I Need Your Love: Is that true?: The Search For Love, Approval, And Happiness

By Byron Katie

ISBN 1-4000-5107-X

Published by Harmony Books

In Loving What Is, bestselling author Byron Katie introduced thousands of people to her simple and profound method of finding happiness through questioning the mind. Now, I Need Your Love—Is That True? examines a universal, age-old source of anxiety: our relationships with others. In this groundbreaking book, Katie helps you question everything you have been taught to do to gain love and approval. In doing this, you discover how to find genuine love and connection.

The usual advice offered in self-help books and reinforced by our culture advocates a stressful, all-consuming quest for love and approval. We are advised to learn self-marketing and manipulative skills—how to attract, impress, seduce, and often pretend to be something we aren’t. This approach doesn’t work. It leaves millions of walking wounded—those who, having failed to find love or appreciation, blame themselves and conclude that they are unworthy of love.

I Need Your Love—Is That True? helps you illuminate every area in your life where you seem to lack what you long for most—the love of your spouse, the respect of your child, a lover’s tenderness, or the esteem of your boss. Through its penetrating inquiry, you will quickly discover the falseness of the accepted ways of seeking love and approval, and also of the mythology that equates love with need. Using the method in this book, you will inquire into painful beliefs that you’ve based your whole life on—and be delighted to see them evaporate. Katie shows you how unraveling the knots in the search for love, approval, and appreciation brings real love and puts you in charge of your own happiness.

“Everyone agrees that love is wonderful, except when it’s terrible. People spend their whole lives tantalized by love—seeking it, trying to hold on to it, or trying to get over it. Not far behind love, as major preoccupations, come approval and appreciation. From childhood on, most people spend much of their energy in a relentless pursuit of these things, trying out different methods to be noticed, to please, to impress, and to win other people’s love, thinking that’s just the way life is. This effort can become so constant and unquestioned that we barely notice it anymore.

This book takes a close look at what works and what doesn’t in the quest for love and approval. It will help you find a way to be happier in love and more effective in all your relationships. What you learn here will bring fulfillment to all kinds of relationships, including romantic love, dating, marriage, work, and friendship.” —Byron Katie

5 star must reading.   [The following is what I highlighted during my read of this excellent book -- I recommend it on my Top-ten List of Peace resources.  My purpose in providing them is to interest you, the reader, and hope that you will obtain and read the complete work.  To properly understand the highlights, you need to read the book to put them in the proper context.  B.S.] 

Foreword

• …a really simple discovery…she had been believing her thoughts and terrifying herself half to death with them. Then she stopped believing her thoughts, and the world stopped at the same time. The inner conflict and fear dropped away.
• I saw clearly, irrevocably, that everything was backward, upside down from what I believed. My thinking had opposed everything as it truly was and reacted with stories of how I thought it should be. “My husband should be more honest.” “Mt children should respect me more.” Now I saw that instead of seeing what was happening, I was placing conditions on what was happening—as if I had the ability to dictate reality.
  It was clear to me now that the truth was the extreme opposite. My husband should not be more honest—because he wasn’t. My children shouldn’t respect me more—because they didn’t. Instantly I became a lover of reality: I noticed that this felt more natural, more peaceful.
• “…is that true?”…didn’t tell anyone what to do or what to believe. They answered her questions for themselves. In turn, people’s lives changed—some quickly, some slowly.
• …write out the thoughts that give them pain. Then she asks her questions.
• …best discovery is that when you do question your thoughts, you find out that the world is a much kinder place than you had imagined, and there’s no need to go to sleep in fear or wake up anxious. When you really start to look, the world is full of love, and there’s plenty to go around.

Preface

Introduction

• What you learn here will bring fulfillment to all kinds of relationships, including romantic love, dating, marriage, raising children, work, and friendship.
• It comes from an enjoyable conversation that you have with yourself.

1.Do you believe what you think?

