
Effects of “The Work” meditation on symptoms and quality of life (2015) - miles
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830714002067
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jasondclinton
> 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.

~~~
crispinb
Well it's only a small pilot.

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.

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adolph
Note: the article is from 2015.

“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?“”

~~~
apatters
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](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).

~~~
midnightmonster
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.

~~~
mercer
Isn't that pretty much Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which is often
referred as part of CBT as the 'umbrella' concept above it)?

~~~
jvanderbot
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.

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mirimir
Elsevier presents an excerpted version of the paper without any obvious
disclosure that it's an excerpt.

Except for "Pages 24-31", anyway.

So here: [https://sci-
hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2014.10...](https://sci-
hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2014.10.003)

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jasonhansel
> “The Work” Foundation, a non-profit 501© organization, partially supported
> this study.

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0xcde4c3db
> 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.

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egypturnash
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.

~~~
whoisjuan
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.

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thealch3m1st
Buddhist's have had similar ideas/thoughts. Buddhism is ~2.5k years old.

~~~
thealch3m1st
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 ?

