But Are You Thriving? Episode 5 Recap: Connecting to Your Inner Wisdom with Byron Katie

Many people would say that to really thrive, you have to do the work. But what, really, is “the work”? 

For Byron Katie, her practice—known as The Work—is a way of looking inward to solve difficult problems and find joy in your life. With both The Work and her book, Loving What Is, Katie encourages her followers all over the world to simply ask four questions that, when applied to a specific problem, enable you to “see what is troubling you in an entirely different light”. 

Thrive Market co-founder Gunnar Lovelace has known Byron Katie since he was 19 years old, when they met in his hometown of Ojai, California during a particularly difficult time in his life. Their conversation in this episode of But Are You Thriving? is familiar, loving, and vulnerable—and it just might inspire you to try The Work for yourself. 

Full transcription below. Subscribe, download, and listen to this and every episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

But Are You Thriving? | Episode 5: Connecting to Your Inner Wisdom with Byron Katie

Gunnar Lovelace:

Hello everybody. My name is Gunnar Lovelace. I’m one of the co-founders of Thrive Market. And up in the interview for our show is Byron Katie. She has this amazing process called The Work, which you can see at thework.com. It’s this amazing way of creating freedom in our minds from suffering, anxiety, fear. It’s been an amazing tool for me in my life. At the core of Thrive Market is this really deep desire to create a platform and community around thriving in general. And so this podcast is very much at the heart of that in terms of broadening the ways that we support our community in thriving, moving from survival to thriving. We all have some combination of trauma or challenges or suffering that we’ve dealt with in our life, and Byron Katie’s process provides this truly simple and powerful framework to live a more empowered life.

I was fortunate enough to meet Byron Katie when I was 19 through a dear friend of mine, Gordon, who was at the time dealing with terminal cancer. He introduced me to her when I was visiting him in Sedona, Arizona, and I got to see her for the first time in a retreat before she became very famous and a kind of global phenomena. And a year later, I got to get much closer with her when she came to visit. My parents had started a hippie commune in Ojai, California, and she came and did a workshop actually for my birthday. And then we went and saw my dear friend Gordon, who was actually on his deathbed dying of cancer at the time. 

That day with Byron Katie that she came for my birthday and then with Gordon as he was passing, was one of the more powerful days of my life and the exposure to her work, the ways that it created a very simple, powerful framework for understanding ourselves, for moving from being ruled and dominated by reaction and reactivity, but rather having more space to listen and be available for life more fully, it’s been a great gift and it continues to be a tool that I use all the time, and I’m very, very excited, without further ado, to welcome Byron Katie. 

Hello, Byron Katie.

Byron Katie:

Hello.

Gunnar Lovelace:

So happy to have you here. It’s such a pleasure and honor.

Byron Katie:

I just love our time together, Gunnar.

Gunnar Lovelace:

I know. I am so grateful that you made some time for us. You’ve been such a transformative force in my life that it’s just such a pleasure and honor to have you here with us.

Byron Katie:

Oh, thank you. I feel the same way. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. So good.

Gunnar Lovelace:

I was really fortunate to meet Byron Katie when I was 19, and we met through a very dear mutual friend. And one of the things that I love about your work is that you don’t have to be spiritual or religious. You don’t have to be Christian or Buddhist. That the power of your work, the piercing simplicity of it, is so deeply rooted in taking radical responsibility for our lives from a place of deeper peace that moves us from kind of being in a victim relationship to life where life is happening to us. Instead, with The Work, which is what you call your process, for lack of a better word, there’s this beautiful framework for taking responsibility for our life, really feeling more embodied to meet the challenges and opportunities. And I’m so grateful that I got exposed to your work and that your work has been so successful in the world.

Byron Katie:

Yeah, good times. Good times. It’s also about, as I hear you, it’s also about the, gosh, how to understand our minds? And when we understand our minds, then our lives begin to make sense to us. And that’s when life gets really simple and more wisdom running our lives than craziness.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah. I think all of us have versions of trauma, survival trauma, and then all of the incredible evolutionary biology of the ways that our brains work. And The Work creates such an interesting framework to really look at that and create space to look at it. And one of the things that I think is obviously our community at its core is about thriving as a concept. And so it’s thriving in health, thriving on the planet, but also this core piece of thriving in our consciousness. And so, there’s so many pieces about your work that I find so deeply interesting, and that’s been a constant tool for me. But one of those pieces is this really piercing insight that you had early in offering your work that every single judgment that we have about someone else is always tied to an unresolved belief or judgment that we have about ourselves.

