the story of the grumpy old lady or how i found to the work

​.......My name is Sylvia Dreiser Farnsworth and I live in Naples, Florida, where I work as a Life-Transition-Coach. For many years I have been practicing The Work of Byron Katie; first for myself, and later as a facilitator and coach for The Work and I do that in form of workshops, online classes, personal online- and phone sessions as well as in person sessions at my center in Florida. I also have developed a retreat program, where people come and stay with me for five days at my Center at the Gulf of Mexico, and I cook for them, and together we dive deep into The Work.
            Byron Katie once said "The Work is preventive medicine" and that medicine was truly put to the test when I stood on the platform of a little train station in Germany watching the train disappearing in the distance. I had just stepped off that train, which was continuing its journey to Freudenstadt in the Black Forest with my purse, leaving me on the platform speechless and moneyless. Yes, I had clothes on and the rest of my luggage in my hands but I had no phone, no money, no flight ticket and no passport or other identification. I felt a shock wave moving through my entire body. My head was blank. Nothing but disbelieve. This just could not be happening! Seconds later, thoughts started to flood back into my head. The first one was “What now? What to do next?” And then grace kicked in with the understanding: "If I don’t have my purse right at this moment with me, that simply means that I do not need to have it with me right at this moment!” Through my intensely practicing The Work for many years, the questions from The Work had become a second nature to me and were available to me now and so spontaneously the question arose in me: "Am I ok right now if I do not believe that I need my purse?" The answer was a clear "Yes". I was perfectly fine. I was healthy, I was safe, I was not exposed to any imminent danger, and I had even food and water with me. My mind, however, was not so easy to calm down. It had its moment of glory now, throwing a firework of thoughts at me, trying to convince me that I was in big trouble. Like a movie projector, it produced images of doom and desolation and projected them onto the screen in my head. Each moment when I believed those images and took them as reality, I felt my heart sinking and my hands shaking. For a while, I could watch myself ping-ponging backs and forth: From a calmness that came by noticing that I was perfectly fine, to believing how terrible all that had just happened to me was. Both extremes were present. The clarity, however, gained the upper hand and saved me from further suffering. Today, when I look back, I can see how tremendously supported I have been at every moment: The man I asked to use his cellphone to call my parents gave it to me without any hesitation. He even dialed the numbers for me, as I could not read them on his phone without my glasses, which also had been left in the lost purse.  I wanted to call my brother but the only number I knew by heart was the number of my parents. My mom immediately picked up the phone and, after I had explained my situation to her, called my brother. My brother who was supposed to be already on his way to Italy with his family for the summer holidays, thank goodness had not left the house yet when he received the call. He jumped into his car and joined me an hour later at the train station. After driving me to numerous places - like the police station to file the report, or to the bank to block my credit cards - he gave me money to purchase a train ticket to return to my parents. Yes, my purse was never found and the surveillance camera on the train videotaped the man who took my purse away. However, that was not proof that there was something wrong.  How can I know for certain that I was meant to make the flight that day or to keep my purse? I don’t know what is best for me, and having had numerous opportunities to observe my life, I had learned that life is kind and that what happens is always the best possible outcome for me. This is the advantage of having a certain age: It offers a time span for observation, something, which I didn’t have when I was in my twenties or thirties. Now, however, having passed my sixtieth birthday this year, I have quite some years to look back. Up to this day, without any exception, I have not found a single event where life was against me. Everything – even what first looked to be to my disadvantage – turned out to be of great benefit to me. So while standing on the train platform without my purse, having the knowledge that comes from observation and experience, I could trust that what had happened to me was for my benefit.
            For me, trusting, which comes out of understanding and not out of believing, is fundamentally different from Positive Thinking. I remember that in my twenties, Positive Thinking was a kind of fad and I practiced it, too. I could never really warm up to it though, as it always felt fake to me. Why would I need to suppress my thoughts and feelings and sugar coat them with positive thinking while deep inside of me I still believed that something was wrong? A very different approach to life is offered by The Work of Byron Katie. Here thoughts and feelings are not suppressed, nothing is sugar coated. On the contrary: When we practice The Work, we take time to let our thoughts and feelings surface; we open up to them, become conscious of them. And then, when they are in the open, we look closely at them, like through a magnifying glass, and we question their validity. Are they fact or fiction?
