by her guileless
approaches, others saw in her a peace that they wanted for themselves.
"People from the street, people I'd meet in stores," Katie says.

"They would say, 'There are names for people like you. You're
self-realized. You're a mystic.'

"I'd say, 'I'm a married woman with three children.'

"And they would say, 'No, no, there's something else.' "

Unable to offer them advice, Katie invited people home to observe how
she lived. The first was a depressed man she remembers only as Jim,
who saw Katie as his potential salvation. She showed Jim and the
others what she did when she had a problem: She wrote it down and
asked her four questions.

Soon she was like that family in New Jersey whose home drew reverent
pilgrims to see a tablecloth with a spaghetti sauce stain that looked
like the Virgin Mary. Dozens, and eventually hundreds, came to be with
Katie. They stayed for hours or called in the middle of the night.
Some believed that she was healing them, though she insisted that they
were healing themselves. Some wanted to turn her home into an ashram.

These developments, as well as Katie's personality shift, would prove
taxing on her marriage. She and her second husband separated. As her
son Bob, a foreman supervisor, remembers, "We thought it was crazy.
She started caring for other people as much as she did her own family.
We had all these ragamuffins, street people in the house. But we
learned about others through her and became more tolerant of society."
Once skeptics, her children now embrace The Work to varying degrees.

Word of mouth about her living room gatherings led to an invitation to
appear before a small group, composed mainly of psychologists and
therapists near Berkeley, Katie says. She recalls the experience as
"very odd. I was just this woman from Barstow. They knew things that I
had no concept of yet." But the professionals wanted insight into
Katie's practice. Answering their questions provided a format for her
traveling workshops. "That was probably the real beginning of The
Work," says Judith Avalon, who attended that first gathering. Katie
had been "ungroomed as far as doing retreat work. But we were
fascinated by her story and her power to shift people." The experience
also provided Katie with a mandate for deciding with whom she would
share The Work: Only those who ask. She would not evangelize.

Today Katie's schedule remains largely determined by request. If she
is asked to bring The Work to a prison in Texas, as she was in 1996,
she goes. If they want to hear her in Germany again, she returns.

By the early '90s, the workshops began to look much as they do now. At
a Marin County appearance in 1995, Larkspur doctor Kevin Maher, now a
close Katie friend, saw her for the first time. In that part of the
state, he says, "You were used to seeing these neo-bohemian Marinites
who had been to India and declared themselves enlightened beings.
Katie shows up looking like Dolly Parton and Tammy Faye Bakker. She
had no idea of enlightenment or the vocabulary."

Today Katie no longer looks or sounds like a Barstow housewife. Her
flowing clothes, usually in black or earth tones, suggest a
well-tailored Jedi knight. Her personality has evolved into a
compelling set of contradictions. She retains a fair amount of earthy
pragmatism, yet occasionally refers to herself in the otherworldly
third person. She has been called a Bodhisattva--an enlightened being
who selflessly delays nirvana to assist others--but this has fostered
in her no curiosity about Buddhism or any other religion; she has not
read her husband's books on the subject. She rejects such lofty
labels, but sits quietly as Mitchell expounds on her awakening.

"I don't know of an instance of this happening to another human
being," he says. "It's like if you took psychosis or amnesia as a
negative and printed it as a positive photograph."

Unavoidably, she has grown fluent in the language of the New Age
movement. She has refined her ideas into sampler-ready sound bites:
"Arguing with what is is like teaching a cat to bark. Hopeless."
Mitchell has anthologized them in a pamphlet available at Katie's
workshops. Attendees also can buy her tapes, videos, mugs, backpacks
or a $76 fleece jacket with her logo (a heart made of arrows pointing
inward). Revenue from these items goes to Byron Katie International,
not the nonprofit foundation.

