Peace Talks Byron Katie

Peace Talks Radio, the series on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution returns this time to maybe the most challenging conflict terrain of all, our inner selves. How can we calm the turmoil within ourselves about who we are, how we are and how we relate to the rest of the world? On this edition of Peace Talks Radio, a conversation with a woman who offers one approach. Her name is Byron Katie who, in the mid 1980's, says she was in deep personal chaos trying to manage her life as a business woman and mother living in Southern California. More than miserable, she says she was deeply depressed, fearful, suicidal and living in a halfway house, unable to manage on her own.

Some 20 years later, the woman everyone calls Katie has written three best-selling books "Loving What Is,""I Need Your Love - Is That True?", and "A Thousand Names for Joy" co-written with her husband Stephen Mitchell. As the book titles suggest, Byron Katie found a way of dealing with her stress that turned her life around. She says, on a specific 1986 morning in that halfway house, she experienced what she called a falling away of self that led to an inner freedom. She insists anyone can achieve it utilizing a method of personal inquiry she's crafted that she calls, The Work.

"I realized that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered," says Katie. "But when I didn't believe my thoughts, I didn't suffer. And I've come to see that this is true for every human being."

In our program, host Suzanne Kryder interviews Byron Katie about The Work, and we hear both her and her husband Stephen Mitchell recorded before a standing room only crowd in a Santa Fe auditorium.