Byron Katie:

Yeah. Regarding our own lives. Yeah. Yes.

Gunnar Lovelace:

And an example of that is, for example, maybe I judge a coworker for being loud and arrogant. And maybe there’s some truth to that, but it wouldn’t bother me unless I was also loud or arrogant or needing validation in some unconscious way. And the simplicity of your work is really this beautiful way of getting to get intimate with those projections, those judgements, those beliefs, and then doing a turnaround.

Byron Katie:

What’s so valuable, what shows up is how we react when we are believing those thoughts about other people, ourselves and the world. How do we react if someone says, There’s something wrong with you, Byron Katie, and I think, Oh, how dare they! 

And maybe I give them the look, but I think, they hurt my feelings when they said there’s something wrong with me. And so they are the cause of my suffering and confusion and discontent. But when I question the thought, She said she doesn’t like me, is it true? Well, I get really still, and I meditate in that situation, in that time and place. And the answer as I listen to be sure I’m right, I didn’t get it wrong, yes, it’s true. She said that. She said that, let’s say she doesn’t care about me, that keeps it simple.

And then how do I react when I think the thought, She doesn’t care about me? I feel like low self-esteem, I began to be self-conscious maybe, I was really feeling good until she said that. So it’s like my emotions were affected. I went from feeling good to a kind of depression. And I gave her the look. I said it was cruel. And so how do I react when I believe the thought? 

Okay, so, Gunnar, what’s come up for me is the effects of what I’m thinking and believing. And who would I be without the thought, She doesn’t care about me? And I get really still, and I drop the thought and I look at her in my mind’s eye. Even if it was 10 years ago, I can see her in my mind’s eye. I can hear her saying that. I look at her face and in this situation, I see her as bothered, self-conscious.

I begin to experience compassion as I meditate in that time and place as she is speaking to me in that way. And so here we have my fault show up. What I said and did is the cause of my suffering and what I’m thinking and believing about her is the cause of my suffering. It is not one thing that she said or did that is the cause of my suffering. So this work allows me to take 100% responsibility for what I am thinking and believing and how it affects my life and the life of the people around me.

When I get to the turnaround, then she said she doesn’t care about me, turned around, I said I didn’t care about her. Well, the ego says, I didn’t say that to her. What? Yeah, but I gave her the look and I scolded her and the look, it can be just as deadly as if I verbally went off on her. So I feel that, I take responsibility for that. And let’s say she said that, and I’m the one that has to go back? She started it. And I’m the one that has to go back and make amends, admit my wrongs? No, I don’t have to. But it becomes a part of my life. And if I never see her again, I live those amends in the world because I’m awake to them, I’m aware of them and I know that it’s I that experience the suffering, and I have no idea how that affects them, but I am mentally in my own business and I am making love, literally making love to this egoic mind that we try to avoid, that we try to shut up, that we try to silence through addictions and false identities. The ego doesn’t sleep when we’re sleeping, and we wake up, the first thing that happens is ego. I, I am. I am awake. I am late for work me. I, I, I, me, me, me. So, this waking up to… the short version maybe is the long version, but in my world the short version is giving the ego, meeting it with understanding as though it were a terrified child that just needs to be understood. I don’t do war with ego. War is war, so I question it, so this work really is all about on how to identify the cause of all suffering and how to end it.

Gunnar Lovelace:

There’s so many things that you said there that I find deeply fascinating, but I used to be under the conception that ego was bad. It’s really an evolutionary tool that allows us to navigate time and space, and so I think of it as a car, our identity, our identity framework, our personality. You get in the car, you drive to a place, and then hopefully you can get out of the car and you’re not stuck in the car. And so, another piece that I felt like you touched on there is so interesting, which is I’m reacting now to my coworker, as an example, and maybe I never see her again, or maybe I see her every day, but I avoid her because of some aspect of her that I’m judging that actually has to do with some aspect of myself that I’m judging or unresolved with, and we think about how many hundreds of relationships we have that we’re doing that all of the time, and then how much energy that takes to carry that around with us.

Byron Katie:

Exhausting.

Gunnar Lovelace:

It’s exhausting. Robert Bly has this amazing concept of “my little shadow,” and that we’re just carrying our shadow around with us, and it’s all of these unresolved judgments and ideas that we have about other people and the world that just suck all of our energy away and take our ability to meet life fully.

