2012
© 2012 Costa Nzaramba Ndayisabye. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the USA
Digital ISBN: 978-1-938394-01-0
Published by:
Great Life Press, Rye, New Hampshire 03870 USA
www.greatlifepress.com
Cover photo: Emily Goodman, Malibu Beach, California, USA
www.emilygoodman.com
Back cover photo: Carol Nazaruk Marocco, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada www.cmaroccoart.com
The School for The Work techniques and materials referred to in this book may be used under the permission and guidance of Byron Katie International. Visit the Website at
www.thework.com for more information.
The Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet is available for download from: www.thework.com/thework-jyn.php
The book The Work that Brings Peace in Me was edited by Kathleen Grant in 2010. Kathleen comes from California, U.S., where she studied anthropology and sociology in her undergraduate years. Kathleen achieved her master’s degree in the Social Sciences from Abo Akademi University, Finland, in 2009 and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Sociology of Education at Turku University specializing in intercultural education. She is also an English teacher and English language proofreader.
This book The Work that Brings Peace in Me was considerately proofread by Peter Nicholas Smyth in 2011.
Peter achieved a BFA in Drama/English, with distinction from University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1981; an award of professional excellence in teacher training PDP from Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, in 1987; a master of arts in directing dramatic literature from Western Washington University, Washington State, USA in 1994. Currently Peter teaches English at Okanagan College, Penticton, British Columbia, Canada, and contributes to “The One Person Project.”
“Sometimes, even when you least expect it, good can emerge from the most tragic of circumstances. Costa Ndayisabye shows that through the grassroots advocacy of forgiveness and practical reconciliation not only can damaged relations be repaired but the entirety of our humanity can be increased. His commitment to communal healing and his personal talent shines through the darkness of his past life and enriches us all.” —Mark Welch PhD, British Columbia, Canada
“Oh, my dear Costa. You have found your way home, the home of the peace in your immovable heart. Oh, my dear Costa, thank you for showing our dear little Queen Byron a wiser, peaceful way of being through The Work and your unconditional love… I am loving you Costa, dear, dear man of peace. All ways,” —Byron Katie, Spiritual Teacher, Byron Katie Institute, Ojai, CA
“You are light…” —Dr. Jim Lockard, author of The Sacred Thinking. CSL Simi-Valley, CA
“Your words and your presence in my life are a constantly renewing balm on my heart…” —Isabelle Stahl, kindmind, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
“Brother Costa, I feel I know you and would love to meet you someday. Tears come when I read your words.” —Jeanette Stephens
“Costa my friend, I will not forget your letter to me, Who said? “I” Said. Who Loves? “I” Love, Who suffers? “I” Suffer. Who is happy? “I” am happy, wow; everything is “I,” lovely. You inspire the world.” —Stevens M., Boston, MA
“The Work works! Thinking everyday of your amazing grace, Costa. Love to you and your family.” —Katherine Munkley
“You introduced to me to The Work of Byron Katie through The Work that Brings Peace in Me; I did it and found peace. I need to forgive me; I was the ground of my own sufferings. —Stanley Yaola, one of the First Nations community Chiefs, Canada.
February 2, 2009. Fourteen days after the birth of our daughter Ashimwe (name she had at the Hospital right after her birth on January 18, 2009), a naming ceremony was organized for Ashimwe. When I was pregnant, I told Costa that we will name her Queen. He said yes! When our neighbors and friends gathered for the event, Costa told them that the child’s name is Queen Byron Ashimwe. He took the time to share with them why he added the name Byron and explained to all the invitees about The Work of a peaceful lady called Byron Katie. “Her School gave me a peaceful shift,” Costa said.
When Costa returned from his first session at School for The Work, I noticed that there were some changes to his life. He could not anymore argue easily with me on some of my sorrowful ideas that were affecting me “negatively” and he previously was the only person that I could share with my sorrows.
During the 1994 Tutsis’ Genocide, I lost my parents, my siblings, my relatives, my friends and my community. I, my young brother Yves Claude, and my young sister Denise Ingabire, survived. I couldn’t forget the long period I, and my brother Yves Claude spent during the Genocide in the ceiling hiding ourselves and when we left there we soon lost our skin and nails due to the effects of heat. Our hearts were totally broken and we couldn’t believe how we became orphans just for being Tutsis.
I met Costa in 1997 and we married in 2003. He was the only one who could cry when I cried, who could hate when I hated, who could conflict with all people I conflicted with.