Thoughts, which we believe but which we never question, thoughts which we unconsciously believe just because our parents or society believed in them, have a tremendous influence in the way we experience life. Before I started to practice The Work, I was not aware of that. In fact, I was not even aware that I blindly believed in thoughts that caused me pain without ever asking, if they were fact or fiction. When we do The Work, we take a close look at each thought that makes us feel sad or anxious or frustrated. In my example, if I believed that I should have my purse with me and that I should be on my way to the airport, while in reality, I was standing in the police station making my report, then I would feel pain in the form of anxiety or frustration. Thankfully, having practiced The Work for a while, even when – for some moments - I was still believing those painful thoughts, I could not believe them for long. Automatically a thought like “I should be at the airport now” or “I am in big trouble” was followed by the internal question “Is that true?”  And that question prompted me to look closer. “I should be at the airport now.” Is that really true? Is it fact or fiction? I mean, honestly, how can I know that it would be better for me to be at the airport right now? At least, I could say, “I don’t know”. So why suffer believing something that might not really be true. Had the same event happened to me ten years earlier, with no doubt, I would have been convinced that something really horrible had happened to me. And I would have suffered as a result. This time, however, it was the Work, which was alive in me, that spared me from such pain and I can say with gratitude and conviction  “Yes, The Work is preventive medicine, and it truly works for me!”
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2.  How The Work came into my Life
It was on a cloudy summer evening about seven years ago. I was sitting in the living room of our home in the East Bay of San Francisco, sipping on a hot tea, when I heard my husband coming home from work. My husband James is a violinist and on that day he had played for the residents in a local retirement home. I had accompanied James to those homes in the past and the idea that I might end up in one was quite frightening for me. James joined me for a cup of tea and started telling me about his day. “You know”, he began “I have been playing for quite a while in these retirement homes and each time I notice the same thing: There are two kinds of people living there: The ones who are happy and content, and those who are bitter, grumpy and who complain about everything. And all of them are living under the exact same conditions, yet they seem to experience the same situation very differently.” Those sentences hit me like lightening. They were the wake-up call that would turn my life around. I instantly knew to which group of people I would belong: I would be one of those grumpy old ladies! I knew my character. I was not born as someone who could close my eyes when something was done “incorrectly”. I knew I would be an old lady who would complain and nobody would like me. I would be isolated and I would hate each and every moment there. As I thought about it, it was so obvious: My path was that of “grumpy old lady”.
            I had already noticed that my world seemed to be shrinking more and more as I got older. What once—when I was a child—had been an amazing place with unlimited possibilities, large and vast and exciting, had now shrunk to a small, limited, predictable place. It was as if the window, which invited the world into my life, was getting smaller and smaller. The more established I became in my career, the more successful I was, the more I plastered my world with definitions of how it should look. I had built up barriers and so all that I allowed into my life as a joyful experience was limited by what I had defined as  “being right”. This was not something I was doing consciously; it appeared to just happen to me. I felt that I was a victim to my own character and I did not see any way out of it. I often wished I could be more relaxed, more able to overlook things, to not take everything so seriously. But that did not seem to be possible for me. When I felt something was wrong - according to my definition of right and wrong - it physically hurt me, and it pushed my buttons. I had to speak up, respond or react to the situation. So on this cloudy evening seven years ago, when my husband told me about the two kinds of people in the retirement homes, I could already see myself sitting in such a home in a wheel chair, cynical and bitter, unless I changed by 180 degrees. But how?
 

At that time I had already heard about The Work of Byron Katie. In fact, three years earlier I had read her book “A Thousand Names for Joy”, which had left a deep impression on me. I felt in my heart that what Byron Katie wrote was true and that the path she laid out was doable. However, I needed that “kick in my behind”, that nightmare of seeing myself sitting in a wheel chair in a retirement home as a grumpy old lady, to actually get me going. I began to deeply study and practice The Work, and for the next few years, I participated in every possible event that The Institute for The Work of Byron Katie offered. I wrote and worked through piles of Judge-Your-Neighbor worksheets. I questioned the thoughts that caused me anxiety or suffering. On thoughts that were impacting me deeply, I worked with a certified facilitator. On others, easier thoughts, I worked on my own, facilitating myself.
Today, I still love precision and efficiency, but contrary to my life ‘before The Work’, I know that if I believe that things should be different than they are, I hurt myself. It is like banging my head against a wall while shouting that the wall should not be there. I have come to see that there really is no sense in negotiating or fighting with reality. I have noticed that what I look at has already happened – it is past! And as I do not have a time machine, there is no way I could undo that what has happened. So why would I lose my joy, my peace of mind or my energy in trying to do the undoable? Today I am so much more relaxed and my friends tell me that I look happier. With The Work I found the tool that turned my life around and today I am confident that in a retirement home, I would be on the side of the happy campers.
 
3: My mom and I
            And so here I sit in the present day at my father’s computer. I am still in Germany. Yesterday I had my German passport re-issued – the one that was lost on the train with my purse - and I also received a travel permit from the US-consulate in Frankfurt, which will allow me to return to the United States. In three days I will fly home to the U.S.  
