How 40 Minutes Undid 29 Years

The Lavish Well | Issue 28

Welcome to The Lavish Well—where this week, I'm sharing what forty minutes in a single session dismantled — and sitting with one of the most unsettling truths in transformational work: that the beliefs causing us the most suffering are often the ones we've never thought to question.

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I went in with a belief about my husband. I came out with a mirror.

I have spent more than twenty years studying the human mind — as a physician, as a functional and integrative medicine practitioner, Ayurveda, positive and spiritual psychology. Lots of studying.

I consider myself a fairly clear-eyed person. Someone who has done her work.

So when my mentor sat me down for a session with Byron Katie's "The Work" last week, I was not bracing for impact. I was curious, maybe mildly skeptical, and entirely unprepared for what was about to happen.

What followed were the most disorienting forty minutes of my recent life.
And I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

Here's what I walked in believing, and what I walked out knowing instead

In Today's Issue

• The belief I was carrying about my husband — and what was actually true

• What Byron Katie's four questions do that nothing else does

• How to begin The Work yourself — no practitioner required

Your most certain thoughts deserve the most scrutiny. 👇

The Pulse

This is what matters this week.

The Thoughts We Never Question

Most of what you believe about the people closest to you is not about them.

We do not doubt our painful perceptions. We collect evidence for them.

The high-achieving woman is especially skilled at this.
Her mind is precise, pattern-recognizing, built for synthesis.

When she concludes that someone cannot meet her — cannot hear her, cannot consider her — that conclusion carries the full weight of her intelligence behind it.

It feels like analysis, not story.

But analysis requires a subject.
And we are always, always the subject we least examine.

The most sophisticated minds have the most sophisticated blind spots.
The very sharpness that makes you brilliant at your work is the same sharpness that makes your most certain thoughts feel like fact.

They are not fact.
They are perception dressed in certainty's clothing.

This week, I learned that lesson at close range — in my own marriage.

THE DEEP TAKE

Where we go deeper—science, story, truth.

The Mirror I Didn't Know I Was Holding

My current mentor is Layla Martin — a world-class teacher in the psychology of sex, love, and relationships, and the woman I am training with professionally in the methodologies of healing female trauma.

She is a powerhouse and a very wise woman. She does not let you stay comfortable in your own story. That is not an insult; it is the reason I chose her.

Last week, she began training us in using Byron Katie's "The Work." If you haven't encountered it, The Work is four questions applied to a painful or stressful thought.
The questions are simple enough to write on a napkin.
What they do to your inner landscape is another matter entirely.

As we learned this methodology by practicing on ourselves, we had to choose a recent challenging situation with someone who brought up painful or stressful thoughts.

My thought was this:

My husband cannot consider my feelings before reacting and drawing assumptions.

I had lived this belief across twenty-nine years of marriage. I had examples. In fact, I had a whole internal case file. As someone who prides herself on not being reactive, it felt particularly true — because I could clearly see how different he and I were in our approaches.

Layla walked me through the four questions:

Is it true?

Yes. Absolutely.

Can you absolutely know it's true?

...I paused longer here. I guess there could be other reasons for his behavior that I don’t know about. So, I see how I can’t absolutely know it’s true.

How do you react — what happens — when you believe that thought?

I tighten. I close. I start building the case for why this marriage cannot work.
My signature move when triggered is black-and-white: I cannot live the rest of my life like this.

Then she probed deeper into this question: How do you treat him when you believe this thought?

I closed my eyes and felt into my body. I treat him like he’s an uncaring, unconscious, narcissistic jerk.

And do you treat yourself when you believe this thought?

This was really starting to sting. I focused in on myself even deeper.
I treat myself like I’m a small, out-of-control little girl who just wants to rage. I look at myself with disdain because I hate the way I feel, and that I let someone else make me feel that way.

Now the tears were really flowing.

Who would you be without that thought?

Not that you just didn’t have that thought, but that you weren’t even capable of having that thought. She used the visual of an alien coming in and laser-beaming that thought out of my brain so it couldn’t even exist.

I suddenly felt some space and saw who I could be without that belief.
Open. Present. Curious about him instead of being closed off from him.

And then we reached the turnaround.

In The Work, the turnaround happens after the four initial questions.
It inverts the original statement, and surprisingly, it almost always feels as true, or even truer.

