All Thoughts

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com. In this excerpt, Byron Katie shares on her moment of transformation and turning our negative thoughts and beliefs around.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Byron Katie, founder of The Work and author of three best selling books whose mission is to teach people how to end their own suffering.

Kevin: I want to talk to you about how you got to where you are now.

Byron: Excellent. So how I got here was I was extremely depressed. I didn’t know how people got there, the there that we all want to be, but I knew that if I didn’t know how to get out of that suffering, Kevin, I just thought you had to die to get out of that kind of suffering. For this I had no clue. I didn’t have a religious background, nothing, no one and my self esteem was so low that I actually slept on the floor next to my bed.

Kevin: Huh.

Byron: And I didn’t believe I even deserved that, to sleep on a bed. So, one morning as I lay sleeping, actually a cockroach crawled over my foot and woke me up and I opened my eyes and in place of all that darkness was a joy that I try to describe and I’m unable to, because it always falls short, but what I can tell you was the suffering was gone and it was so much better than anything I have ever experienced. In fact, it was really beyond experience . These thoughts hit my head just like they hit everyone. I was without thought. It was just that gap that Deepak talks about and all of a sudden all these thoughts just hit that gap and, Kevin, after seeing, you know, that moment without thought it was such an education that when the thoughts poured in I could no longer believe them. They were there. They were loud and clear and I began to laugh and laugh and laugh.

So I like to say I was born out of the laughter and it was long, long, long overdue and so to this day thoughts are my friends and I invite everyone to be a friend to thought, that thought is not an enemy. Our mind is not an enemy and I invite people to find out for themselves, to check it out for themselves and the way to do that is I offer people four questions, just four simple questions that you’ve put up against the concept.

For example, he doesn’t care about me, or she doesn’t care about me. It could be any concept, but if we look at that one the first four questions are: Is it true he doesn’t care about me? Can you absolutely know that it’s true? Third question, How do you react when you believe that? And that gives everyone the experience of noticing that all the feelings and everything they live out is in accordance with what they are believing and mind is cause and The Work – that’s what I call it – The Work it shows that clearly. Then the fourth question, who would you be without that thought? In other words, don’t drop the thought. Thoughts aren’t enemies. Just simply, who would you be if you didn’t believe that?

And then consider that and with meditation, all four questions and then I invite people to do the 180, the turnaround with it and turn it around. He does care about me and then get very still and notice all the feelings that surface around that. Just the idea of that, of confronting that, of looking at that and sometimes it takes a lot of courage to do the work, but it takes more courage not to. You begin to find examples of where he was kind. When the mind opens, it goes into a whole other polarity and there’s no trickery here. It’s the real thing, genuine. We don’t have to come up with untrue positives on views. We don’t have to be kind about it. It doesn’t take away the others. That’s not the point. It’s just we’re giving them a new view. Another turnaround is I don’t care about him and define examples of that and then we feed them to make amends and if we’ve hurt them to find how can we make this right? Another turnaround, I don’t care about me and my goodness, Kevin, when some of us look at that it’s like oh, my goodness. How can I expect him to care about me when I don’t care about me? No one would see me in the horrible way, the distorted way that I viewed me, but I didn’t have The Work, so I had to continue to believe my thoughts about this wonderful, wonderful human being called Byron Katie, that I’ ve come to respect.

Kevin: So, Katie, how did it develop? Did it come from that moment?

Byron: It came from that moment.

Kevin: Okay.

Byron: I would tell people, “Your thoughts aren’t true, you’re thoughts aren’t true and they would look at me like “Oh, my gosh. She’s crazy.” But still people wanted to know this freedom. I was such a turnaround that my family didn’t recognize me. My friends didn’t recognize me . I was agoraphobic. It was very difficult for me to leave my house, even my bedroom more often than not. So here I am with my doors wide open, people traveling in from all over the world to see what this experience was about and so when their minds were open to it I would help them. They couldn’t hear their own thoughts, so I would invite them to put their thoughts on paper and try to find, what I call, a judge of the world worksheet and they would write their thoughts down and because they were doing it themselves, they really got that these were the thoughts that I, myself am thinking. So when they wrote them down they had to own them when I questioned “Is it true?” Is it true the thing you believed all your life? Are you sure it’s true? Do you believe everything your mommy told you?