Byron Katie:

How do I react? I believe the thought, She doesn’t care about me. She said so. She doesn’t care about me. And, how many years is that going to arise in me, and what false identities do I carry so other people won’t say that about me or to me? It’s these false identities we carry around, and then when they don’t work, our feelings get hurt, but we’re just ego protecting its identities so that it can imagine itself as physical, and ego is mind and you can’t touch mind. It’s not a thing, it’s not object, but the ego, its attempt is to be object, to live in the world, and so it can’t sleep. It’s a full-time job, but when we begin to question it, it’s quite a meeting.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah.

Byron Katie:

We begin to wake up to reality, and some would say even non-duality, because the ego, there’s the ego in me. Well, ego is not physical, it’s not a thing, so that leaves me, and inquiry that I refer to as the work is the answer to who am I every time we sit in it.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah, and I realize I’m hearing our conversation, there’s probably a lot of our listeners that actually don’t even fully understand the process that you guide people in. And so, just to even zoom out a little bit, because I realize I probably jumped right into it because I’m so excited about talking about these things with you.

Byron Katie:

Do you? I feel like I did the same thing just because we have so much history together.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah, and so I went to thework.com today, which is your website, because I hadn’t been there in a while, and I wanted to download the worksheet again and look at it. And one, I just loved how many languages it’s translated in, which is just a sign of how wide your work has been distributed. It’s a very simple worksheet that has six questions, and anybody who wants to understand this process, you literally just go to thework.com. The worksheet’s right there. It doesn’t matter what your spiritual or religious orientation is. It’s literally a one-sheet. The first time that I started doing the work, I tried to be very… I didn’t allow myself to be as petty as I should have been, and one of the things that you would always coach me when we would do the session was like, Oh, you’re being too mature. I want you to actually… I want you to be more petty. I want you to be more judgmental and really create the space for that. 

Byron Katie:

Yeah. Who are you when you’re upset, angry, depressed, or confused?

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah, and giving full permission for those really negative perspectives to be voiced without filtering them, just completely sharing those negative judgments, those negative perspectives—

Byron Katie:

And rightly so. We’re looking at the cause of our suffering. We’re looking at what we’re thinking and believing about ourselves, others in the world. So, we’re trying to avoid the cause of our suffering when this is what is offered here as a way to meet them head on, look at them, honor them, question them, and see maybe it can’t hurt because you’re bringing a lot of freedom to a lot of people.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Well, and I mean, just speaking purely selfishly, how exhausting is it to carry all of these ideas about everybody all the time? And so, for those of you that haven’t been exposed to her work before, the worksheet is this incredible tool. Also her, Byron Katie’s book, Loving What Is, is absolutely amazing, and it talks a lot about your journey through crises and breakdown, and then how you came to your process. The audiobook is so beautiful, and the introduction that your husband, Steven Mitchell makes, you can feel how much he loves you, how much he’s been touched by you.

Byron Katie:

He does, he does. He’s incredible.

Gunnar Lovelace:

He’s absolutely amazing. And so, I just highly recommend anybody who is interested in freeing themselves from nonstop chatter in their minds, who feels like they’re spending a lot of their life every day with judgments that are intense about other people, anybody who’s struggling with intense emotional energy, this is such a simple, beautiful process for creating some space and getting to know ourselves beyond all of those judgements and those beliefs.

Byron Katie:

Yeah.

Gunnar Lovelace:

I just wanted to share that just because I realized that we dove right into it and I wanted to make sure that people had an opportunity to get access to this. For me, this is so important because this concept of thriving, so much of our lives, we’re all moving around so quickly, things are going faster with cell phones and just the pressure and the intensities that we have all the time, and so often we’re just surviving, and I feel like this technology is such a simple framework to move from surviving to thriving, and it doesn’t matter what good food we’re putting in our body, if we’re totally worked up and stressed out and judgmental, there’s no way for us to be truly healthy.

Byron Katie:

Yeah. When we’re not in touch with our inner wisdom, we make really hardcore choices to feel better, whereas if we feel better about ourselves, we’re tapped into something, a beautiful mind, let’s say, and we make clearer, healthier choices out of that mind. So, it really is, these questions are like thrive market, Bernard, and they allow us to be enough sanity to see what you offer and so many people in the world are offering as far as sane ways of living.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah, and it was interesting for me because, first of all, I love my mother. She has been one of the most amazing humans in my life and she’s such a courageous, brave woman who has overcome so many challenges. Like most of us, the parental relationships are always very… they tend to have more texture to them in terms of the ways that we’re vulnerable to our parents and those dynamics and the way they cut to us. And so, she’s coming to visit me tonight—

Byron Katie:

Oh, honey. Tell her I said hello and love.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Of course. Yeah, and so I was looking at the worksheet. I hadn’t done it in a while and I was like, Okay, well I’m going to do the worksheet around my relationship with my mother. And it was so interesting because I felt some anxiety about her coming and staying with me. And this is only from a place of true love because I love her deeply. The beauty of this process is that it invites us to be really honest with the feelings that are arising so that we can actually free ourself from the energy that’s tied up in those feelings. 

