Going to Work Naked: My Journey to Byron Katie (1)
Anonymous
Going to Work Naked: My Journey to Byron Katie
Carol L. Skolnick
You might say I have been a spiritual masochist. In my desire to know myself, for many years I attended various “experience the truth” programs and meetings with different gurus, teachers, and masters of one method or another.
The truth would burn me to a crisp and each time my life would fall apart, my belief system got turned on its ear and I started all over again on my path like a blind, lost baby...yet I continued to go, and go, and go. I would do almost anything in order to get at that core of love that I knew – I just knew – was hiding somewhere in my hardened heart.
So in March of 2001, after several days of weepily and joyfully priming myself in the company of Pamela Wilson – a loving, gentle, advaita-style teacher of self-inquiry – I gathered up my courage, ripped open my chest, and handed over my heart to Byron Katie, to undergo that psycho-surgery-sans-anesthesia of hers that she calls The Work.
Actually, I'd been preparing for Katie for over a month.
This thing I was about to do felt more like a calling or a pilgrimage than an intention to take a workshop or hear someone speak.
Just prior to New Year's 2001, my friend Smriti had shoved an old, out-of-print book into my hands as she was about to leave on an extended trip to India.
“You have to read this,” she insisted, and told me a truncated version of the contents...about how a woman who had been at death's door emotionally had “a moment of clarity” and became self-realized when a cockroach crawled over her footwhile she lay on the floor of a halfway house for women with eating disorders. This sordid tale was the last thing on earth I wanted to read, but I figured I wouldn't burden Smriti with my curmudgeonliness when she was off to see her guru.
So I accepted the book, but I shelved it. One desolate day in January, I decided to take a peek. The cover photograph presented a pretty woman who looked impossibly happy and radiant. I cracked the spine. The writing verged on hagiography in its depiction of a wife, mother, and successful real estate developer from Barstow, California who, despite living the “good life,” had been abjectly miserable for much of her existence until her sudden awakening at age 43.
That struck me; I'd just celebrated my forty-third birthday. Now intrigued, I ploughed past the platitudes and read further... until I found things I could not stand to read; such as Katie's story about her early childhood molestation at the hands of a neighbor... and her understanding that she went to him, that she was reaching for love however insanely, and that she took responsibility for what
happened.
“Nobody can hurt me,” Byron Katie says. “That's my job. I do that.”
I hated this.
Monica Pignotti
I'm not sure how this is on-topic for alt.religion.scientology, but
just in case this was posted by a Scientologist who thought the
"psycho-surgery" was literal, it isn't. Katie does not literally do
psychosurgery, but just the same, based on other reports of people who
attended, I think I'll pass, since it sounds like the food at her
seminars is just horrible, not to mention the other alleged emotional
abuse she put people through:
http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/2008/02/byron-katie-is-either-going-to.html
Looks like poor Carol went from the frying pan into the fire!
Monica
realpch
Well, if the foods no good...
: D
Peach
--
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