Kevin: Wow.

Byron: Basically they do.

Kevin: Processing and evaluating your thoughts to some can be a scary thing. I think it is to me sometimes.

Byron: Oh, my goodness. You never know who you are without your thoughts, but what I can tell you, Kevin, from my experience and the experience of millions of people that are doing to work is they always come out as kinder human beings, more open, more prosperous, healthier and I went from this more than 200 pound woman that couldn’t move to literally not fat. My heart rate — the physical body has everything to do with what you believe in.

Kevin: Let’s talk about that now. What do you think is the role between emotional health and your thoughts and physical pain, physical ailments, physical manifestation?

Byron: Well, when we believe our thoughts we suffer and when we question them we don’t suffer. I have come to see that this is true for every human being. So any time we’re confused and I’ve noticed the confusion is the only suffering and any time we’re confused I invite people to put it on paper. Any time you’re confused, you put it on paper and then just simply put it up against these four questions and the questions are always free on my website. You don’t have to sign up for anything. You don’t have to log in. There they are front and center and it tells you how to work them and it has everything to do with emotional health. It’s like the third question: how do you react when you think the thought they don’t like you? What happens? What happens, Kevin? When you got back to middle school or the yard when you were five or six years old or a teenager, what happens when you think the thought they don’t like me?

Kevin: You kind of walk away or kind of put your head down.

Byron: You walk away and you kind of put your head down. Okay, that’s how we react when we believe that thought. So that’s emotional. So what happens, it doesn’t end there. When you believe that thought the next time someone just looks at you in the classroom you think they’re one of them and then you go home and your mom is really happy to see you, but your self-esteem is low and you think “How could she? No one does.” I mean it begins to transfer our whole lives. It makes up our whole life and we have just looked at one stressful thought. “They don’t like me.” Now, who would you be on that same playground or whatever images you were picturing — you see that little boy?

Kevin: Mm hmm.

Byron: Okay, look at the same exact situation. Who would you be without the thought the thought “They don’t care about me?”

Kevin: So without that thought “They don’t care about me,” just, I guess playing with them.

Byron: You’ve got it. So what we’re learning here, Kevin, from you, is that what we are believing dictates our emotional life and what we’re believing in our emotional life dictates the world for the rest of our lives. It’s like if you look at your life prior to believing they don’t care about you, oh, what a happy little guy and then little kids don’t have The Work and big kids don’t all have it, but even if they turn that around “They don’t care about me,” turn it around, “I don’t care about them.” Look at me. I’m the one walking away. I’m the one that won’t talk to them again, because I’m believing they don’t care about me. I’m the one not caring about them, because of what I believe and they don’t care about me turned around, I don’t care about me. I’m costing me my life on the playground, if nothing else. I’m costing me my friends and associations and play time and our whole life and another turnaround is, “They do care about me.” And then just get still and look at that little boy and see what he missed. It won’t change your whole life today, because we are that little boy until we go back and take a look and get it squared away and we can do it from a chair. We can change our whole life from where we sit and he can go back and actually, you can see. They’ll say “Come on, come on.” You think “Oh, they don’t really care about me. They’re just trying to be nice.” It’s like as though we see them as liars, but if we go back, we can hear them calling and we don’t have to imagine it, even though imagination is everything. We can go back to how we saw reality and we can hear the people we ignored, because we were so into believing the thought “They don’t like me.” So in a nutshell that’s The Work and it is. People try to change their life and life isn’t going to ever change. It doesn’t change. We still have war on this planet. We haven’t really advanced. There is only one way to change the world and that is to do the inner work and end the war with the self and then everything that is projected out of it, the entire world shifts when you do. That is how to change the world.

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Tags: Around, Author, Byron, Information, Katie, Negative, Shares, Thoughts, Turning
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Higher Selves Quote:

The Thought Form Body is an invisible body that contains realities that have been created through every thought generated by any individual at any point in time.  Within this envelope [energy field] dwells many different ‘yous.’ There is the ‘you,’ for example, who lives in this altered reality as an actual energy identity who is poor, who has no money. This altered reality has been created by you based on every thought you’ve projected dealing with a state of financial lack.

This altered reality that is the ‘you’ in a state of financial lack actually seeks to reinforce and empower itself, the altered reality that it has become. This then, quite outside of your conscious thought process, allows that altered reality to continue to grow and manifest its power and its authority over you in the physical form in the physical reality.

