How I started to do “The Work”

Years ago, I bought a book that I thought would help me out. I was at the beginning of a long dance in the shadow of my family's generational trauma. This particular movement involved my mother and my total inability to understand her and thus my judgment of her. This condition sadly persisted for years.

The book, The Work by Byron Katie, poses 4 seemingly easy questions. The point of the questions is to turn judgement on its head. If done correctly, you, through the effort of your own questioning, you come to integrate the futility and harm of judgement. I didn’t get it at the time even though I could see it’s illuminating clarity. Stymied, I put the book down.

Just this week, the principal of my youngest kid’s school, which is strong on social justice, shared this quote by the great Dr. Martin Luther King, in which he was inspiring fellow pastors to action:

…And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love….Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is realizing that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love…

So, how do we seek justice and stay out of judgment? How do we embody power and keep it rooted in love? How in God’s name do we do this work when seemingly the entire world, and my own family included, is engulfed in the lie of polarity?

Best I can tell is to carve out a space for yourself [this won’t be popular by the way]. Reject the dominant narrative and go inside, is there a rightness and wrongness calculator in you? Not likely. If cultivated, with kindness and self love, there is space. Space for what’s possible. Space for standing up for oneself. Compassion and allowance for others to navigate their own way – regardless of our understanding.

So, today, I no longer feel on the hook for fixing my mother or repairing the wounds within my family. I know each individual must heal themselves, and perhaps, when done collectively we can experience the healing of the whole. And now, finally, I understand The Work.