• Love is what we are.
• The unspoken belief is that unless people approve of you, you’re worthless.
• The thought “Nothing supports me without my efforts” is just one of the unquestioned and often unnoticed beliefs that set in motion the search for love and approval.
• Everything supports you whether or not you even notice it.
• The thought that kicks you out of heaven could be “I’d be a little more comfortable if I had…”…without that thought you’re in heaven…with that shift of attention, you give up the peace you have. Seeking comfort, you give yourself discomfort.
• So, how do you get back to heaven? To begin with, just notice the thoughts that take you away from it. You don’t have to believe everything your thoughts tell you. Just become familiar with the particular thoughts you use to deprive yourself of happiness. It may seem strange at first to get to know yourself in this way, but becoming familiar with your stressful thoughts will show you the way home to everything you need.
• When you begin to notice your thoughts, one of the first things you’ll see is that you’re never alone… your thoughts will be there…
• If you’re afraid to be alone, it means you’re afraid of your thoughts. If you loved your thoughts, you would love to be alone anywhere with them; you wouldn’t have to turn on the radio when you get in the car, or the TV when you get home. The way you relate to your thoughts—that’s what you bring to every relationship you have, including the one with yourself.
• Thoughts create your world and your identity in every moment.
• Your most intimate relationship is the one you have with your thoughts.
• Thoughts about your wants and needs can be very bossy. If you believe them, you feel you have to do what they say—you have to get people’s love and approval. There is another way to respond to a thought, and that is to question it. How can you question your wants and needs? How can you meet your thoughts without believing them.
• …with understanding.

2.Questioning your thoughts about love

• Unquestioned thoughts like these pretend to guide you toward love when in fact they are obstacles to it.
• Often, within pain or depression, there are thoughts you’ve had for so long and held so close that you don’t even know they are there. And you’ve never stopped to see if you believe them.
• After you do inquiry for a while, you find that it becomes automatic—your natural way of relating to thoughts. Believing your thoughts comes to seem more and more unnatural, a method of fooling yourself, and it becomes clearer and clearer that inquiry returns you to reality.
• How do you bring a thought to inquiry?
• After you’ve found the thought that’s upsetting you, the first step is to ask if it’s true.
• How do you live with and without that thought?
• Any feeling of discomfort or stress is an alarm that lets you know you’re believing an untrue thought.
• Turnarounds: is the opposite as true?
• This is the final step of inquiring into the thought.
• Turnarounds open more space. They allow you to see how things can work out in a peaceful way, beyond what you had considered when you were defending a position.

How to do your own inquiry:
now that you’ve read the overview, here are the instructions.

1. When you feel disturbed, upset, or simply unhappy about some situation in the present or the past, notice the thoughts that are running through your mind, and write down the one that is upsetting you the most right now. If you’re convinced that it’s a feeling, not a thought, give the feeling a voice. Write down what the feeling would say, as a short, simple statement. For example, “He just walked out the door, and that means he doesn’t care about me.” Just writing down the thought that’s been tormenting you is a powerful act. Now you can question it.
2. Ask you if it’s true. “He doesn’t care about me”—is it true? Don’t ask if the thought matches what you’ve been told or have learned. Don’t consider the way life is supposed to look.
   Don’t consult the part of you that knows what the answer should be. The question is, does the thought match what you know inside? Does that thought resonate with your deepest sense of reality? Can you absolutely know that it’s true that he doesn’t care about you? (“I don’t know” is as good an answer here as “yes” or “no”)
3. Explore how you live when you believe this thought. Overall, does this thought bring peace or stress to your life? Does it bring you closer to the people you love, or does it separate you from them? How do you react when you believe the thought “He doesn’t care about me”? What does it feel like to believe it? How do you treat yourself and others? How do you treat him? Take your time with this process. Picture yourself believing the thought. Do you react with sadness? Depression? Anger? Do you withdraw from him? Do you try to win him over? Do you judge yourself and feel like a failure? Do you light up a cigarette or head for the refrigerator? Be as precise and detailed as you can be.
4. Explore what life would be like without the thought. Use your imagination to give yourself a glimpse of who or what you would be without this thought. Don’t look for a better thought to substitute the painful one. Just live for a while in the space that opens up when you view your situation without the old thought. Pretend that you don’t have the ability to think the thought. What would that be like? Look at him in your mind’s eye without the thought “He doesn’t care about me. ” Maybe you will simply see a man who is deeply absorbed in reading his newspaper, who loves his wife but doesn’t want to shift his attention to her right now. Maybe without the thought “He doesn’t care about me” you’ll find it easy to take pleasure in his pleasure.
5. Turn the thought around. Consider reversed or opposite versions of the thought. If a certain turnaround doesn’t make sense to you, don’t bother with it. Turn the original statement around any way you want to until you find the turnarounds that penetrate the deepest.
   Turning around “He doesn’t care about me”:
   I don’t care about him. (When I feel hurt, I withdraw or I get angry, and I don’t care what he feels.)
   I don’t care about me. (I don’t care about myself when I go to war against someone I love. I take away my own peace of mind. I put myself in a hostile situation, I create an enemy for myself, I give myself a lot of stress and sadness. This is when addictive behavior such as bingeing, smoking, or overeating begins to kick in.)
   He does care about me. (He may love me and still speak harshly to me. He may love me and still want to leave me.)

