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.

Thoughts on Cassel going to Hawaii
The Kansas City Chiefs have officially announced that quarterback Matt Cassel has been named to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii on Jan 30. Cassel replaces an injured Tom Brady (didn’t that happen somewhere before?) as the No. 1 alternate. The following are some random thoughts on Cassel’s promotion: This is a nice reward for a player who made great strides in his second season in Kansas City. Cassel …
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Your standing the conference room with all your peers looking at you as your about to give your big presentation.  You were so confident that you were going to nail this, you’ve prepared for weeks.  Then you start thinking “I’m going to mess this up and fail big time”.  It is fair to say that people do have an inclination to think a certain way and have repetitive thoughts about events or situations that bring on anxiety.  The thoughts can be so repetitive that they mess up your ability to finish tasks, thus creating more anxiety and panic within us.  This type of thinking can become a terrible cycle that can be very difficult to undo. 

So how can people that suffer from repetitive anxious thoughts eliminate the intensity of the thought? 

1)      An anxious thought enters your mind and whatever the thought, the sequence of feelings is always the same.

The anxious thought comes in and you instantly react with fear. The fear you just felt sends a shock through your nervous system to the pit of your stomach. The reaction you’re having within your body makes you think of the thought over and over. The stronger the thoughts become the more your mind and body start to lose control completely.

2)      You start to question the thoughts, sometimes for an entire day.  The more you think about the thoughts the harder it seems for them to go away.

Why am I thinking about these thoughts? Why can’t I get this feeling to go away?

3)      How do you start to eliminate the unwanted anxious thoughts?

Don’t force the thoughts away, this is very important. Allow the thought to come in, the more comfortable you are with them the better. The thoughts will not go away fully, but you can change the way you react to them. When you become able to change your anxious thoughts the more free you become of them.

The most important thing to remember is everyone, and I mean everyone has anxious thoughts.  Most people as they have the anxious thought usually just think their just crazy thoughts and push them out of their mind immediately.  They see it for what it truly is a fleeting anxious thought and they just ignore it.  To people who have anxiety the anxious thought fuels out of control thoughts.  Choosing how to react to your anxious thoughts are key for reducing anxiety. 

Try to observe the thought you are having and then label it.  By labeling the thought you are calling out were the thought is coming from, as in fear.  Next, watch how the thought passes through your mind and don’t judge the thought just watch it.  Finally move your focus on to whatever you were doing when the thought came into your mind.

Anxious thoughts are hard to deal with especially for the already anxiety ridden person dealing with them.  Just like anything else in life it takes practice and patience with any new thing we learn, yes even techniques on reducing repetitive anxious thoughts.  If you would like to take a more in-depth look at these and other techniques you can follow this link http://anxietypanic.weebly.com.

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The faculty of thinking or reasoning in support of any object and subject of the world are logical or scientific thought. The faculty of thinking or reasoning in support of spiritual issues is spiritual thoughts. The product of mental activity with which we think about ourselves and God is called spiritual thoughts. The spiritual thoughts are different from the spiritual wisdom and logic or scientific thought.

Feelings of self and spiritual wisdom are related to God now. The spiritual thought is the collection of our submission on the issues and is linked to past or imagining the future. Spiritual thoughts are spiritual wisdom from the holy books of faith as the Bible, Koran, Gita or say holy people. The spiritual thoughts are creating our state of mind that the spiritual wisdom itself comes from the inner consciousness.

The thought that identifies the body with a lot of things and objects of the world are called logical or scientific thinking. The thought that snapped our identity with the body with a lot of things and objects of the world are called spiritual thoughts. The spiritual thought leads us to raise awareness and experience the true identity with itself. . All thoughts of inspiration, education mantra, and spiritual growth are spiritual thoughts.

Good life in happiness with spiritual thoughts. Many people living in the crisis of the illusion of knowledge, in the same place and similar situations. What you see with your eyes and hear with their ears is the system of logical thought. How do you feel and look beyond their experience with their eyes and hear with their ears is the spiritual thought. The sages say that the system of logical thought are simply illusory knowledge, perception, and will continue to evolve with the transformation of the mind. The wise live with the system of spiritual thought of all things essentially the base and their properties.

To purchase a system of thought of many things spiritual, we must study the basic substance of things and their properties and to download our attachment and hatred with her thoughts. To acquire true spiritual thoughts, we must explore the inner self which is created and its properties. Any system of logical thinking learned in a university is entitled to see with eyes and sight, hearing and order his thoughts. Therefore, the knowledge gained through the senses – an illusory consciousness.

As the system of the mind continues to transform the experience of age and education in college, all systems of human knowledge continues to evolve. What civilization is to continue to grow and learn new ways to study the basic substance of many things that are made and their properties, including the system of thought of human civilization, always changing?
. The sages say that the system of logical thought is simply our knowledge, perception, and will continue to evolve with the transformation of the mind.

The sacred books of different religions are a source of spiritual thoughts and the actual properties of many things and be inside. However, feeling, high level of meditation is necessary. The simple understanding of the significance of the eyes and ears is purely theoretical thought out. Therefore, many religious scholars are devoid of certain spiritual thoughts

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