At the workshops, scented candles burn as you enter and music is
playing, something affirming such as John Lennon's "Imagine," Alanis
Morissette's "Thank U" or an original composition called "The Work
Rap: No Decision, No Fear." A typical program begins with a volunteer
from the crowd sitting in a chair opposite Katie onstage, a box of
Kleenex between them. All of her events are videotaped and the
volunteers are miked. Katie is introduced with no mention of her
spiritual resume. (Throughout the evening, she rarely alludes to her
past except to empathize. To a woman enduring power struggles with her
kids, Katie offers, "I know. My religion used to be 'pick up your
socks.' ") She starts by asking the volunteer to read his or her
answers to questions on a printed worksheet. "OK, sweetheart," Katie
says. "Do you really want to know the truth? Let's hear No. 1.... "

Though she calls everyone "sweetheart" or "honey," there is little
coddling. Asking someone if the deeply held stories about them are
true requires a bluntness almost incongruous with Katie's Zsa
Zsa-meets-Deepak demeanor. At its most effective, her method can cut
through years of self-delusion and rationalizations; it leaves some
participants in tears of recognition. Many wrestle with Katie's
frequently repeated statement that she loves reality, whatever it
brings, because reality is "kinder than our stories."

"I have a hard time with the passivity--what comes to you, be happy
about it," says Nancy, a Los Angeles lawyer who asked that her last
name not be used. She has been in the chair twice, and the first time
she spoke about losing her mother. "I needed God to put a mother
figure in my life. Katie turned it around: 'You be the mother figure.
It's not God's responsibility to give you that,' " says Nancy. "It
feels hokey. It ticks you off. But it returns the power to you."

Marion Jacobs is a clinical psychologist who has studied self-help
groups. She is not familiar with The Work, although when it is
explained to her, Jacobs suggests it is similar in some ways to
traditional therapy. Katie's first two questions, says Jacobs, "are
fundamental to cognitive behavioral therapy. Then she makes the
connection between thoughts and feelings--any therapist is going to do
that. Finally, she's asking a person to use imagery to see what would
change them. Nothing in there that's new."

While Jacobs isn't troubled by Katie's ideas, the format does raise
questions. "If she just got up and gave a sermon, you could listen and
decide where it fits in your life. But she's working with people
individually. When you do that, you're walking a fuzzy line of what is
therapy."

In 1999 the California Board of Psychology raised that issue after
listening to a tape of Katie working with an incest survivor. Katie
says the board wanted to know what would happen if she were hosting a
session elsewhere and the woman subsequently had a breakdown. Katie
argued that the woman's emotional state after the dialogue was her own
responsibility, just as it had been before they met. Ultimately, with
no finding that she was practicing psychotherapy, the investigation
was dropped. As a matter of policy, the board would not comment for
this story or release records.

Kathy Smith, a self-described "Byron Katie groupie," drove up from San
Diego to hear Katie in L.A. She also has attended the five-day "New
Year's Cleanse," held at a summer camp in Malibu. Smith, an ebullient
woman who first used The Work to explore her struggle with overeating,
says that the only thing that concerned her going into the Cleanse was
the juice fast. The what?

"I brought cheese and crackers--I was sure I wasn't going to make it,"
she says, adding proudly that she existed for three days on
watermelon, beet, lemon, apple and cucumber juices and miso broth.

Katie explains the reasons for relying on juice: "You take away
people's chewing and their mind goes nuts, they start getting angry,
feeling like little children. They feel deprived. It gets really
radical and that's what I want." She says she went through the same
changes in 1986.

Using anger and deprivation is a rarely discussed element of The Work.
I ask if there are any other physical elements to the program. "No
sex, please," says Katie, smiling but serious. "We separate husbands
and wives so they can focus on their thoughts about that. They don't
have to, we just suggest it."

It is virtually impossible to find a Byron Katie critic at a Byron
Katie event. (She more frequently attracts what one volunteer dubs
"Bliss Ninnies.") On three occasions I lurked in the parking lot,
trying to catch people leaving early. At an East Hampton, N.Y.,
workshop, two women emerge before the break, talking and laughing.
Perhaps they found it all too funny, possibly ridiculous.

"Oh, no," one insists. "We love Katie. But we have dinner
reservations." Where, I wonder, are the skeptics?

In Altadena, Calif., as it turns out.

I call the Skeptics Society, a watchdog group that challenges bogus
science. They have not heard of Katie, so I run through the four
questions. "I like that fourth one," says Pat Linse, a Society
co-founder. I try to rile Linse's skeptical side: What about Katie's
lack of training? What about presenting The Work as a charity? What
about the mugs?

"They are supporting themselves," she reasons. "We don't fault people
for making money."