Imagine what it would be like to hold on to every thought you have ever had from the first moment you were born. Imagine that each thought was actual energy that did not disappear but hung out in some energy field surrounding you. And imagine that this thought energy had some magnetic qualities so that every type of thought you’d had over the years drew all other similar thoughts to it, like magnets with the same polarity. Then imagine that all these thoughts, or energy identities, have created actual altered realities in the space around yourself. And as you grew up, these energy identities, and the altered realities they created, became larger and larger with each thought.

To illustrate, let’s begin with an example of how thoughts create energy identities and how these, in turn, create altered realities. 

Perhaps you’re someone who has focused on your weight throughout your life. Maybe as a small child you went through a chubby stage, and sometimes people around you would suggest that you refrain from a second helping. At first you paid it no mind, but then your consciousness took it in. You began to think that you were bigger than your cousins and friends the same age. You started thinking thoughts of needing to eat less candy and desserts. You found yourself rating how some friends or family members looked based on their weight. The issue built slowly for you as you went through being teased in school. 

As an adult, you’ve struggled with your weight, trying diet after diet with limited success. And all this time, you’ve been harboring thoughts about being overweight. These similar thoughts are magnetically attracted to each other, building thought forms such as “I’m too fat,” “I eat too much,” “I’m a failure at losing weight,” and/or “I’m unlovable because I’m fat.” All these thought forms tirelessly develop an altered reality of your struggling with your weight.  

Thought Form Body

Thoughts of every type have created thought forms in each of us. They come in all sizes—some tiny and some huge, with many in between, depending on the degree of thought put into them. As the Higher Selves stated in the above quote, the invisible envelope (energy field) around us, the place where these positive and negative energy identities call home, is the Thought Form Body. It isn’t actually a physical body but is instead held in an etheric energy field everyone carries with them. It contains all the thoughts of joy, fear, love, hate, hurt, illness, wealth, poverty, and ideas of the self, others, relationships, work, play, and on and on. All thoughts are held here, magnetically attracting similar thoughts from many sources, thereby building and strengthening all of our thought forms. They create all the altered realities that live with us in our Thought Form Body. 

Suspending disbelief for a minute, let’s take this a few steps further by looking at how our mind works. Do we tend to think more positively or negatively as we go throughout our day? Most of you know the answer to this already.

For example, if we wake up feeling good, having had a good night’s sleep, we might think, “Oh, I feel great today! I have so much energy; I’m sure this will be a good day.” And then we go on our way and may never think of it again. Despite feeling really good, we actually tend to spend little time thinking about it. Feeling good helps us focus on the things we have to accomplish that day, resulting in thoughts geared toward those activities other than the state of feeling good. 

But what happens if we sleep poorly and wake up with a backache, headache, or stiff neck? Don’t we often express a litany of complaints about it to friends or co-workers? And if a repairman or deliveryman comes by and politely asks, “How are you,” what do we say?  If we feel good, we most likely just say, “Fine, and you?”  But if our neck still hurts, we say, “Well, since you asked, I am having a bad day, starting with . . .”  

The tendency to dwell on the negative outweighs our tendency to think positively, and every day we do so we strengthen those misery magnets. This means that when we look at the balance or the ratio of negative energy identities to positive ones, the scale weighs heavily on the negative side. This serves none of us well.

Drive to Manifestation

Thought forms are soulless and mindless. They lack consciousness. However, they carry the power of magnetic attraction. This magnetic energy is working 24/7. In fact, it does not just attract our own thoughts but all similar thoughts from many sources, including other people. This is not a conscious act any more than an actual magnet consciously attracts. What is the result of all this attraction?

The result of magnetic attraction is that the energy identities (and the altered realities they create) continue to build in strength. At the point that they’re strong enough, they manifest into our physical reality. In fact, their sole purpose is to manifest. The manifestation process from all of our energy identities is what forms our outer expression or, in other words, our lives. 

