A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around
Byron Katie is best known for developing The Work, a simple inquiry practice in which people question stressful thoughts using four questions and a turnaround. In A Mind at Home with Itself she and her husband Stephen Mitchell, a distinguished translator of religious texts, walk through the Diamond Sutra, one of the central texts of Zen Buddhism. Mitchell provides a fresh translation and short commentary, while Katie shares dialogues with students in which she uses The Work to test the sutra's teachings in real life. The result is neither a straight book on The Work nor a straight commentary on the sutra but a hybrid that lets each illuminate the other. Elizabeth Gilbert has often recommended Byron Katie as one of her core spiritual teachers and this book as an especially rich meeting of practice and text.
What you might want to know about A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Byron Katie applies her four question inquiry practice, called The Work, to the Diamond Sutra alongside her husband Stephen Mitchell's translation.
Gilbert has often named Byron Katie among her most important teachers and has recommended her books, including A Mind at Home with Itself, as central to her own spiritual practice. She has said The Work is one of the practical tools she uses most.
No. Katie explains the four questions and the turnaround throughout the book, and the dialogues with students show the practice in action.
A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around was written by Byron Katie, published in 2017 by HarperOne.
A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Turn Your World Around is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.