Fearless: Creating the Courage to Change the Things You Can by Chandler Steve

Author:Chandler, Steve [Chandler, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Maurice Bassett
Published: 2008-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

There is something better than heaven. It is the eternal, meaningless, infinitely creative mind. It can’t stop for time or space or even joy. It is so brilliant that it will shake what’s left of you to the depths of all-consuming wonder.

Byron Katie

Chapter 31

Calling Byron Katie

I had never experienced a single human being who was fearless. Until I met Katie. Day after day in the school of hers that I attended, she was up there leading us morning through night, intelligent, sweet and calm, and without fear. Without worry. Just peaceful energy. I had never experienced anyone like her.

Months went by after that school and I saw her speak again at a gathering that Steve Hardison arranged for friends and family. She remembered me from the school. I got to know her husband, the author Stephen Mitchell, and the more I used her system called the work (www.thework.com), the more fear began to disappear in my life and in the lives of my clients.

Katie later invited me to call her at her home to discuss this book. She knew I was writing about the relationship between thought and fear, and she was delighted to help me with my key question: how can fear come from a thought when it feels deeper than that? It feels like sometimes I’m feeling it before I think anything. Like the moment I looked out the plane windows in Idaho and felt the plane dip and saw the mountains on either side of us. The bottom dropped out of my stomach before I could form a thought. Or so it felt.

People all call her Katie, but Byron Kathleen Reid is her real, natural born Irish name. Some people see the name Byron and think it’s a faux-medieval affectation. They are wrong. Some people hear about her and think she’s a new age guru of some sort, but they are wrong there, too. She is as humble as anyone I’ve ever known. When she first answered the phone and I said, “Is this Katie?” she said, “That’s what I am told.” When a woman once asked her in a small gathering how she handles her fame as author, she said in all sincerity, “That’s just a rumor to me so I don’t pay any attention.”

I told her how much her school had relaxed and changed me. The experience had made everything fresh and new. The peaceful energy I now had! I was so much older when I went to her school. I’m younger than that now. I now knew exactly what I wanted to do. Live this moment. Write this book about fear.

We talked for a time about the mind’s need to label and judge everything. At her school, she taught us to take a morning walk with no mind. To label things anew as we saw them. As if we were empty children without stories. Then from the void: Tree. Sky. Lamp post. Woman. Love.

She reminded me that the mind is a polarity. On one end of the pole is the “I know” mind: the ego.

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