> Participants (n = 197) enrolled in a nine-day training course (“The School for The Work”) and completed a set of self-administered measures on three occasions: before the course (n = 197), after the course (n = 164), and six months after course completion (n = 102).
I'm a big advocate for meditation but the study is skewed by survivor bias. Almost half of participants dropped off responding after 6 months.
I find the 'meditation' description a little odd applied to Byron Katie's work. It's really more like a highly commercialised self-enquiry method than meditation per se. Basically neo-advaita plus wads of cash with a little cultish bullying mixed in.
“Like other psychological
models, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), “The Work” technique assumes that feelings (such as sadness, anger,
and pain) emerge from an attachment to a stressful thought, which leads to behavior. This means that thought precedes feelings and behavior and should be focused on as the primal cause of stress and suffering. However, unlike cognitive restruc-
turing that encourages an individual to use deliberative thinking
to answer questions, “The Work” uses it only for asking questions and “relies on one's witnessing awareness to listen for a response to arise naturally from within.””
The “questions: (1) Is it true? (2) Can I absolutely know that it is true? (3) How do I react when I believe that thought? (4) Who would
I be without the thought?“”
The line of inquiry is not dissimilar to CBT, which instructs the practitioner to identify the negative belief that's troubling them, identify evidence for and against it, and finally consider whether alternative explanations may exist. Which is more or less what you're doing in The Work's first two questions, only more rigorous.
I don't think CBT has an analogue to The Work's latter two questions. I don't know whether these questions have additional value, but one advantage of The Work might be that you can just buy the book and practice it on your own. CBT seems to be hard to do alone due to a dearth of quality resources for self-study.
The Work was invented by a woman named Byron Katie who used to be a real estate agent and claims to have solved her own alcoholism and overeating with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Katie
Notably CBT doesn't work for everybody (perhaps because if you can't convince yourself that your original negative belief was wrong, it's probably going to keep bothering you).
Short version: Last year, The Work as taught in Loving What Is by Byron Katie gave me perspective and tools that enabled me to function professionally and personally through/despite deep emotional pain/fear/grief--and be open and generous with the person close to me whose life choices were generating the pain while standing firm in my own choices. (Katie would say, I had thoughts about this person's life choices that generated the pain.)
I had already and pretty recently attended almost a full course of CBT skills classes (accompanying a person for whom they were prescribed), which I had found mostly to include codified, acronym-ized versions of techniques I had already been taught growing up or had independently discovered.
I thought the CBT stuff was pretty good, and it was helpful for the person I was accompanying, but it wasn't enough for me to deal with the pain last year.
Katie teaches that you don't have to convince yourself that your original belief was wrong. Often you do find that it's wrong, but often you just find that you're not sure. Once you've achieved some epistemic humility (I might not really know this), the third and fourth questions give you a different perspective, looking at the consequences of holding on to this belief (which I just realized I'm not so sure about) and letting you imagine a world where you weren't being hurt by the belief. You don't try to convince yourself not to hold the belief: you just do The Work and let your mind do its thing.
She includes lots of example dialogs where she plows straight in to hard cases, too. It's worth a read, especially if there's anything you're having a hard time coping with.
I find it reassuring that CBT, OP, and this thread agree. I find it reassuring that many times similar concepts were re discovered. For those who do too, I recommend the book Happiness Hypothesis, which delves into psychology, biology, evolution, anthropology, religion and tries to unify some themes. It does very well and backs with decades of studies.
One common mechanism found in effective psychological treatments[1] is creating awareness to a negative thought(often below awareness) and it's sorrounding emotion and creating a positive emotion around it .
You get that in therapy - unaware thought gets exposed, challenged, in an emotional atmosphere of care.
The work works similarly - you start with a negative thought. You question it - that's an awareness process. While doing so other related negative thought sometimes rise to the surface.
And the second part - the 2 last question - creating awareness to attached negative emotion , and creating a new positive emotion.
That's how it feels to me, from long and very helpful use.
And also, the simplicity, only four questions - makes it easier for this to become a habit.
On the other side, just from reading about CBT ,it feels like a worthwhile addition to the work, because it's more in-depth treatment of more complex thought patterns like "mind reading" which we do when we try to understand others, and should be done to a reasonable amount .
In the work, it's easy to go to the other side and doubt the value of some mind reading at all, which is less valuable for social situations.
> The promising results of this pilot study warrant randomized clinical trials to validate “The Work” meditation technique as an effective intervention for improvement in psychological state and quality of life in the general population.
Were RCTs ever done? I don't see anything in PubMed.
The obvious next question for me is how does this particular meditation compare to other modes of meditation that are not all about poking at places in your brain that hurt.
Other modes as in what? Meditation is either a fully introspective exercise where you try to momentarily pause your mind monologue or thought threads, or an inquisitive exercise where you evaluate your feelings about situations (by using logic or by simply mindfully re-organizing thoughts.) Whether you can call these things meditation or not is another discussion.
The latter it’s basically what behavioral therapy does and it’s already established as the only efficient/semi-successful method to treat stress from past traumas and correct damaging behavior.
So if the question is if you can overcome traumas and fix behaviors by simply doing introspective meditation (seeking to cease thoughts), I would say no.
Your brain needs to actively revisit events and situations to readjust your perceptions about those events.
According to BJ Fogg you can only change habits either by having a near to death experience (the only cold turkey approach that works) or by taking very small steps to disrupt and modify those habits. In a similar sense thought patterns can only be modified by continuously revisiting and shifting your perspective on a particular matter.
This is easy to understand when you reflect on how particular opinions change as you grow older. It usually takes years of exposing yourself to different environments and information to change fundamental beliefs that are part of your upbringing. This is why childhood plays a crucial role in human development, since it’s easier to create to acquire new beliefs and change behaviors in a young developing mind.
From the paper - how many of you actually downloaded it to read it ?
"The Work" technique assumes that feelings (such as sadness, anger, and pain) emerge from an attachment to a stressful thought, which leads to behavior. This means that thought precedes feelings and behavior, and should be focused on as the primal cause of stress and suffering"
Anyone here familiar with buddhist meditation ? Vipassana specifically ? Isn't that what they talk about ?
I'm a big advocate for meditation but the study is skewed by survivor bias. Almost half of participants dropped off responding after 6 months.