Four questions

"Is it true?" That's the first of four questions Byron Katie asks about any stressful thought, and she's asked it of thousands of people on stages around the world for nearly forty years.

Katie's story is plain and strange. In 1986 she was a woman in her forties in a small California town, depressed for a decade, who woke one morning on the floor of a halfway house and found that the thoughts that had tormented her were, when she looked at them, simply not true. She built a method from that morning. She calls it The Work. It fits on a card.

Take a stressful thought: "He doesn't respect me." Ask: Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it's true? How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought? Then turn it around: "I don't respect him." "I don't respect me." "He does respect me." And find three honest examples of each turnaround.

That's the whole method, and it's hers, and we point to her books and her free worksheets for anyone who wants to go deep. What Vault Human keeps is the discipline of actually questioning a thought instead of obeying it. Most of our stress is a thought we never examined. "She should have called." "I should be further along." The Work puts that thought on the table and asks it to prove itself.

It belongs in Awareness because the first step, before the four questions, is noticing the thought at all. You've been training that for ten weeks. Now you have something to do with what you catch.

Katie's claim is that suffering is optional, which sounds glib until you've done the four questions on something that's been eating you for years and felt it loosen.