Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

When your writing on the Worksheet is pointed at an issue, first inquire with the four questions as usual. Then, when you get to the turnarounds, substitute the words “my thinking” for the issue, wherever that seems appropriate. For example, “I don’t like war because it frightens me” turns around to “I don’t like my thinking because it frightens me

I often use the word story to talk about thoughts, or sequences of thoughts, that we convince ourselves are real. A story may be about the past, the present, or the future; it may be about what things should be, what they could be, or why they are. Stories appear in our minds hundreds of times a day—when someone gets up without a word and walks out

“Sweetheart, I hear that you had a wonderful phone call. I love that, and I would also like you to leave the room now. I have a deadline to meet.”

One of the best ways of discovering your underlying beliefs is to write out your “proof of truth” for question 1. Rather than moving immediately to the awareness that you can’t really know anything, allow yourself to stay in the story. Stay in the place where you really do believe that what you have written is true. Then write down all the reasons

Notice how each statement in the following dialogue appears to be about a past event. In reality, the pain we feel about a past event is created in the present, whatever our past pain might have been. Inquiry looks at this present pain.

The reason I made friends with the wind—with reality—is that I discovered I didn’t have a choice. I realized that it’s insane to oppose it.

The Work will show you where you’ve got your happiness backward. When you think that people should be kind to you, the reverse is true: You should be kind to them and to yourself. Your judgments about others become your prescription for how to live. When you turn them around, you see what will bring you happiness.

Before the thought, you weren’t suffering; with the thought, you’re suffering; when you recognize that the thought isn’t true, again there is no suffering. That is how The Work functions.

What I say is, find an enemy. They won’t give you that sympathy. You go to your friends for refuge, because you can count on them to agree with your stories. But when you go to your enemies, they’ll tell you, straight up, anything you want to know, even though you may think you don’t want to know it.