For example, if it is cold and rainy outside, we may think throughout the day that we have to keep warm and dry so we don’t get sick. We see ads on TV about various cold remedies, which remind us to check what we have on hand just in case. We remember the time last year when we got the worst cold ever and had to miss work. Flu season is here and we plan to get a flu shot. We believe that all schools are breeding grounds for illnesses and have no patience for parents who send their children to school with a cold. We also believe that we are susceptible to every germ with which we come in contact. In this way, we are empowering our illness thought form (one that we already have) over and over again. And what do you know? Despite all our efforts to prevent it, we come down with a massive cold two weeks later and blame it on the time we spent helping out at our daughter’s pre-school. 

In fact, getting sick was a result of the altered reality of illness gaining enough strength to manifest itself in our physical reality as a cold. It attracted the opportunity when you were asked to volunteer to read to your child’s pre-school class. This then triggered and empowered your beliefs (based on your thoughts) that you were now exposed to the germs that you were convinced would make you sick. And they did.

Isn’t it just that colds are contagious? No. If that were the case, every teacher, parent, and student who came in contact with children would get sick. Each individual responds to each situation based on what thought forms he/she is creating for him/herself. That is why some children/teachers have perfect attendance and others are chronically sick or somewhere in between. Of course, this process is more complex than I have presented. But the basic principles are the same.

Other examples are: If you have a large victim thought form, it will magnetically attract conditions that will make you a victim once more. If you have a failure pattern, the thought forms will bring in situations that will again result in failure. If you bring in mates that make you crazy with their infidelity, the thought forms may keep you in a cycle of betrayal.  Thought forms are the source for the patterns we have in our lives. 

Habit Body

In addition to the Thought Form Body, we also carry a Habit Body. The Habit Body is another invisible envelope of energy (field) surrounding us that contains imprints of every thought and every action. Thoughts create energy identities and habit imprints simultaneously. And as the imprints of similar thoughts get deeper and deeper, they become our most ingrained habits. As we smoke/worry/procrastinate/and so on, the imprints/ruts are reinforced again. In other words, the depth of a habit imprint in the Habit Body is relative to how often we have thought the thought and/or acted—the deeper the rut, the more automatic and intense the habit. There are no energy identities in the Habit Body, but the habit imprints empower the thoughts and vice versa. 

Have you ever noticed that you wake up five mornings out of seven at the exact same time? Or that you get a cup of coffee without thinking before you start any project? Or that you put on your left shoe before your right one every morning? These are simple, repetitive habits that are easy to see and are relatively harmless in the scheme of things. Of course, we all have deeper and more complicated ones, so it is very important that we pay attention to all our habits. These habit imprints work with Thought Forms to reinforce our patterns. These two working together are in part what makes it so difficult to change things about ourselves with which we are unhappy. The more ingrained a habit, the more we act on it and think about it. The thought form gains power and then manifests again – and then again.

One of my habits for over ten years was to sleep only three or four hours a night. Once I’d wake up, I would never be able to go back to sleep, resulting in chronic exhaustion. Fortunately, by doing the exercises that the Higher Selves taught us, I was successful at changing this pattern, and those sleepless years are now a distant memory. Now I sleep at least five to six hours a night with few exceptions. I still wake up many nights, but the difference is I go back to sleep. Of course, five or six hours are not enough. Fortunately, I have continued to improve, sleeping seven plus hours a night at least three times every week. Habits can be changed, and you can do it too. 

The Overall Picture

Remember that we live as humans in a Free Will Kingdom, that we choose how our lives unfold. If something happens that changes our thought patterns for a day or week, we will empower different energy identities and habit imprints and will, therefore, manifest differently than we did in prior weeks. 

One example many can relate to is the unexpected death of a young friend or family member. The new vulnerability we now feel may make us realize that we have been complacent about life. As a result, we decide to focus more on preventing illness by eating healthy food and exercising. We also become more open to telling our family every day how much we love them and perhaps resolve to work harder to be a better person so that there are no regrets if we die young. Were we thinking this way before? No, but we are now. So our energy identities and habit imprints are changing as a reflection of the changes in our thought patterns.

What is more significant, however, is how often we are determined to change only to find our old habits return. How many of us with great intentions find ourselves back in the same place within days/weeks/months? How many times have we had to use the same New Year’s resolution because we didn’t accomplish it this year or the prior years? Why are there so many new diets on the market, multiple no-smoking aids, a myriad of solutions for depression, insomnia, etc? Why are there so many self-help books? Because for all our grand efforts and deep desire to change, we predictably find ourselves back in the same place, having made little lasting forward movement. This does not feel good. There are reasons why change is so hard and there is more to it than just thinking positive thoughts. Let’s take a look at the Law of Attraction.