• Ask yourself if any of your turned-around versions seem as true or even truer than your original thought, and if they do, find three genuine ways in which each of them is true. Turnarounds can dramatically set you free from a thought, especially if you’ve loosened your belief in it by following the earlier steps.

Ask Four Questions and Turn it Around: The pocket-sized reminder of the work

• Whenever you have a stressful thought, these four questions and the turnaround will guide you through your inquiry:
• Is it true?
• Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
• How do I react when I think this thought?
• Who or what would I be without the thought?
• Turn the thought around, and find three genuine examples of how each turnaround is as true as or truer than the original statement.
• This pocket-sized version will get you started. If you come across any thoughts that persist in disturbing you, you’ll find a complete troubleshooting manual on page 247

3.Seeking approval

• If you can track down the thought that caused one of these painful or awkward events, you can begin your journey home. These are the thoughts that, unquestioned, lead to separation and misery. When you find one of them, you can ask if the belief is really true. You can notice how you suffer from it. And you can find the peace and the love that are already present inside you when you don’t believe the thought.
• We all have experienced these things, because there are no new stressful thoughts; everyone has them.

Making yourself more agreeable:

• Winning people over by pretending to be interested in them is part of a bigger project: trying to become a more likeable person.
• How do you react when you believe the thought that you can find love and approval by making yourself more likeable?
• A built –in part of developing a personality that’s designed to please is constantly watching for signs that you’re succeeding. This can be a stressful way to live. Anxiously focusing on the other person, checking for approval or disapproval, leaves nobody at home in yourself, nobody noticing your thoughts or taking responsibility for your feelings. This cuts you off from the source of real contentment. The outward focus also leaves unnoticed and unquestioned the inevitably painful thought that if you have to transform yourself to find love and approval, there must be something wrong with the way you are.
• Manipulation often happens without anyone intending to do it or even noticing.
• When you feel real gratitude, it shows without effort.
• People become very open in the presence of gratitude.
• …a hug.
• The receiving is the giving.
• Why bother with all this complicated pretending? There is no reason. You do it because neither of you has questioned the belief that your relationship depends on playacting and couldn’t stand up to honesty.
• What impression—what “you”—are you trying to hide or strengthen?
• What is the story of “you” that you perpetuate or want to perpetuate? What “you” would you be without this story?
• What would happen if you moved and responded with less concern about what others will think? What if you let your actions speak for themselves? What would it be like to live your truth without excusing, defending, explaining, or justifying your thoughts or actions to others?
• When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result.
• If you act from fear, there’s no way you can receive love, because you’re trapped in a thought about what you have to do for love. Every stressful thought separates you from people.
• But once you question your thoughts, you discover that you don’t have to do anything for love.
• The fact is that when I have my own approval, I’m happy, and I don’t need anyone else’s. Their approval is just icing on the cake. Its extra, and it’s not necessary for me to be happy.
• We all do emotional gymnastics to be seen as wonderful or funny—just to get what we already have. And because we’re doing gymnastics, we don’t see that we already have it.
• …be someone who just lives your life and lets people form whatever impressions they want to form—of you and of everyone else. That’s what they’re all doing anyway.

