Have you ever felt that the harder you look for love, the more it seems to elude you? Or that seeking approval makes you feel insecure?
If you have, there's a reason. It's because seeking love and approval is a sure way to lose the awareness of both. You can lose the awareness of love, but never love itself. Love is what we are. So, if love is what we are, why do we look for it so hard, and often with such poor results? Only because of what we think – the thoughts we believe that are not true.
It may seem odd at first to look at grand passions or unhappiness, especially unhappiness about love, in terms of thoughts. Still, if you slow down and take a look, you'll find that there is always a particular thought that triggers any stressful feeling. Anxiety about love is the result of simple, childlike thoughts, thoughts that everyone has, even ninety-year-olds. ‘I need your love.’ ‘I'd be lost without you.’ Unquestioned thoughts like these pretend to guide you toward love when in fact they are obstacles to it.
People who are upset sometimes say they can't locate the thought that is causing the upset; they can only feel a flood of emotion. This doesn't mean that the thought isn't there. Suppose, for example, you say something heartfelt and he doesn't reply; he just gets up and leaves the room. You're left sitting there feeling as though the world has ended. The thought may be ‘He isn't interested in me.’ It may become ‘Why do I bother? No one really cares about me.’
If you aren’t feeling upset right now, as you read this, remember a past situation in you life where you were very upset; be still and allow that feeling to re-create itself. If you're upset and you can't seem to find the thought behind the emotions, try this: Take some time to travel inwardly toward the place where the feeling is most intense. This means sinking into the physical sensation of the feeling. Let yourself be upset all over again, for your own sake, and this time give it a voice. If the feeling could talk, what would it say and who would it say that to?
Don't rush this. Be precise. Otherwise you're likely to come up with something that seems wise or kind – the thought you think you should be thinking – instead of the thought that's really there and hurting.
Suppose you've just returned from travelling for a week with a new friend, and your hopes for the experience were completely dashed. A psychologically correct thought, such as ‘My expectations were too high,’ isn't what you're looking for when your real feelings are saying, ‘You let me down,' ‘You hurt me,’ ‘You lied,’ ‘You're not the person you pretended to be.’ Your actual thought, the one you blurt out in the moment like a child – write that thought down as bluntly as you can. That's the thought you're looking for.
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 even believe them.
What if you stopped to ask? What if you had a method of seeing whether you really believe your most disturbing thoughts? The Work – it's also called inquiry – is exactly that. Seeing it as a method is only temporary. 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?
Is it true?
After you've found the thought that's upsetting you, the first step is to ask if it's true. That means checking it against your own truth, going inside yourself and seeing if you really believe the thought that's troubling you. Does the thought match what you know as reality? In most cases it doesn’t.
There's no reason to believe that thoughts match reality. As you move through life, thoughts appear like shots in the dark. They are no more than vague attempts to figure out what's going on around and inside you. When you're seeking love and approval, many thoughts are aimed at deciphering the behaviour of the people you care about, or theorizing about what's going on in their minds.
In a sense, every thought poses a question, something like ‘Is this what's going on?’ A thought about something we perceived, if it were expressed accurately, might say, ‘I think he insulted me – is that what happened?’ But, like children, we tend to focus on the alarming part. ‘He insulted me.’ We grab hold of it, then react as if the thought were a fact. We go into pain, or we attack, instead of answering the question implied by the thought ‘He insulted me – is that what really happened?’ (What if the reason he didn’t answer your friendly wave is that he didn't see you because he wasn’t wearing his glasses?)
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. In this step, you first examine what happens when you believe your thought. You notice in detail what the thought does to your emotional and physical life. Suppose, for instance, that your thought is ‘George doesn't care about me.’ Take a good look at how you live when you're in the grip of that thought. How does that thought affect you? How do you treat yourself and others, including George, when you believe that thought? Do you pity yourself? Do you feel hurt and angry? Is this where you become a victim? Do you stop talking to George and give him ‘the look'? Do you snap at your colleagues or your kids? Does it affect your sleep?
Then you take an imaginative leap. You imagine what your life would be without the thought: if you didn't believe it or if you were incapable even of thinking it. Just for this moment, don't bother about whether or not the thought is true. The point is to experiment, to see what your life feels like when you don't believe that thought. In your imagination, look at George without the thought ‘He doesn't care about me’ and stay with that experience for a while.
This step lets you notice the consequences of believing a thought. You thoroughly immerse yourself in life with the thought, and then you give yourself a taste of life without it.
Turnarounds: is the opposite as true?
This is the final step of inquiring into the thought. Like a mirror, the mind has a way of getting things right but backward. So you take your thought and turn it around. This means literally reversing it in as many ways as you can. You then ask yourself if these reversed versions seem as true as or truer than your original thought. They often do.
Let's turn around the thought ‘He insulted me’: first to the other, then to the self, then to the opposite.
I insulted him. (I jumped to my conclusion when he didn't wave, and I judged him harshly.)
I insulted me. (I turned a possibly innocent action into an insult. I was the one who created the insult, in my own mind. And my angry thoughts made me feel small and mean.)
He didn't insult me. (Maybe he didn't even see me. Maybe he was thinking of something else. I can’t really know what his intention was.)
When the mind wants to prove that it's right, it can get further into a rut, like a stuck car. Trying out turnarounds and considering whether they may possibly be true is like rocking your car back and forth to free it from the mud.
Suppose, for instance, you're convinced that it would be a terrible thing if your boyfriend were to take a job a thousand miles from where you live. This thought leaves you paralysed with anxiety. Turning it around makes you look at a possibility that your stuck mind would never consider: Are there any ways it could be a good thing if your boyfriend took the job and moved away? Your mind may refuse to even look at that possibility. That is pure stuckness.
But what if you can find even one genuine reason to support the reversed thought? Perhaps you can find this: your boyfriend's new job could be tremendously fulfilling for him, and your relationship may improve because of that. If you can see even a slim possibility that this may be true, the fear has to lessen. Maybe his absence would allow you to spend more time with your friends, or to start working out, or to take the course you've been wanting to take. Maybe his move to an exciting city would result in your spending time with him there, or even moving there – who knows? You don't have to believe these reasons or act on them – just finding a reason can move you out of your rut. You may be astonished at the lightness and relief that come from opening your mind to the possibility that what you were convinced was terrible may not be so terrible after all.
You may resist this exercise because you believe that it would somehow bring about what you fear. In the example above, you may think that opening your mind to your boyfriend's move, even for a moment, would make you a weaker opponent of it. But if you really look at that thought, the opposite is more likely. When people take a fearful and rigid stance, they often bring about what they're trying to prevent. 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.
If someone has trouble finding one reason to support a turnaround (‘This is a terrible setback and that's that,’ ‘This could work out for the best? No! I won't even consider that!’), I often suggest that they find three reasons that the turnaround could be true. When your mind refuses to budge, you may discover that finding three genuine reasons, even if they seem silly or insignificant at first, moves you out of your rut and puts you back on the road to interesting possibilities.
From I Need Your Love – Is That True? Copyright 2005 by Byron Katie, published in the UK by Rider.
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