Byron Katie

Byron Katie has one job: to show people how to stop suffering. When Katie appears, lives change.

In the midst of an ordinary American life—two marriages, three children, a successful career—Katie entered a ten-year-long downward spiral into depression, agoraphobia, self-loathing, and suicidal despair. She drank to excess, her husband brought her pints of ice cream and codeine pills that she ate like candy, and she ended up weighing over two hundred pounds. She slept with a .357 Magnum revolver under her bed. Every day she prayed not to wake up the next morning, and it was only because of her concern for her children that she didn’t kill herself.

In 1986, at the bottom of a ten-year spiral into depression, rage, and self-loathing, Katie woke up one morning to a state of constant joy that has never left her. She realized that when she believed her stressful thoughts, she suffered, but that when she questioned them, she didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Her simple yet powerful process of inquiry is called The Work.

The Work consists of four questions and a turnaround, which is a way of experiencing the opposite of what you believe. When you question a thought, you see around it to the choices beyond suffering.

The Work is an embodiment of the wordless questioning that had woken up in her. She had lived and tested it. Now she formulated it, as if in slow motion, for other people to use. Over the past thirty-one years it has helped millions of people around the world begin to free themselves from stress, frustration, anger, and sadness.

Byron Katie's six books include the bestselling "Loving What Is, I Need Your Love Is That True?" and "A Thousand Names for Joy."