4.Falling in love

• Falling in love is usually understood completely backward, like so many other important things. There’s no mystery to falling in love.
• …she shifts her focus outward and cuts herself off from love. But love doesn’t go anywhere; she just loses her awareness of it. Later in life, people call experiences like this “falling out of love” and think that they’re about the other person.
• The little girl is innocently misdirected.
• Even though the awareness of love is always available, years might pass before she has it again, years she devotes to searching for love and approval outsider herself.
• If the love isn’t coming from the other person, whom does that leave? There’s only one person left: you. You gave yourself the experience…It was you who felt the wonder and the excitement. Someone held up a mirror and showed you your heart.
• Grownup love is like the crush—it lasts only until the painful thoughts cover it over.
• …one way or another, that happiness will have to vanish as long as you believe the thought that love—the joy you stumble into—depends on the other person.
• First of all, remind yourself what love means to you. What is the experience of love for you?

Love story:

• …falling in love feels wonderful. It feels so good that you want to keep it forever by becoming a couple. You’re still taking a break from approval seeking and all the painful thoughts that go with it. You’re also having a lot of sex—one of the few ways most people give themselves some relief from their thoughts. And then love seems to wear off. Why do we have that impression?
• What spoils the love fest is that, as time passes, the effort of maintaining their facades takes its toll, and those hidden doubts appear more often. One day she gets honest…He feels confused and let down…The recriminations begin.
• Deep inside themselves, each of the lovers knows that the other is right, but they think they would lose ground if they admitted it instead of attacking back. They would love to stop the pretending, but they stick to the beliefs that seemed to have worked so far. So, staying in the roles they’ve created (by now, they no longer realize that these are roles), they experience disappointment and anger.
• The lovers may now think they don’t even like each other, and they may break up without every truly meeting the person they’ve been living with. They have gone directly from their original facades to operating angry “me” puppets, each of them feeling betrayed by the other. To get to this kind of impasse, couples always pass up chances to reverse directions.
• She’s taken the risk of telling the truth. If he joins her and takes the risk too, revealing his own doubts and fears, they’ve changed direction and are moving toward asking and finding what’s really true for them. They might have something genuine and wonderful going: the beginning of honest relationships with themselves, and—who knows? Maybe even with each other.
• …if a relationship is anything less than good, you need to question your thoughts. It’s your responsibility to find your own way back to a relationship with yourself that makes sense. When you have that sweet relationship with yourself, your partner is an added pleasure. It’s over-the-top grace. Romantic love is the story of how you need another person to complete you. It’s an absolutely insane story. My experience is that I need no one to complete me.

5.Personalities don’t love—they want something

• Two things they often want are comfort and security.
• …they rationalize settling for them as a realistic and inevitable thing.
• She tells herself that she’s sacrificing her happiness, her life, to please him, make him happy, and have his love…Her resentment boils up, and there’s a huge self-righteous explosion…Those angry “me” puppets come onto the stage again, and the original resentments appear.
• I want my husband to want what he wants. And I also notice that I don’t have a choice. That’s self-love. He does what he does, and I love that. That’s what I want, because when I’m at war with reality, it hurts.
• …peaceful reciprocation…
• … “civilized” people have learned how to use reciprocation to torture each other. All it takes is the belief that if I do something for you, you owe me something in return.
• What happens if you don’t reciprocate? I take back my love and approval, and I give you resentment instead. The rules of each relationship dictate all the things you have to do or not do to avoid resentment. These rules aren’t written down or even spoken. You find out what they are by breaking them.
• And, of course, you find out about your rules for my behavior using the same method. How do you know when I broke a rule? When you get angry at me.
• In any case, if you do your best to figure out all the rules and obey them, do you get my love? No. you get to tiptoe around me, so that you can minimize my anger and continue the relationship. Love seems to have disappeared. Where did it go? You can find out by questioning the thought “if you love me, you’ll do what I want.”
• …parents never questioned the thought that obedience is an expression of love, so why would he?
• Unquestioned thoughts about needs and wants launched the quest for love and approval to begin with. It’s no surprise that after we win someone over, those same thoughts arise again. We haven’t known how to question what we want from love. We haven’t known how to question what we believe. We don’t know that we can simply love, and that we can simply ask for what we want, with no strings attached.

Is it True?

• The two major universal whoppers about love.
• “I need to win people over to make them like me.”(also known as “I can manipulate your love and approval”)
• “If you love me, you’ll do what I want.” It seems reasonable—so reasonable that we’ve built an entire civilization on it. How can it be wrong? Let’s stop and question it.
• Score sheet
• Demands
• Withdraw
• Separation
• Withhold
• Shame and guilt
• I hate myself
• It would be like not having you in my life except as someone I love and care about.
• “If you love me, you won’t do what I want.”
• “If I love me, I’ll do what I want.”
• “If I love you, I’ll do what you want.”…when that feels honest and right for me.
• …giving to you is giving happiness to myself.
• …you can happily unhook love from want and begin to live the experience of freedom.

