Making Love in the Kitchen

This is Nourish Your Soul Week. We are well in to summer and it is time to start enjoying it. This week is dedicated to just that, enjoyment of life. A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had been given the opportunity to interview the inspiring Bryon Katie. Katie has addressed many health and well being related issues in the numerous interviews she has done over the years (including her interview with Oprah), I chose to focus our discussion on health and nutrition, obviously.

Is That True?

Thoughts are not facts. Live in the now. Present moment awareness. Mindful living. Conscious eating.

All of these philosophies are intended to bring us the very same thing: joy. The challenge however is going from being wrapped up in our own thinking one day, to being free of stress and suffering the next. How can we go from being attached to and believing our stressful thoughts to being truly present? That is where Byron Katie and The Work come in.

Byron Katie discovered The Work, a practice of inquiry into our thinking, after she hit bottom herself in 1986. Living in a halfway house, dragged down by her own depressive thoughts, The Work came to her. She opened her eyes to the realization that all the negative thoughts she had been having and believing, as most of us do, weren’t actually true at all. At that moment, Katie woke up to reality, reclaimed her sanity and since that moment, has been sharing The Work around the world.

The founding principle of The Work is the understanding that when we believe our stressful thoughts, we suffer. When we can be free from believing those thoughts, we don’t suffer. Makes sense but easier said than done surely. With The Work, freedom from suffering is just four questions away.

I had the privilege of speaking to Katie about her life and The Work. What struck me as we first began speaking was the gentleness in her voice. Katie stated that without the fears that come from believing our thoughts, we are able to act out of our true nature as human beings, which is to be loving, caring and kind. Katie is the absolute embodiment of this.

Since beginning my practice as a nutritionist, it has been challenging to me to figure out what I can do for people so that when they leave our session with the best intentions to fulfill the recommendations I have made, they don’t still find themselves at the drive-thru the moment things get tough. I spoke to Katie how The Work helps people overcome their old habits and addictive behaviour.

“It is not old habits”, she explains. “It is that people fall into old ways of thinking. We are at war with our negative thoughts”.  Katie went on to explain that when it comes to what we eat, often we find ourselves throwing the same things into our carts that have caused us to be in the state of health we are in. Are we throwing in the chocolate bars because we are addicted to the junk food, or are we addicted to the thoughts that result in us wanting to eat junk food?

According to Katie, this is not a junk food habit, but a negative thought habit that we continue to believe and feed.

We are all familiar with the thoughts I am referring to; “I am too fat”, “I hate my body”, “I am too tired to exercise”, “Eating healthy is too much work”, “I can’t cook” and the list goes on. These are some of the top level thoughts that result in junk food landing in our carts. We believe these thoughts and our mind likes to be right and so we make it right. You with me?

Once we can stop living out of our addictive, troubled minds, we can be freed from these negative habits. It is the negative thinking we habitually hold as the truth, that creates the bad habits.

The Work gives us a way out of this repetitive negative thought pattern that, despite our best intentions, perpetuate the bad habits in our lives.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of the interview.

Byron Katie will be in Toronto from October 2nd-4th to conduct a three day workshop. Get the details on the event or find out how you can win tickets to this event, click here.

Print PDF

Tags: Happiness, Health, Meghan Telpner, Wellbeing