Heart Meets Mind

The following is a quote of an MP3 of Byron Katie facilitating the Work, which is freely downloadable from the website www.everypathis.org – the session is entitled How to Do a Relationship. I am including it here because I feel that it is a profound explanation of how inquiry works.

“This Work is meditation; the heart gives the answer – not the intellect. What I experience is: the mind has been perceived as an enemy. So we write the mind down on paper and then we ask the questions. In that way, it’s the mind asking the questions. And then if it asks with intention and it really wants to know, if you’re a lover of truth, the mind asks and the heart, which has always been clouded over with all of this thinking, all of this chaos; the mind asks the questions, the four questions, and the heart will give the answer. Every time it will give it in pictures, it will give it in knowing, it will give it in thoughts. And if you wait it will just feed you and feed you and feed you. And the mind begins to just lose itself in that peace it’s always been seeking. It’s the mind finding a home in the heart. And the heart and the mind come to know in that space that they’re the same. There is no mind and heart, there is no separation – it’s merging.

We want to give our bodies a home – let’s give our mind a home. We want to give our sweet children a home – we want to give the homeless a home – focusing always on that so we don’t have to give the mind a home that is safe and that is the power of understanding and truth.

There is no mind and heart. There’s only, you know, the symbol of heart, the mind knows that that’s why it never goes out – it’s coming home to itself. It’s been out there a while. It’s a nice trip out – for me forty three years and its back. And that’s what this Work does, you know, we begin to look forward to it; like look forward to the worst that could happen, we may as well we’ve had a wonderful teacher here that shows us, you know, here it comes.

So this Work is, we go out and the Work is the way back now. So we begin to look forward to the trip and eventually there’s nothing that can stop the flow – it’s an in and out – I, I, I, I, I, I.

There’s no harm anywhere – our story about what is, is the harm we experience within us. And if you should feel the discomfort of that, then If you think this investigation would serve you – it’s an offering.”