I won the free coaching session with him in the group's raffle, at the end of which, my mind was blown again. People who have been practicing inquiry for a while often say, 'The Work is no longer something I do.

This is where you turn a problem around and see if the problem is actually your fault or just in your head.

Nearly twenty years later, Loving What Is continues to inspire people all over the world to do The Work; to listen to the answers they find inside themselves; and to open their minds to profound, spacious, and life-transforming insights. But the way the work sets it up is that one is only meant to inquire as to whether the thought creates stress or peace, and then we are asked to let the thought let go of us (I did appreciate her clarification that she isn't asking people to "drop the thought" or to try to drop it) on the basis of realizing it's not helping us feel peaceful or happy. The key, in my mind, is to accept that things that "shouldn't" happen sometimes do anyway, that you have no control over other people's choices, and that sometimes that really hurts, and then move on with a determination to try not to hurt others the same way, to ease pain instead of cause it, not to accept that bad things *should* happen because they did.

She even includes guidelines to help children incorporate The Work into their lives when they are young, saving themselves from the baggage that could come from years of negative and unproductive thinking. While I can see how not getting upset might be helpful, the rest of the story is completely unhelpful and makes no sense.It's another one of those books that would improve the world by major leaps and bounds if everybody read it. The only way to achieve harmony is to focus only on your business, leaving the things others can control in their court and surrendering the things that only God can change. What The Work brought me that all the books on the former list did not is an actual method--a process not a theory! At best, this is a gross oversimplification of real problems people face with solutions founded in anecdotal evidence and contradictory principles. Not asking you to drop that thought, just simply can you see a reason to drop this lie that argued with reality?

In fact, “If you want reality to be different than what it is, you might as well try to teach a cat to bark. When I am discontent, it is because I cannot accept some person, place or principle that is not as I want. Years ago, after months of dealing with post-partum depression after giving birth to my first child, my GP suggested I talk to a therapist to help me through the depression.There are endless ways, paths and healing ways to go and not everyone benefits from the same things, It all depends on the journey they are on. My concern is for the danger of applying this technique to (an admittedly small number of) extreme cases, such as those who are victims of crime.

I don't even really 'do' the Work but I ask myself the questions quickly and that in turn has helped me to see that my thoughts are not necessarily reality, and that my feelings are caused by those thoughts. It's not his need for acceptance which is causing stress, it's the unrealistic strategy of trying to have it met through his family, which, in reality, doesn't, in his experience, have the willingness or ability to meet that need. Okay, my other main disagreement is that the application of the work felt too rationalistic and, again, simplistic to me. If you continue to do The Work, you may discover that the questioning flows into every aspect of your life, effortlessly undoing the stressful thoughts that keep you from experiencing peace.So it's not your partner’s assumed lack of love that’s hurting you – it's your interpretation of your partner’s feelings. We can know that reality is good just as it is, because when we argue with it, we experience tension and frustration.