Honest Communication:

• Knowing the difference between loving someone and wanting him to do what you want doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for what you want. You can, knowing that his answer has nothing to do with his love for you. You’ll discover that asking is much easier when it’s free of hidden agendas. And when he realizes that whatever he answers is fine with you, an amazing intimacy can open for you both.
• …it’s possible to love without condition, even when your answer is no.
• If you’re not a clear communicator, you may live your life unloved and misunderstood, not ever realizing that if you just said what you wanted, your whole world would change. Remember that the first step in clear communication is communicating with yourself.
• Notice that once you have separated love from want, simply asking becomes much easier. But you have to ask. People can’t second-guess our desires; they aren’t psychic on cue.
• The voice within is what I’m married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes or no comes from. That’s my true partner. It’s always there. And to tell you yes when my integrity says no is to divorce that partner.

6.The relationship workshop

• …it’s easy to see how you can have a happy relationship if you stay true to yourself.
• So how do you stay true to yourself? The first step is to remember that your most intimate relationship is the one you have with your thoughts.
• An open heart is not a possibility without an open mind.
• Meeting your thoughts with inquiry allows you to meet your partner with understanding. What determines the quality of your relationship with her is not what you think about her but whether you believe what you think about her. Crazy, trouble-making thoughts…float into your mind uninvited: you don’t even think them, they think you. Suppressing or trying to control them has never worked. But if you question those thoughts and come to understand them, they no longer have the power to disturb you or cause you to act with anything less than intelligence and kindness.
• When something hurts in your relationship and it’s not obvious why, you can do the same thing. Sit down and put your thoughts on paper. Concentrate on your complaints about your partner. Don’t be kind. If anything, exaggerate the faults you find. Using the worksheet on page 251 as your guide, write down how you’ve been wronged, what they should and shouldn’t do, what you want and need from them, what you refuse to put up with any longer. And when you have it down on paper, question what you believe. Ask the four questions and turn it around.
• Once we being to question our thoughts, our partners…are always our greatest teachers.
• If there are things about him that you consider flaws, good, because these flaws are your own, you’re projecting them, and you can write them down, inquire, and set yourself free.
• Your partner will give you everything you need for your own freedom
• That’s where true happiness is found, on the inside, and after that, you need nothing.
• …if you tell her yes when you mean no, you’ve lost your integrity, you’ve lost yourself, and you’re the one you live with.
• Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be caused by another person. No one outside me can hurt me…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.
• What we are doing with inquiry is meeting our thoughts with some simple understanding, finally. Pain, anger, and frustration will let us know when it’s time to inquire. We either believe what we think or we question it: there’s no other choice. Questioning our thoughts is the kinder way. Inquiry always leaves us as more loving human beings.
• …it’s hopeless to argue with what is.
• Feel the violence that you inflict on yourself.
• It can’t ever be something outside you, a situation or a person, that is causing your unhappiness. It can only be your unquestioned thinking about that situation or person. There’s no exception to that.
• …you get to discover yourself. You get to focus not on her but on you and your own thinking, which is the cause of all your suffering.
• …love is nothing more than agreement. If I agree with you, you love me. And the minute I don’t agree with you, the minute I question one of your sacred beliefs, I become your enemy; you divorce me in your mind.
• Unconditional love doesn’t need to dictate the form.
• …just experience your own nature, which is to love yourself, and therefore her, with no separation.
• If we want something from you and you give it to us, then we approve, and if you don’t give it to us. It’s simple. We’re just like you.
• …that things happen with or without me, people approve of me or they don’t. It has nothing to do with me. This is really good news, since it leaves me responsible for my own happiness. It leaves me to do nothing but live my life as kindly and intelligently as I can…It’s only me I’m dealing with, and that is enough for a lifetime.
• When I question my thoughts, I like the mind I live with. It not only leaves me alone, it leaves you alone too.
• Just answer with a simple yes or a simple no. Nothing else satisfies the mind. It has to know what’s real or it lives its life trying to prove what it thinks, and it can never rest.
• That’s what this is about: just taking a look to see what was your part in it. That’s where the pain is created, discovered, and uncreated.
• Understanding is your job. You’re the one who should understand you.
• How do we love ourselves? One way is by not seeking approval outside ourselves—that’s my experience. By not seeking approval outside myself, I come to see that I already have it. I don’t want approval; I want people to think the way they think.
• The only thing that can cost you your husband is if you believe a thought. That’s how you move away from him. That’s how the marriage ends. You are one with your husband until you believe the thought that he should look a certain way, he should give you something, he should be something other than what he is. That’s how you divorce him. Right then and there you have lost your marriage.
• I’ve always been just me, but I was the last to know that it was all right.
• “God spare me from the desire for love, approval, and appreciation…”

