In life there seem to be few things as decisive for our level of happiness as the presence (or absence) of love. One has only to look at the dozens of titles in the Amsterdam ABC’s White Room on How to Win Friends and Influence People, attracting your Soulmate, or Getting the Love You Want, to realize how deeply imbedded the search for love and approval is in the human psyche.
To be loved, to be approved of – isn’t that what we are all looking for?
Yes, says Byron Katie, and that’s exactly why so many of us are miserable!
This makes her approach to love the complete opposite of the more mainstream titles on human relationships. The main problem with the collective search for love, she says, is that it is based on a false premise. Looking for love means love is not present already. Someone is missing in our lives, a “special someone” who will make us happy. Byron Katie calls this ‘The Thought that Kicks you Out of Heaven’.
You see, when we are looking for love, we are not coming from our True Self. Our True Self knows that we are perfect just the way we are, and that we are being supported and loved by all of Life. The moment we start to look for outside love and approval, we move out of this ‘Heaven’ – or state of Total Acceptance of What Is – into the ‘Hell’ of Expectations and Neediness. You could also say that we move out of our True Self into our Ego. And when we operate from our Ego, we resist reality. Something has to change in order for us to be happy: we need to find a lover, or the lover we already have should love us more/differently/longer/more intensely/less intensely. There is really no end to our Ego’s list of things that need to be changed So That We Can Be Happy. Our Ego is very creative when it comes to finding fault with reality!
And according to Byron Katie in I Need Your Love – Is That True?, it is exactly this resistance to reality that causes our suffering. Our thoughts of what is wrong, and of what is lacking, block our experience of the abundance of love that is already present in our lives – and in ourselves.
That is why she has developed a technique called The Work, that exposes the misperceptions hidden in our Ego’s thoughts of lack and need. The Work questions our thinking and consists of four parts: Is this thought true? Can I absolutely know for sure that it is true? How do I react when I believe this thought? Who or what would I be without this thought?
Then comes the ‘turn-around’: turn the thought around, and find three genuine examples of how each turn-around is as true or truer than the original statement.
If we take the example of the thought “I need you to love me”, and follow through on the four steps, we come to realize that we cannot be absolutely sure that you need to love me (because the reality might be, that you don’t. And how can we argue with reality?). We find that when we believe this thought, we suffer, and that without this thought, we feel happier. If we turn the thought around – into “I need to love you”- we might realize that we have been the one who had been withholding love. Because by focusing on our neediness and our desire that you change your behaviour and love us like we want you to, we forgot to really love and accept you!
Byron Katie’s four questions and the turn-around assist us in dismantling our Ego and its painful story of not-good-enoughness. The Work helps us to stop resisting the reality of What Is, and moves us out of our Ego into our True Self. When we re-center in our True Self, we realize we do not need anything – we overflow with things to give!
That is why Byron Katie’s teachings can be represented by the image of the beggar at the gate, sitting on a chest. The beggar, impoverished to the bone, turns to bypassers for even the smallest gift – all the while not realizing that the chest he is sitting on, is filled with gold. His attention to the bypassers and his belief in his own state of lack prevented him from discovering the wealth that was within his reach. Byron Katie’s method of questioning our flawed thoughts helps us to turn our needy, outward focus inward and to discover the abundance of love awaiting us there.
Recommended Reading: (more…)
ABC’s Spiritual Book Club meets once a month on Sunday, from 3pm to 5pm at The ABC Treehouse in Amsterdam to discuss a title from the American Book Center’s Consciousness section.
Our new bookpick is The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda. 
Gary began his piano study at the age of seven with David Sokoloff in Philadelphia. As a concert pianist he has appeared worldwide in recitals, including 12-hour Beethoven marathon concerts in which he performs all 32 piano sonatas of this great composer.
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Ah yes, it’s December, the time of looking over the past year and deciding what was great, what was so-so, and what could be done better next year. In what is now 