She’s so talented, too. She came from a dictatorship in Argentina and used to get blindfolded to go to activist meetings, and many of her friends were killed in college. And we lived illegally in the United States for eight years until we got our green card. It’s like she’s worked so hard, so courageous, so smart. It’s interesting, as I was doing the worksheet in advance of our call, this interview right now, I was observing the sadness because I love my mother so much, and yet I feel that I have to keep space between myself and her because I don’t quite know how to handle this old pattern that’s there.

I share that because it’s this really amazing thing where we have these incredible tapestry of relationships in our lives, whether it’s our siblings, our husbands, our wives, our partners, our children, and the ways that we put these subtle, protective layers between us and them because of all of these judgments and all of these protective mechanisms.

Byron Katie:

What you say is so powerful because she’s not putting it in front of you. It’s like she can. But what you’re putting in front of her, that anxiety and validating her because you believe her to be anxious and needing to be validated. Maybe she does. But one of you can… I don’t know, I’m just very touched by your work, Gunnar. I just love that you would listen to her and hold her hand without trying to fix her and listen and listen. You’re a good listener. So when I look at who I’m talking to, you’re a really good listener. If you can do it with others, you can surely offer that gift to your mother.

You’ve maybe heard my prayer. If I had a prayer, it would be this: God spare me from the desire to seek love, approval, or appreciation. Amen.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Spare me from the desire to seek love, approval, and appreciation. Yes. I was thinking about all the ways that I do that while I was surfing this morning, just the subtle ways that I try to make myself look good or exaggerate a situation a little bit just so it makes me look better. Yeah. I love the simplicity and the brutal honesty of this process.

Byron Katie:

Gunnar, you could do the work on all of that, everything you mentioned while you were out there surfing, and do the work on it. It’s just some kind of miracle that your personality will go on without the need to and without the ego being involved. The natural inclination to be there for people and to laugh when it’s funny and to even smile when it’s not so funny because you have an inside thing going that is … The way I’d describe it is you understand. We don’t turn into just un-fun-loving, unclear people. I can’t imagine you having more energy than you do, but it is, but without the effort-ing. Stress is, oh boy, that can really be a burnout for some of us.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Oh, yeah. One of the things I love about your book, Loving What Is, is you describe the meaning of life for the first time after your breakdown process. One of the things that you share is this experience of being breathed, as opposed to being the active one that needs to breathe. This experience that we’re being breathed by life all the time, and the invitation to relax into that, as opposed to how much energy we put into effort-ing and pushing all the time.

Byron Katie:

I don’t want to throw all your listeners off and sound weird, but we’re also being talked and walked and lived. It’s just the ego takes credit for all of that. When the ego takes credit, there’s a twist that happens that turns into the ego as a self. In the absence of self, there is something beautiful going on. That’s my invitation first to myself, just to live this out, and then passing it onto others in a way that no one needs me. It’s a meditative way of sitting in oneself.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yeah. I recognize that we’re coming to the end of this particular interview, and there’s obviously so much more that we could spend time with. I’m so grateful that you took time with us, that you worked through the technical issues that we had to get you here, and that your work is now accessible to so many people, that you give it away for free. Literally, anybody can go to thework.com. If you find yourself in a place in your life where you’re just really suffering and you’re anxious or preoccupied or in conflict and you’ve tried so many other things and it’s not working, this is such a beautiful, simple tool and the way that this has provided freedom for so many people.

I find for myself that it’s a constant commitment to be clearing the decks. It’s not like you do it intensely once or do it intensely for a month or a year, and then it’s gone and the decks are clear and life is perfectly smooth. Maybe it will be, but my experience of it is that it’s a commitment to clean the mind regularly and that this is such a beautiful tool for it. I just love you so much. I’m so grateful for you, and I’m so happy we share this planet together.

Byron Katie:

Oh, I am too, sweetheart. I am so grateful as well. You do such good work, such good work, and thank you for that.

Gunnar Lovelace:

All right.

Byron Katie:

Thriving.

Gunnar Lovelace:

Yes. Well, I hope you have a beautiful day, and I’m going to let you go for now. That is it for our episode with Byron Katie. Please check her work out, and I hope you get some of the benefits that I have from her beautiful work.