7.What if my partner is flawed?

• Why do these things happen? It may not be clear at first. But if you take a minute, you’ll discover that they’re wonderful ways of bringing us closer together. Not if you’re passive, though. This is about your own empowerment, your ability to see things as they really are, through the eyes of love. When you do The Work on your partner, you realize that all your problems are coming from you, because it’s your thoughts that are telling you who he is. If you see him as flawed in any way, you can be sure that you’ve found a place where you’re arguing with reality in that moment and are blind to yourself…Go back to the source; go to yourself.
• …no wonder you’re sick and tired of living with someone who doesn’t care enough to change. That person is you. And there’s no release or escape from yourself until you leave him alone and focus on your own turnarounds. Changing him will no longer be your life’s work. You can be your life’s work. You’re the one who believes in change.
• You may or may not be willing to put up with your partner’s apparent flaws. Whether you stay in or leave a relationship, there are always two ways to do it. One way is in peace, with love; the other is at war, with anger and blame. If you want to be in peace, judge your partner, write it down, ask four questions, and turn it around. Cleary see that his flaws are flaws in your own vision. Then let the decision make itself. It always happens right on time, and not a second before.
• It’s not your job to understand me—it’s mine.
• When you’re at peace with your reason, your mind isn’t a war zone.
• Whenever you want to understand yourself, judge your partner, write it down, ask four questions and turn it around.
• What’s important is not that they understand, it’s that we understand. Because this is where we are the happiest.
• …you’ve questioned your thoughts now. You know what is true for you…
• You have everything you need in order to be an honest human being. No one ever has to be afraid of the truth. It’s the defenses that we build around the truth that strike fear in our hearts.
• …every single human being is trying his best. We’re all doing the best we can. But when we believe what we think, we have to live out those thoughts. When there’s chaos in our heads, there’s chaos in our lives. When there’s hurt in our thinking, there’s hurt in our lives.
• When you question what you think, you may see that love was always there but you were blind to it. If I think, “What’s the matter with him?” there is something the matter with me in that moment.
• When I find what is true for me, there are no obstacles anymore. There are no barriers between me…and anyone in the world.

8.Five keys to freedom in love

1.You can make it without your fear

• The move here is a powerful, all-purpose lifesaver: Whenever you think you couldn’t bear something, find three proofs that you could in reality bear it.
• …love doesn’t mean fear.

2.This moment should be happening

• …expect reality not to follow your plan.
• Questioning the thought that arises when you hit a bump in your life can radically change the quality of your whole existence.
• Noticing and counting the beautiful reasons unexpected things happen for us ends the mystery. If you miss the real reasons, the benevolent reasons that coincide with kind nature, then count on depression to let you know that you missed them. Anger, frustration, and aggressive reasons can be imagined—and what for? People who aren’t interested in seeing why everything is good get to be right. But that apparent rightness comes with disgruntlement, and often depression and separation. Depression can feel serious. So “counting the genuine ways that this unexpected event happened for me, rather than to me” isn’t a game. It’s an exercise in observing the nature of life. It’s a way of putting yourself back into reality, into the kindness of the nature of things.

3.”This is just what I needed”: the direct route to getting your needs met.

