When I was in my early thirties, externally, my life looked normal and what society would deem successful and fulfilling. I was married to a kind man, had two lovely daughters, a beautiful home, good friends and a supportive family. However, in the midst of this “successful” life, I still found myself unhappy; I felt critical of people in my life, especially my mother and my partner, and I compared myself to other people and felt jealous and inferior. I felt guilty for believing what I did and I tried to run away from my negative thinking or I tried to talk myself out of it. I became very self-critical. I told myself that I should be happy, I should be satisfied, I shouldn’t complain, I should forgive and forget. Then when I failed to meet these expectations of myself, I became depressed, hopeless, and ashamed of myself.

In 2008, I read Byron Katie’s book, Loving What Is, and a window of light opened up inside of me when I discovered that it was possible to make friends with the negative, stressful, and for me, shameful thoughts that I had been trying to push away for years. I discovered that the way out of my misery was by going inward. Paradoxically, it was by welcoming and inquiring into my dark thoughts that I was graced with an inner wisdom and clarity that had eluded me when I tried to push the thoughts away. Is it true? became a deeply revolutionary and exciting question for me to contemplate in regard to my thinking. I started doing The Work and so began my journey of making peace with my mind. Since then, I practice The Work regularly and I have been learning to move towards my stressful thinking, to meet it with understanding and to slowly and steadily question the thoughts that move me from a place of peace. Now, when I experience stress and confusion in my relationships and life circumstances, I know what to do and I no longer feel as drawn to micromanage my life and other peoples’ lives in an attempt to prevent difficulties from arising. I just trust that I know how to meet them when they do show up. Through the experience of doing The Work, I see clearly that reality is much kinder than my beliefs about it. Every stressful thought is an invitation for me to look again, to see where my beliefs are preventing me from experiencing the beauty of Life.

The Work has been a supportive vessel to hold me in this sometimes messy, confusing human experience. In the simple process of identifying and questioning beliefs, I am able to be authentic–free to think and feel everything that comes up, free to have a temper tantrum, free to weep, free to fall into my open arms and be held. Free to discover the freedom that is mine to see when I am ready. Free to love without condition. It is about seeing myself and the other, for the very first time, without a filter and discovering the beauty in our common human experience. My life might not appear more “peaceful” because now I am not shutting down and running away from myself, but there is a peace that resides in me through all the storms, that is grounded in the understanding that my experience of peace is only a question’s distance away– “Is it true?”