Find Inner Freedom With The Work

Helena Montelius talks to Cissi Williams about how The Work from Byron Katie helped her find inner peace even in the midst of unimaginable grief.

- Helena Montelius

You used to be pretty famous in Sweden, back in the early nineties, when you were a well-known spiritual teacher writing books on channelling. What was it that caused you to change direction and seek out Byron Katie’s The Work?

I actually stepped back from all of my channelling because I wanted to be a mum. I was then pregnant with my second child, so I was in a very peaceful happy place. I had heard about The Work of Byron Katie, and I had gone to an introduction evening, but I didn’t really have a big reason to use it right then, as I was happily being a mum.

Then my oldest son, who was then 21, overdosed accidentally on drugs, and as you can imagine, that just threw me into a deep, deep dark hole. I was in such shock, agony, pain and severe guilt, because I hadn’t known about his heavy drug use. I thought it was my fault.

In this very dark heavy place, all my other stuff kind of disappeared, as it didn’t help me, except this one practice, the old traditional Buddhist meditation of just simply witnessing your breath. It was just all I could do, just like one breath at a time. And then I remembered, “oh yes, The Work.”

So I started doing The Work on my own, and with The Work, you identify what you’re thinking and believing, so I would write down all my thoughts, like “He shouldn’t have died, he was too young, it’s my fault, I’ll never be happy again, I can’t handle this, why is this happening to me? Death is bad.” All of my thoughts were about death, and then I would do The Work and take one of my painful statements and go through this process of the four questions, and the turnaround.