Week Two, Day Two: LOVE
Turn complaints to gibberish
Refine and dissolve ALL complaints with the
“Work of Byron Katie.”
In love, we have our moments when we are not particularly thrilled with what the other person said.
If this person is our “True Love,” these words often hurt the worst.
One: They are our True Love. They aren’t supposed to say harsh/ mean/ selfish/ inconsiderate/ disrespectful things to us.
Two: They have been with us for awhile and know our weak points, and this is often where they go when they want a little blood.
Three: They “love us.” They aren’t supposed to want a little blood. (This is the same as One.)
And how many times have we counter-attacked, pointed out their hypocrisy, showed them how they do or say even worse things than they just said about us.
Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
It’s grade school stuff.
And we fall for it.
We have this ancient and immature story: They started it, so…. What they said isn’t “fair,” so…..That wasn’t nice, etc, so, we get to retaliate….
This is all bullshit.
Why?
The results, the results, the results. Anytime we’ve tried tit for tat, it’s been a disaster.
And we don’t have to do this bullshit anymore.
This can be nipped in the bud, by taking our gibberish way of saying the complaints and doing a five part process with them.
This sounds like a lot.
Well, it’s “work.”
And it’s work that can do six months of therapy in a couple of hours.
Love Game # 8
Before you feel like saying a complaint, don’t.
Write down a statement of the complaint in gibberish.
Then do the work of Byron Katie on your statement.
What’s the work of Byron Katie?
Stick around. It’s a system discovered by a woman named Katherine in 1986, out of immense suffering. She was obese and chain smoking and depressed and alcoholic and a mess.
And then she “woke up,” or as she says, “had a moment of clarity.”
But is was really, really clear clarity, so she started laughing and feeling at total peace and bliss with the world, since all of a sudden she didn’t believe any of her thoughts.
She was free.
Her suffering was all gone. She was 43. Suffering was over.
Except when it wasn’t.
If a thought of complaint (and so many of them are) came to her brain, say the old fashioned thought that “My Mother shouldn’t have….,” then suffering would roar back.
All the more painful from her new state of almost full time bliss.
And so she had evidence right there immediately: I am suffering because of my thoughts.
And this method came to her: Write down the thought, Ask four questions and do the “turn around.”
Write it down to slow it down, so you don’t go over and over in your head.
Ask four questions: let’s find out if the thought is true? Let’s find out the difference between believing the thought and not believing it.
So, here’s the game.
- Think the complaining thought
- Don’t say it
- Write down the thought, in squiggles and wiggles, as if writing gibberish
- Ask four questions
- Turn it around
And what are the four questions?
Let’s say the thought is…%^&*#@%
Here’s the questions;
- Is it true? In writing, you’d write, Is %^&*#@% true?
- Is it absolutely true? In writing…. Is %^&*#@% absolutely true?
- How do I react/ feel/ live when I believe this thought? In writing: When I believe that %^&*#@% how do I feel? Actually write down what you feel: sad, angry, hurt, victim, or whatever you feel. Write what happens to your body: I tense up here, I stop my breathing, I shrink down. How do you live: I avoid, or I numb our, or….
- Who or what I’d be without this thought? In writing: When I don’t have the thought that %^&*#@% who or what am I?
Discover what’s left when you aren’t taking this personally. They still do or did what they do or did.
But you don’t have the %^&*#@% thought that is complaining, attacking, to come between you and simply being present .
In the present you might see the other person as they are.
In the present you might remember what you enjoy and sense in your body and your life right now.
And now, what’s the turn around?
And here we do the other way of looking at the world.
This can be an art form just in itself.
Let’s make it, it’s own love game.
Love Game #9: Whenever you think about a flaw in another person, find that flaw in yourself.
They are selfish: find it in yourself.
They don’t respect you: you don’t respect them.
They fudge the truth sometimes (lie): find where you fudge the truth/ lie.
This seems harsh.
It actually frees us up for a sense of humor about how we are much more similar to our so-called opponent than we’d like to think.
That’s the “turn around” in the Work of Byron Katie.
You should listen to me more, “turns around” to I should listen to you more.
You should appreciate me more, “turns around” to … I should appreciate you more.
Good.
Okay, that’s enough to change your life immensely and completely.
A story about my life changing once because of the “turn around.”
