An Interview with Byron Katie

Byron Katie is the inventor of The Work, a method of self-inquiry based on four simple questions. Sheexperienced an unexpected awakening in 1986 following years of severe depression.

By SUNNY MASSAD

Sunny Massad: Now did you even know what freedom was before?

Byron Katie: Yeah. Death! That was it. I obsessed suicide. I thought I had to get dead to get free.

SM: So did you get married, have children?

BK: Yeah, I got married. I married the man I dated in high school.And then we had three children. Then I divorced him. We weretogether many, many years and married 14 and then, several yearsafter we divorced, I married a man who I'm still married to and we'vebeen married almost 20 years andjust raised the children.

SM: And how old are your kids now?

BK: 36 and 31 and 29 I think

SM: So, then what happened? I mean you were just kind of movingthrough your lifedid you work? You were raising three kids

BK: I always worked. I was always self-employed. I always knew howto make money. I was good at that. I was really good at that. Then after my divorce I started becomingjust very depressed andwell, long before my divorce actually. And pretty soon I couldn't leave myhouse. It was very difficult. And then pretty soon I couldn't leave my bedroom. I did that for like 8 to 10years: the depression.

SM: And you continued to work?

BK: Yeah. As long as it was from my bedroom. Cuz the work I did was over the phone. And I couldsend other people to do what I couldn't do. My story is what people have told me, really, and so goodyou keep asking. [Long pause.] Anyway, long story short, I ended up in a halfway house.

SM: They were going to help your depression?

BK: Yeah. I was very suicidal, very depressed. Agoraphobic. Paranoid. Really pretty hopeless. Justobsessing the suicide. Many years. So I went to this halfway house andthe women were so afraid ofme that I was put in an attic that was the only way I could stay. They put me in an attic up above.And I slept on the floor in there. And one morning I was asleep on the floor and I felt this thing crawlover my foot and I looked down and it was a cockroach. I opened my eyes and [pause] what was bornwas not meand, the way I tell it isshe rose, she walked, she apparently talked. She was delighted. Itis so ecstatic to be born and not born. It sees, and sees everything, without a concept. It's amazing.

SM: Now, you're in the attic, the cockroach crawls over your foot, and you have an opening of somesort?

BK: That's it. Most definitely.

SM: Would it work to call it a sustained transcendent experience?

BK: I don't really call it anything

SM: Well, would the words match considering how it's described here? [I point to Maslow'sdescription of transcendence, and then my description of sustained transcendence.]

BK: I would say, yes. Everything. It transcended itself and itself was everything. It totally transcendedthat. It's like this. Every moment's like this. It's like if you [lifts hand in front of face] is to be amazed.Just to see this hand, is amazing! I mean, I eat that food [points to the food], I am eating myself. It is sogood! I mean, every moment, It is Itself now. But to see this, you get still with that. Or this. And youdie. You dissolve into it. Anyone would. Just to get still. And I call it, who we are without a story. Butit'sI call it love, because I don't have another word. But just to see my hand in front of my face, or myfoot, or the table, or anything, it's to see it for the first time. Here are the words that I would use: 'It's aprivilege beyond what can be told.' It's self experiencing the mere image of itselfborn [inaudible inlove?].

SM: Mmm.

BK: Yeah. They said this is your husband. I said, good. These are your children. I said, good. Yourname is Katie. Okie dokey.

SM: So you truly had a disidentification. Even of memory?

BK: Everything. Everything. Everything.

SM: So how did your behaviour change?

BK: Radically. Radically. Extreme opposite. It took a 180-degree shift. Totally. Total shift.

SM: So, some practical things: You were spending vast quantities of time in bed, you were depressed,and when the shift occurred?

BK: None.

SM: No time in bed?

BK: None. Three hours sleep and not eating.

This interview appeared originally in The Noumenon Journal, summer 2000/2001. Used withpermission.

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Sunny Massad, Ph.D., is a motivational psychologist and certified hypnotherapist. She lives inHawaii. Click here for her website.

A Thousand Names for Joy

By Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell

Byron Katie's husband, Stephen Mitchell, explains that early in theirmarriage he used to read to her from great spiritual teachers like Lao-Tzu and the Buddha. She called these people "his dead friends." Katiewould take in their words, sometimes nodding and saying "that'saccurate." But occasionally, to his surprise, she corrected theirstatements with one of her own.

He believed that she was speaking as the peer of these ancient sages,as somebody who has had the same experiences and can speak aboutenlightenment with equal authority. Eventually Stephen decided toread to her his translation of the Tao Te Ching, all 81 chapters, and

write down her responses. Those responses became the raw material for this book.

Where to Buy

Amazon

A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are

Published by Three Rivers Press (2008)

304 pages

ISBN-10: 0307339246

ISSBN-13: 978-0307339249

This page was published on October 23, 2001 and last revised on February 14, 2014.

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