"Her Jaguar was a gift," Roxann Burroughs says, aware that seeing a
quasi-spiritual self-help authority roll up in a Jaguar sends up a red
flag with some people. The car was bought by Katie's son Ross, a
successful record producer who credits The Work with greatly improving
his life.

Even in the depths of her depression, Katie says that she was always
able to make money. Byron Katie International now has a paid staff of
seven, and Katie receives an annual salary of $120,000. Aside from the
free public appearances, Katie charges $250 plus accommodations for
the Cleanse and $1,800 to $3,000 for the school, plus room and board.
"We're not trying to build anything, we're just trying to meet the
call," she says. "I don't have any ambition. I'm a woman without a
future."

Andy Bernstein, director of Byron Katie International, is a bit more
focused than his boss, who doesn't seek out forums for sharing The
Work. "I'm pushing it," Bernstein says. "We don't just answer phone
calls. It's not as passive as it seems. We have a product: four
questions, and a spokesperson: Katie. It moves the way any product
moves, whether it's Nike sneakers or anything else."

Katie plans to continue sharing The Work as long as people ask for it
and she is able. Still, she is preparing for the day when she isn't.
Hundreds of graduates of her school now lead groups of their own, and
her book will eventually reach many more people than her workshops
can. Although her wise pixie face twinkles on the book's cover, Katie
feels that the questions, and not the woman behind them, are what's
worth promoting. But her undeniable charisma is a selling point. She
plays down the import of discussing her awakening, yet she and
Mitchell already are at work on her autobiography. An early draft
suggests it will delve into Katie's cockroach moment, which otherwise
has been excised from her literature.

"The cosmic side of things is a big stumbling block for a lot of
people," says Jeff Gold, who is now on the board of The Work. "It's a
stumbling block for me, but who am I to say it didn't happen? She is
clear in claiming to not be enlightened, but I think they were smart
to keep it out of the first book."

Like many Byron Katie fans, Gold finds her practice useful regardless
of its origins, which is handy, since trying to confirm the more
incredible elements of her story is like looking for the footprints
where Jesus walked on water. Why have some of the key people and
places in her story been lost to history? Why didn't she ever get a
doctor to look at that bleeding tongue? (Her answer: "It was
beautiful, a stripe of red. It didn't hurt.")

With Mitchell conveniently nearby whenever Katie and I sit down to
talk, posing the question about how new religions are born is
irresistible. Is it possible that, generations hence, the story of a
woman with little education, suffering from acute depression and
spontaneously becoming a charismatic teacher will be an article of
some new faith?

"If we're lucky, people will have forgotten all of that, because it's
not about her, it's about The Work," says Mitchell. Still, he will
allow that "this kind of radical questioning is in the lineage of the
great spiritual traditions. The 'inquiry' is in Buddhist traditions
and my own Jewish tradition, from the book of Job to Spinoza." He
won't go so far, however, as to say that they are actively trying to
put a new brand of spirituality on the map. "I've never heard Katie
say, 'I have the truth.' It's not like that. It's not a doctrine," he
says. "She doesn't want to spread the word. She doesn't want a
following."

The Work's simplicity is seductive, as is Katie's apparent happiness.
Her calm acceptance of reality is as enviable as those unbreakable
fingernails. I wonder if a mere mortal can achieve either trait.

One day, Mitchell, Katie and I go to lunch. The restaurant we choose
has a half-hour wait for a table, so we walk to another place. Katie
is pleased: This other restaurant is the right one. No disappointment,
because she always loves what happens. When Katie's salad arrives, she
tastes the vinaigrette and crinkles her nose. She calls the waiter.
Seeming like a gal from Barstow, she asks, "Could I have some ranch
dressing?"

It is a relief to see even this little glimpse of desire in her.
Sometimes getting what one wants tastes even sweeter than accepting
what is.

Quote

I wonder if a mere mortal can achieve either trait.

Yeh, same as the LGAT. Inhuman expectations and standards.

Thanks for that article.

Quote
skeptic

Yeh, same as the LGAT. Inhuman expectations and standards.

Thanks for that article.

Yep.

Sounds like just another way to ~reframe~ or re-"contextualize" or dissociate or disengage from reality, despite her claim to be grounded in reality. A nother psycho/cogno switch/flip designed to make you feel better by ~creating~ a different reality, as though your initial interpretations were so faulty and worthless and your habitual way of seeing things was so problematic you daren't peep out your door in the morning without turning them on their heads and negotiating with some opposing universe.