            My mom and I were just making preserves from the tomatoes of her garden. Mixed with ginger and mango, the preserve turned out to be really yummy and I will take a glass back home to Florida. “My mom and I” – that was one of the big challenges in my life and “getting my mom back” was one of the biggest gifts that I have received through The Work. It is a gift that I never expected, just as many that The Work gives us are.
            The fights between my mom and myself began when I was fifteen. Unlike my childhood, where she and I had a wonderful, joyful and heartfelt relationship, as a teenager I began to perceive my mom as restricting me, commanding me, not allowing me to spread my wings, not understanding me. I started to hate her and I fought and resisted her on all levels. Deep inside of me, I was very sad, and I had the feeling of “having lost my mom”.  I blamed her for having caused that loss. As I became older, I tried to solve that discord between my mother and myself and I truly made a many efforts. However, the more I tried to be nice, the worse it got. Most of my life I lived abroad and my biannual visits to see my parents looked like this:
Day 1: Total joy to be reunited.
Day 2: Still a lot of joy and sharing.
Day 3: My mom began to get on my nerves. I tried to ignore when she was criticizing me and tried to remain kind.
Day 4: It became more and more stressful for me to stay friendly. I walked on eggshells to not give her cause to criticize me but trying to stop her in doing what she did, was not working. She always found my Achilles heel.
Day 5: My mom seriously pushed my buttons and I could not suppress my anger any longer and exploded and I told my mom “what I thought about her”. 
The year before I started to practice The Work, it was so bad that I called my mom a “house tyrant” and I meant it. Using that expression, I hurt my mom deeply. As a consequence, my parents asked me to leave their house, not to come back. Both of them were already over eighty years old at that time, which meant that there was a possibility that I would not see them again. I was desperate. And still, I found that all I had done was the best I could do and that all I had said was what I truly believed. 
During the years that followed this incident I had no contact with my parents. These were the years where I immersed myself deeply into The Work. I wrote a lot of worksheets on my mom. I did not practice The Work with a specific goal in mind.  For instance, I was not specifically aiming for fixing the relationship with my mom - although that was a deep wish of mine - I just wrote and worked my worksheets about those situations with her that had caused me stress. And then, shortly after the end of one retreat, a miracle happened: My mom sent me an email and started communicating with me again. She invited me to spend the next Christmas with her and my father in Germany. I was delighted. I also was a bit afraid. What, if I messed up again?
            Christmas came and I flew to Germany. I was so happy to see my parents again! But there was something, which truly baffled me: My parents - it was the strangest thing – I did not recognize them anymore. Of course, I saw that they were my parents. Physically they looked the same. But they had changed!  It was as if aliens had taken away my old parents and put two new people at their place. They were definitively not behaving like my former parents, especially my mom. I experienced what Byron Katie says: “If you do The Work, your world changes”. I tried to find the problem I had with my mom for the last 35 years and I just could not find it! The woman in front of me was a kind, conscious woman, who was not restricting or criticizing me in any way. Where had the ‘house tyrant’ gone?  I was a careful observer in the following days, asking myself when would the old problem emerge again. The first two days were fine like always. Day 3: no problem in sight. Day 4: still no problem. Day 5, 6, 7…. 20 -  The problem had disappeared for good!
            Since those Christmas holidays, I see my parents twice a year. I have now been here with my parents in their home for over four weeks and we are having the best time ever. We just love every moment together. My dad is beaming with joy - he loves harmony and suffered a lot during those years when my mom and I were fighting. As for my mom, she has become an inspiration for me, an inspiration of strength and of love and of dedication and I cannot express how grateful I am to have her back in my life.
 
4. Conclusion –The Work works (when we DO it)
            I am back home in Naples, Florida. it is no longer my father’s computer I am sitting at but my brand new MacBook Air and in this last chapter of my article, I want to speak about why I choose The Work as primary tool for my work as Life-Transition-Coach.
During my more than 35 years of working as a coach, I have learned and practiced numerous methods for dealing with the psychological mind. I always preferred those methods, which were simple, easy to access and efficient. The method that proved to be the most efficient to me is The Work of Byron Katie. No, it is not about end-gaining, about running for results. However, I have had tremendous results with The Work. The Work cuts to the heart of the problem like a sharp sword. It is the most time efficient and respectful method that I have come across, and for that reason, it has become the heart of my Life-Transition-Coaching. It works for me personal as well as for my clients. One client who came to my 5-day retreat in a state of tremendous suffering, wrote to me after the retreat to say, “I feel like something shifted from doing The Work. I experience a lot of peace around the issues we worked on.”