Rather than understand the original cause-a thought-we try to change the stressful feelings by looking outside ourselves.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing that our stressful feelings stem from our thoughts, rather than external circumstances.
Byron Katie's quote highlights the tendency of individuals to seek solutions to their stress and discomfort in external factors, rather than addressing the underlying thoughts that cause these feelings. It invites introspection and self-awareness, suggesting that true change and relief come from understanding and altering our internal mindset instead of blaming outside situations.
In practice
In a motivational speech about mental health awareness.
When you stay present with your children, that’s where abundance is. And when you stay out of their business, that’s where everything you deserve in life is. When you’re in presence, there’s no story, and you are abundance. And you come to trust that space so often that you just eventually hang out as that, because there is nothing that can move you out of it, not even a perceived child or a perceived anything.
It is easy to be swept away by some overwhelming feeling, so it's helpful to remember that any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says, "You're caught in the dream."
We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.
An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.
Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be cause by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That’s not a possibility. It’s only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt. And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I’m the one who can stop hurting me. It’s within my power.
I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.
However much I dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalize a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice.
The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
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