The Law of Magnetic Attraction Clarified 

Higher Selves Quote:

Thought forms are what carry the impact of what you will outwardly manifest. This is not a process that will be reached through affirmations or through consciously speaking words. For the process of thought forms is one that goes very, very deep. Thought forms are carried from lifetime to lifetime so that the buildup of these “altered realities” is very intense and very powerful.

What exactly is the Law of Attraction? It seems to be the basis of many metaphysical self-help books (including The Secret) and even has its place in some religious teachings. Simply stated, it posits that thoughts are energy and are magnetic in nature. They attract to you situations and people that match your predominant thoughts, whether conscious or unconscious. The bottom line, therefore, is like attracts like. The more positively you think, the more positive your life will be. Every individual is responsible for what they bring into their lives. Is there more to it than this? Yes.

There needs to be more than positive thought to create real change in your life. Of course, there are people who have changed their thoughts from the negative to positive, who have brought more good into their lives than before. But what does it mean for those of us who didn’t find success by thinking positively, yet worked as hard or harder than the others who did? What about those who achieved results but didn’t recognize that what they got was either the exact right result (even if unexpected) or that it was only the first step in a process that would lead them to the final goal? What about the patterns that keep recurring in life despite the efforts to change them? Or the emotional upheavals that make us behave in ways we’re not proud of? 

What has been missing in the prior teachings on the Law of Attraction is the fact that it has not been fully understood. The Higher Selves didn’t change the Law. They explain how it works. And there are two misconceptions that need to be cleared up. The first one is that a positive thought does not negate or replace a negative thought. It only empowers the positive energy identities while the negative ones remain to also magnetically attract negative situations, conditions and people into our lives.  Because we harbor so much more of the negative, the positives we empower through our thoughts are still extremely weak compared to the powerful negatives.

The second misconception is that even if you never think a negative thought ever again, it doesn’t mean that the negative energy identities go away. Once created, the thought energy exists forever. Leaving those negative altered realities in place is what makes it so difficult for us to change. Whether negative or positive, the energy remains in place in our etheric bodies as thought forms and habit imprints. When these are positive, we can rejoice. When they are negative, we are concerned with what we do about them. What we must do is to neutralize the negative energies to render them harmless and incapable of magnetically attracting anything that could hurt us.  Neutralizing the negatives and using that energy to empower our light is the key to change.  Again, the Higher Selves didn’t change the Law of Attraction but added details about how it functions. 

The Shift From Victim to Taking Charge

Once we accept that we are living in a Free Will Kingdom, and that we are making both conscious and unconscious choices that create our experiences, we can find our way to take responsibility for what happens to us. So the shift goes from blaming someone, something or some event for our problem/s to looking at ourselves and asking, “Why did I bring this into my life?” “How can I change this reality?” Or “How can I prevent it from happening again?”

There is no judgment here. We are not all screw-ups who just can’t get it right.  Instead, we acknowledge that we are all experiencing the human condition.  Everyone has challenges to face, joys to experience, moments of wonder and moments of despair. What will be explained is the way to be actively involved in how your life unfolds. There is no magic pill to take and presto . . .you have changed. If it took years and lifetimes to develop our patterns, undoing these patterns won’t be instantaneous. However, with consistent effort, we can change our patterns, find what was hidden and untapped, and definitely improve our lives significantly. 

In a year from now we will all be one year older. We can still be in the same place, coping with the same issues. Or we can use the simple Higher Self techniques and make this year and every year a witness to us becoming much more of what we want to be. We understand our conscious choices. And now we understand how our own thought forms and habit imprints, through the process of magnetic attraction, work with our conscious choices to create the outer expression we call our lives. Someone else isn’t creating our lives. It isn’t Mother Nature, your jerky boss, or a vindictive god picking on you. We are busy making and playing out our patterns consciously and unconsciously, then, taking what life gives us and handling it as best we can. Now is the time to be in charge but it is wrong to just focus on the positive and neglect the negative. There are techniques available to enable us to do the neutralizing we need to do.  We are not doomed. We are not stuck. We are not powerless.

Tags: Negative, Positive, Really, Subconscious, Thoughts, Works
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