Ellen

That's right!

BK uses attendees to "demonstrate". I get the idea that the subject feels the need to give the answer BK wants. Ya think? The effect, then, on the viewers is that BK just "turned around" the person and banished their woes. All in a matter of minutes. Like magic. The very doing of a (magic) show has a special effect on viewers.

The CD I got at the event has a demo of a woman (subject) who was upset (gasp!) because what she thought was a monogamous relationship was not. Her partner had told her he'd met a woman and was going to pursue a relationship with her.

The subject said she wants the guy to break up with the other woman and BK asked, is that true?

BK got the subject to see what's "wrong" with her, e.g. she's jealous, upset (i.e. she's human) so of course the guy wouldn't want to be with HER! Nice turn around BK.

The turn around: "I don't want him to break up with her and pursue a relationship with me". (mindgame: the truth is the lie, the lie is the truth)

Subject's "story": "He shouldn't fall in love in with another woman if he really wants to be with me". (this sounds about right to me, like, mutually exclusive). Is this true, BK asks.

At this point, BK is telling the subject how she thinks, telling her that even she doesn't believe her own lies. Subject seemed confused, by her sighs, silence and remarks.

BK asks, "Who would you be without this lie (that he shouldn't fall in love with someone else)?" BK coaches her into the "right" answer, but doesn't get the right one, so BK gives the right answer: "happy for him". The subject honestly, humanly says, "I can't go there."

BK asks, "Who would you be if you didn't hold the belief that he shouldn't fall in love with her?" and the subject sees the problem. She says, "Oh right, if it wasn't [i:d056f391ea]personal[/i:d056f391ea]?"

At one point, BK says "everything is imagined". And, "It's not really possible [to fall in love with someone else], you can only project yourself, no two people ever loved each other, there's only one, it's you". If you love yourself you can love another, but really, you're just loving yourself. Circletalk.

BK tells the subject that she wants to dictate who her partner loves so that SHE'LL feel better, so it's all about her, and the subject agrees.

The subject starts getting giddy. As I'm listening I'm thinking her brain is getting scrambled.[i:d056f391ea][/i:d056f391ea]

I see the similarities, especially in reframing and reality questioning, and also some significant differences between Katie and some other LGATs. Three big ones: money, control of materials and focus on doing the stuff in meetings.

On money, at the Landmark thing I went to, I was amazed at the anabashed emphasis on transferring money from the attendees to Landmark. I sat there in awe as the facilitator or whatever you call him stood in front of several hundred affluent and educated people and repeated that it was very important for them to make sure that any friend or family member they got to attend to one of the introductory meetings BRING THEIR CHECKBOOK. By comparison, Katie doesn't charge for the majority of her events, as far as I can tell, and her requests for money are comparatively very low profile, almost hard to find.

Also, Landmark and its ilk rigorously control the documents and other stuff they use during their sessions. Everything is copyrighted and they repeatedly threaten to suppress any attempt to publicly distribute it. Katie has lots of free stuff on her website, including a sizable sample from her first book. I'll note that book publishers are usually reluctant to give away freebies like this, which essentially present the entire book in compressed form, rather than merely excerpting a chapter that is usually only a fragment of the content and intended to get peopel interested enough to buy the whole book. There are also audiotapes and downloadable forms and lots of detailed instructions and FAQs that anybody can get without so much as registering. To me, that is un-LGAT-like.

Finally, as far as I can tell many if not most of the Katiedids don't go to the meetings or events and have never met Katie or any of the paid or trained facilitators. They do what I have been doing, which is read the book, look at the materials, try out some of the exercises and take what they find useful. It's pretty hard to mind-control anybody in this fashion, I'd say, and again is unlike the LGAT approach, which is focused on locking you up with a bunch of other people who, with the assistance of mind-control specialists, can eventually get you do do nearly anything.

I try to take the "Work" at face value: A predominantly spiritual approach with a lot of New Age gip-gip that neverthless contains at its core some interesting techniques for self-revelation. The inquiry and turnaround process has traction when it comes to unraveling your own thinking and attitudes. Not the whole toolbox, but a gadget or two I can make room for in my shop.

V