This was a whiles back when the girlfriend, whom we’ll call Sally, and I were in heaven making gardens in Sonoma, California. Yeah, yeah, Marlie and I made gardens. Sally is different.
(Minor insight: my mother was not the happiest person in the world, and there were two times she was happy when I was younger: when she was reading and when she was puttering in a garden. Later bridge became her passion, but as a kid, I saw an basically distracted and frustrated mother become calm, content and even happy when she was reading or when she was gardening.
Guess what two activities I have loved most of my adult life?
Right, reading and gardening.
Now I read less, and take walks more, but gardening is still a treat and a real food for my life)
One way Sally is different is that she likes to argue.
And so do I.
And so we argue a lot.
And have good sex and argue and have good sex and argue.
It’s not that great a relationship, and I’m even planning on letting it end in six months if it doesn’t get better and then a very human disaster happens.
She leaves me.
For Ted.
Now, if I’d called the end, I probably would have been fine. (This is petty, right? And this is the way we are in love that is lusty and not enlightened, it gets quite small minded, sometimes.)
But, her leaving me??? Disaster! Infamy! Etc!
So, she’s off with Ted, busy not arguing and having great sex, instead of with me and arguing and having great sex.
I do the usual stupid stuff of demanding she come back so we can argue some more about what a mistake she made by trading me in for someone she isn’t arguing with. And for some reason she turns this down.
Now, I notice something interesting: when I’m present and in nature, I’m pretty content, because nature is peace, and there is no Sally-Chris argument going on to disturb the peace.
And when I’m not present, I’m busy driving myself into unhappiness with the usual nonsense: this isn’t fair, how can she do this to me, I’ll never find another Sally (which was true, luckily, not to ding her, but to ding us and how we argued).
And then a couple months after her “unfair” departure, I learned the work of Byron Katie.
And doing the work on this belief led to an amazing opening in my mind, life, heart and soul…..”Sally should love me more.
I did the four questions, and began to get free.
“Sally should love me more,” Is that true? I don’t know.
“Sally should love me more,” Can I absolutely know that’s true?, and the answer is a clear… No.
“Sally should love me more, “How do I react when I hold and obsess on that belief?”
The usual consequences of taking the victim stance: angry, hurt, cheated, betrayed, weak, scared, and on and on.
“Sally should love me more, “Who or what would I be without that story?” Free. Ready for what life had next.
And I was still a little fumbling until I go into the Turn Around.
“Sally should love me more” became, “I should love Sally more.”
As a set of words, I could say, “Yeah, yeah, I should love Sally more,” and somehow I felt this as a real and deep stance in life.
Loving her more would mean,
- Being happy that she was happy
- Being happy that she was with someone with whom she wasn’t arguing
- Being happy that she was finding a more satisfying love
- Being happy that she was doing with her life what she wanted
- Being happy that she and I had both gotten a lot from our 7 years together, and that she was going to a next level for her
- Being happy that she was happy
I said that before.
I’ll say it again, “Being happy that she was happy” was the core of what “I should love Sally more” meant.
It wasn’t about me.
It was about her. That’s what love was.
That’s what I felt and realized when I actually did “love her more.” I was free. She was free.
Same old sentence, and it was deep and liberating for me: I was happy that SHE was happy.
And I was free.
The bitterness and betrayal and poor me shit turned into the golden glow of a smile on my face and in my heart of real happiness for her happiness.
This changed my life, and made it very clear that being with someone who left you was always alright, if I could love them for their sake and not mine.
Love is big.
This turn around helped me deeply and truly understand that.
Summary of Week Two, Day Two:
Feel the urge to say your complaint.
Don’t.
Write down your complain as gibberish.
Do the Work of Byron Katie (http://thework.com), which is….
Ask four questions about that gibberish written thought:
Is it true?
Is it absolutely true?
How do I react when I believe that thought?
Who or what would I be without that thought?
After that, do the “turn around.”
Which is to admit and see: whatever flaw you are twisted up about, exists in you, too.
“So and so should….. me more” turns around to “I should…. so and so more.”
And,
“So and so shouldn’t …..” turns around to “I shouldn’t…..”
The turn around always shows us our next medicine, or next job, the real work that we need to do.
Our judgment of THEM turns into wisdom for what WE NEED TO DO.
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