You're not debating the thought — you're locating where it lives closest to home.

My turnaround: I cannot consider my own feelings before reacting and drawing assumptions.

I sat in that sentence for a long moment.

Because it was true. More true, in many ways, than what I'd said about my husband.

I plow through life.
This is not a flaw I am ashamed of — it has built everything I have — but it is a pattern.

I operate from what my logical brain says must be done. I make decisions from strategy before I've checked in with my body, my feelings, my deeper knowing.
I draw assumptions about situations and people, including myself, before I've paused long enough to actually feel what's present.

I had spent years with a thought that pointed entirely outward.
The turnaround brought it home in forty seconds.

The tears were not small. They were the kind that carry years of accumulated certainty that has suddenly lost its foundation. I felt my understanding of my husband shift — not because he changed, but because I stopped projecting onto him what I hadn't looked at in myself.

I went from "I cannot live the rest of my life like this" to feeling genuinely excited about what is possible between us.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

I have since started reading Byron Katie's book, Loving What Is, from cover to cover. I am getting trained in The Work so I can bring it to my clients. In more than twenty years as a physician and women's coach, I have not found a methodology this precise, this disarming, or this effective at reaching the root of human suffering.

If Byron Katie were Santa Claus, I would call myself a true believer.

IN REAL LIFE

What it actually looks like.

The Work requires one thing more than any other: willingness to be genuinely wrong about something you are certain of. 

Not performatively open-minded. Actually willing.

If you have that, here is where to start:

01. Identify one thought.

Not a theme — a specific thought about a specific person in a specific situation. "She doesn't value my time" is a thought. "She dismissed my idea in front of the team on Tuesday" is a fact. Work with the thought.

02. Ask the four questions slowly.

Is it true? Can you absolutely know it's true? How do you react when you believe it — what do you do, what does it cost you? Who would you be without it, in that same moment?

03. Do the turnaround.

Flip the thought toward the other person, toward yourself, toward the opposite. Then find three genuine, specific, real examples of each version. Not hypothetical — actual. This is where the work lives.

04. Don't rush the release.

If something cracks open, let it. That is not a breakdown.
That is the sound of a story losing its grip.

You can begin at thework.com. Byron Katie offers free worksheets to help you through this process, guided sessions, and videos.

This is one of the few transformational methodologies that asks nothing of you but honesty.

FROM THE WELL

What’s supporting the rhythm.

Loving What Is - Byron Katie

This is the book I started the morning after my session and have not put down.
Byron Katie developed The Work after a decade of severe depression ended — not through therapy or medication, but through a single moment of radical self-inquiry. What she discovered became four questions that can dismantle a lifetime of stressful thought in a single sitting.

Loving What Is walks you through The Work in real time — actual sessions with real people, real beliefs, real turnarounds. You watch the process unfold on the page. You feel the moment a person's certainty cracks open. Then you understand: this isn't philosophy. It's a precision tool. One of the most powerful I've encountered in twenty years of practice.

👉 Get Loving What Is on Amazon

THE LAST WORD

The most dangerous thoughts are not the dark ones.

The most dangerous thoughts are the certain ones — the ones that feel
too obviously true to examine.

Your perceptions are not reality.
They are your mind's best attempt to make meaning from experience.
And your mind, brilliant as it is, has developed its conclusions largely in the dark.

I am a physician. I study the body, the brain, the intricate architecture of how human beings function. I know the neuroscience of perception, of confirmation bias, of how the mind filters reality through the lens of what it already believes.

I knew this — and I was still carrying a thought about my husband that I had never truly examined.

That is not a failure. That is a reminder that the work is ongoing.
For all of us.

We must understand that our thoughts are just thoughts, and they are to be questioned. Don’t believe everything that you think. In fact, dig deep into your long-held beliefs and assumptions about yourself and others, even if you think you have mountains of evidence that prove your point.

In doing so, you will learn to love deeper, understand more, be more compassionate, gain wisdom, and trust yourself and others more. You will free yourself in so many ways.

And you can be absolutely certain that this is true.

If this issue moved something in you — send it to someone who needs it.
If you're reading The Lavish Well for the first time, subscribe and join us every Thursday. And if you or someone you know has been living under the weight of a thought that has never been questioned…

This is the shift.
This is the medicine.

Until next week…

Be well. Be fierce. Be lavish.

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