A casting out of demons…
I woke up on the bed in my rented apartment in Ojai, August 2025, two in the morning, and for some reason I saw an image of a person, then a street with cars moving through the dark. And then I cried. Not a polite little tap, more like the return of a spring tide that has been gathering itself for decades. The kind of crying where your body takes over, like when you’re suddenly sick and your plans and preferences mean nothing because it’s already happening. Two full hours of it. Wave after wave of love, pain, loss, sadness, then joy, gratitude, and a very real presence of love that filled me from my feet right up through the crown of my head and down into my soul. Then the stillness came, like the room finally exhaled.
This was my middle of the night, middle of nowhere experience during a summer cleanse retreat with Byron Katie. No one around for miles. Peculiar doesn’t cover it. After all the years of seeking, healing, grinding, doing everything I could to fix myself from the outside in, it was like something finally caught up with me. Like it had known where I lived all along. I call it my “casting out of demons” moment, borrowing the biblical phrase, because whatever it was, it changed me. The Ben everyone knew before that night—he’s gone.
Most of us don’t realise how aggressive our own thinking is. Mine was quiet but ruthless. A constant commentary about how people should be different, how I’d messed something up, how this situation shouldn’t be happening, or how things would finally be fine if someone else would just get their act together. Not loud, but relentless.
The Work slows that commentary down. Instead of being dragged around by your thinking, you actually sit with it. It’s self inquiry stripped right back to the bone. You take one stressful thought, not a clever theoretical one but the one currently chewing through your peace, and you question it.
There are four questions. They look almost too simple, which is part of their genius. Asked slowly and honestly, they cut straight through the noise. And this isn’t about positive thinking or reframing things so you can feel a bit warmer and fuzzier about life. It’s about discovering what’s true under the story you’ve been living in.
What I love about The Work is that it doesn’t ask you to be someone else. You don’t need to be calm or enlightened or emotionally folded and ironed. You can arrive annoyed, self-righteous, fed up, or convinced you’re absolutely right. In fact, that’s usually the best place to start. The thoughts we’re most certain about are often the ones costing us the most.
As you can imagine, we get a daily stream of “he said, she said,” “he’s driving me mad with his victimhood,” “she won’t talk to me,” “she won’t have sex with me,” “the kids always come first,” “he lied to me again.” All of it. And all of it needs to be heard. For almost fourteen years I’ve been looking for an approach that would help me first, and then help others find their own way out of suffering, fear, and the cycles that repeat until we’ve had enough. We use many modalities in our coaching, and honestly, the results have felt like small miracles.
Every single person I’ve worked with has given me my own work to do. I’m forever in your debt for that. You’re my angels, whether you meant to be or not.
So what is Byron Katie’s Work? For me, it’s the most self empowering way I’ve ever found to cut through the unnecessary and get to the truth—and the truth really does set us free. I’ve spent years helping people name the “what” and “why” of their relationship breakdowns, but this gives us the “how,” the way to actually stop the suffering at its source. Or to let it stop you. It’s not gentle though. It asks you to take one hundred percent responsibility for your experience, which is a big ask for any human. And no, that is not the same as “it’s your fault.” Responsibility and blame live in different galaxies.
In January, on a Saturday morning in Monmouth, I’ll be running a small workshop where we’ll explore The Work together. No performance, no pitch. Just space to learn the process, try it out, and experience what it’s like to question a stressful thought with support around you.
If you’re curious, sceptical, or simply tired of hearing the same thoughts echo through your head, you’re probably exactly who it’s for.
Photo credit: https://uk.pinterest.com/fineartamerica/