• By now your needs are familiar. And you know what the effect is on your life when you believe you’re entitled to have them met and it doesn’t seem to be happening. The result is a hopeless quest filled with separation, frustration, and resentment. You’ve seen how to use four questions to ask yourself what you really need in this moment.
• The direct route is to let reality be the guide to your needs: “What I need is what I have.” This is not something to believe; it’s the way things are right now, whether you believe it or not.
• I am a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person but because it hurts when I argue with reality. No thinking in the world can change it. What is is. Everything I need is already here now. How do I know I don’t need what I think I need? I don’t have it. So everything I need is always supplied.

4.Whose business am I in now?

• It’s confusing and painful when you try to mind someone else’s business.
• Every time you try to second-guess what someone else is thinking or feeling, every time you believe that you know what’s good or bad for them, you have moved out of your own business and into someone else’s.
• One of the most loving acts you can do for yourself, and for everyone else, is to ask, “Right now, in this moment, whose business am I in?”
• There is no more loving way to be with someone than to stay out of his or her business mentally.
• Even when you and your partner are physically close, you’re still living in different worlds, and there is great beauty of the unknown yet familiar person you’re with.
• When you no longer intrude and have stopped trying to manipulate or control her, you meet someone who is more amazing than anything you could have imagined.

9.The transformation of a marriage

• The effects on a relationship when both people do inquiry can be nothing short of miraculous. The communication keeps everything open and without secrets. It’s not necessary for both partners to do this; if even one does The Work on his or her partner, it will radically change the marriage. But it’s more than twice as powerful if both partners do it.
• Both partners have written a Worksheet on the other, and each in turn reads the Worksheet aloud.
• …be a listener…take her words in, and see if he can find where she is right, without defending or interrupting or justifying.
• The apparent flaws or shortcomings that each sees and dislikes in the other are, after all, the pain that each one feels.
• …since…I found inquiry. Those painful fights…never happened again.
• I began to seriously question my thoughts—to ask “is it true?”
• With my inquiry, my first surprise was that I couldn’t be sure that my thoughts were true.
• I found out that these painful, painful thoughts were my way of torturing myself…
• Of course it wasn’t done all at once.
• Right there, I wrote down my thoughts and inquired into them. When I returned to my own business—which meant looking into my thoughts, not his—I felt better immediately.
• The thoughts unraveled as I asked myself the questions. Some beliefs disappeared and I didn’t even realize it.
• If we have a problem with each other, we go to different rooms and write down our thoughts. Then we help each other to inquire.
• Through inquiry we find out that these stories are just telling us where we wandered from the path of love and understanding.
• I know now that I’m not a victim. “I need my husband’s love”—is it true? How could it be? I’m the only one responsible for my life, my health, my feelings, and my happiness. When my neediness died away, what was left was love. Inquiry has been more than a tool for me; it’s been a path to joy and understanding.
• Forgiveness is discovering that what you thought happened didn’t—that there was never anything to forgive. What seemed terrible changes once you’ve questioned it. There is nothing terrible except your unquestioned thoughts about what you see. So whenever you suffer, inquire, look at the thoughts you’re thinking, and set yourself free. Be a child. Know nothing. Take your ignorance all the way to your freedom.

10.What’s not to love? Could it be you?

• Trying to earn your own love is just as painful as seeking the love of others, and the results are just as unsatisfying. And undoing the search works the same way. When you sincerely question your unexamined thoughts about yourself, love just happens.
  In every inquiry about a painful relationship—with your spouse, your mother, or someone at work—you always discover that the stress is caused by your own thinking. It’s not the person outside who is your problem. That’s not possible. And when you do the turnarounds, you see how the opposite of a painful thought can be as true or truer. At some point you arrive at statements that sound like “I should be faithful to me” “I should understand me” and ultimately “I should love me.”
  This might not be news to you. Most people have been told by friends or family or advice columnists that they should love themselves. But how do you do it? The fact that you can’t seem to live the turnarounds can even become another kind of self torture…You can’t force this process; you can only inquire and find out what’s true.
• This chapter is…about un-fooling yourself. The only obstacle to loving other people is believing what you think, and you’ll come to see that that’s also the only obstacle to loving yourself. To discover the beliefs that may not, after all, be true for you, you’ll need to ask yourself some very private questions. What are you ashamed of? Whom do you still resent (though you believe you shouldn’t)? What haven’t you forgiven yourself for?
  This inquiry isn’t manipulation. It’s going inside yourself for the love of truth and finding your own answers. If you have any trouble with loving yourself, your work isn’t done.
• No one who thinks “I should love myself” knows what love is. Love is what we are already.
• Love is not a doing. There is nothing you have to do. And when you question your mind, you can see that the only thing that keeps you from being love is a stressful thought.

Obstacles to loving yourself: the thing you are most ashamed of

• A good place to start is with whatever it is you’re most ashamed of. This may take some time to uncover. We’re so secretive about what makes us feel ashamed that we even try to keep it from ourselves, clinging to our pretense of self-respect while our thoughts run on about how terrible we are and how unforgivable the things we’ve done. Secrets cry out for inquiry. You can’t be free if you’re hiding.
• …it’s safe to see exactly what it is that you survived and to end your own denial—if only to discover the incredible gift that you have to pass on to the others.
• I have gone to the depths of my own painful beliefs. I have questioned them and seen them vanish like dreams.

Exercise: “Most Ashamed”

• Step one: write down a short, simple sentence that begins “What I’m most ashamed of is ________.”
• Step two: Inquire into each of the “meanings” on your list, one by one.
  ask yourself for your own truth. Please treat each question as a deep meditation. Ask the question, then gently wait for the heart’s answer to surface.
• Even if the turnarounds seem difficult, find three genuine ways, however modest, in which the opposite is as true as or truer than your original statement.
• When you question your darkest secret, and turn it around, you discover that everything you thought it meant isn’t necessarily true. This journey allows the mind to give you other truths, truths that reveal your goodness. There’s nothing you need to hide from yourself. It’s the truth that sets you free.
• Another shame exercise: “What I don’t want you to know about me”
• There are no mistakes in this perfect world, which is a tapestry of pure delight and beauty when seen through the eyes of someone who isn’t arguing with what is.
• There are two ways of being me: one is to hate it and one is to love it. Which will it be (since I don’t have a choice but to be me)? Okay, I’ll be me, and question my thoughts about me until I see me as perfect in every way, even sweeter than perfect.

Exercise: Letter of Apology

• …when you’re ready…act on it as soon as possible.
• It’s your life that you’re cleaning up. You can’t be in too big a hurry to do that.
• Gently move past the places where the turnaround doesn’t work, and see where it does work.
• You think that other people think there’s something wrong with you because you think it…When you question what you think, the truth will make you laugh.

Making friends with criticism

• If you really want to be free, criticism from others can be a gift. Feeling hurt by any criticism, feeling the slightest urge to defend yourself, means that there’s something you don’t accept and love about yourself. This is the very part of you that you want to hide. You want to be loved and understood, but not there. And as we’ve seen, hiding creates separation, from yourself as well as from others.
• No matter what anyone says to or about you, if you experience stress, then you are the one who’s suffering in the moment. Stress is the signal that it’s time to question your own thinking.

Exercise: Criticism

• When you no longer put your energy into seeking approval, you can open your arms to criticism and see it as a gift, instead of as something to disprove or defend against.
• When you’re genuinely humble, there’s no way that criticism can hurt you; it becomes obvious, through your own experience, that it can only help you. This is how clarity takes on life as effective action, so that you are kind to others and kind to yourself.
• Defense is the first act of war.
  Through you, I will come to know myself.
  It’s called integrity. I am all things.
  If you say one single thing that I have the urge to defend, that thing is the very pearl waiting inside me to be discovered.

11.Living in love

• …it’s easy to forgive yourself for your own humanity.
• …waking up from the dream of what they thought was happening in their lives and seeing what was really happening.
• When you don’t believe your stressful thoughts, all that’s left are love and laughter.
• Eventually The Work just becomes something very simple, a way of maintaining a happy life.
• “God spare me from the desire for love, approval, or appreciation.”

12.Love itself

• Love is what you are already. Love doesn’t seek anything. It’s already complete. It doesn’t want, doesn’t need, has no shoulds. It already has everything it wants, it already is everything it wants, just the way it wants it. So when I hear people say that they love someone and want to be loved in return, I know they’re not talking about love. They’re talking about something else.
• Seeking love is how you lose the awareness of love. But you can only lose awareness of it, not the state. That’s not an option, because love is what we all are.
• I already have everything. We all do. That’s how I can sit here so comfortably.

Further tools for inquiry

See http://www.thework.com