After he went through the inquiry process using The Work of Byron Katie, I felt much overloaded because he couldn’t still help me to hate, conflict, cry, or grieve. One day he asked me, “Is hating, conflicting, and grieving bringing to us peace or stress?” I couldn’t respond. He provided to me the inquiry guidance paper called “Judge Your Neighbor Work Sheet,” designed by Byron Katie, to write down my sorrowful thoughts. I could hardly write some of them down. He drew a yellow card that contained the four questions and the Turnaround:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
Then you turn the thought around. “Let’s do The Work,” he said. We both practiced the inquiry process before even he was invited by Byron Katie to go to the School for The Work in Los Angeles. We were both criticizing The School for The Work and were considering it as a tool to kid with people’s minds. However, at that time he was very serious and was considering The School his “pathways of Peace” I tried to go through the process and couldn’t turn around my concept.
In March 2009, after his return from his second School for The Work, he became excellent and peaceful. At that time, he was inviting many friends from Europe and North America to come to experience The Work in Rwanda and Burundi.
Costa asked me, “What can be your answer if our son Gentil asks why you don’t go to the place you were born?” I felt something awaken in me.
My time was there. I got the opportunity to open my mind and do The Work. I realized that I wasn’t in a good temper with myself by living with those sorrowful ideas. Then, I wasn’t in a good relationship with me and with God.
It was just after both of us doing The Work that we decided to be baptized and committed to live in good harmony with ourselves first.
I am motivated by, “Replace any darkness with light and concentrate with belief of forgiveness and release.” (Dr. Jim Lockard, The Sacred Thinking).
Here is the time to get out from our fear, hunger, mistrust and revenge and live lovely for our lives so we can enjoy everything. The simple process is to question our minds. The Work is always sounding in me.
Costa became an international speaker and his transformation is the result of his peaceful trip for our entire family.
“Enjoy The Present,” is Costa’s dictum.
I love you Darling,
Bernadette Ndayisabye [Costa’s wife]
Friends of the Universe, during the time you are reading this book from one paragraph to another, take time to question your mind, find out if there is any stressful thought you are living with, balance and see if it is bringing in you peace or stress. As you will continue to read, you will find how our minds import stressful thoughts from the past, “Stories,” which we use in our daily curriculum.
A friend of mine from a TV station in Canada asked me, “Costa, who do you think is destroying the World?” I simply replied, “I” am the one.
He also asked me, “Who do you think can make this World lovely?” I said, “I” am the one.
When I do not know the truth of my life, I always live with my stressful thoughts. When we question our stressful thoughts, we can easily come to know the truth.
I don’t know which organization, family, religion, or society you come from; however, the inquiry process for every stressful moment can be indispensable, making it useful for all individuals.
When I question my mind in this manner, my vision is enlarged and I can see deep in me. I need The Work to make my life peaceful. It is therefore essential to know when I am distressed: What is the most important step that can help me to be a much more nonviolent person?
A courageous man, who is also a friend of my family, works with an international organization which provides food to refugees and to other vulnerable families. He told me about how their efforts are creating dependency among the beneficiaries. I said I would feed my mind and then my body. I always see planes carrying food, clothes, medicine to people who are victims of civil wars in Africa, my continent. It is so good to bring such help. However, it would be much better if these United Nations planes would have people like Dr. Jim Lockard, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Pamela Grace, Bill Twist, Lynne Twist, Isabelle Stahl, Christina Syndikus, and others on board, individuals who can assist people in crisis to live “The Present” and “Love what is” through their spiritual teachings. I added to him that feeding the body is good, but if our minds are much more attached to what we lost because of the war and our relatives who were killed, we will need people who can help us think much more about our inner peace. “Have a Mind That is Open to Everything and Attached to Nothing.” (Dr. Wayne Dyer)
The book relates a self-Inquiry that can help to find out the truth and then make life into something lovely from an ultimate choice.
It is now very simple for me to discover what does not go well in me and open my mind to an inquiry process. The inquiry process helps me to notice that all the events which negatively affected my life in the past should not drive my actual life today. I found that if my past experiences drive my actual life, I would live similarly to those experiences and possibly live in a state even worse than during the period that they happened. But I can now get the chance to question my mind and find what is true or even truer for my life.
Should I live The Present or the Past? Does my story bring peace or suffering/hatred?
I have frequently used my past which was full of atrocity, misfortune, and suffering that was stressfully applied to my daily life. It was obviously the past story. An internal voice will say to me, “Find the reality of your life in your story,” and, I believed it. However, is what I believe true? In his book The Sacred Thinking, Doctor Jim Lockard of The Center for Spiritual Living, Simi Valley, California, said:
When you make the choice to direct your thinking consciously, you step to the helm of the ship of your life and you take the wheel. Actually, you have always had the wheel, but you may have been living unconsciously, thinking of yourself as a victim, or perhaps believed that you were at the mercy of forces outside yourself. These mistaken beliefs have caused much misery but they have never taken the wheel out of your hands!
It is by the process called “The Work of Byron Katie” that I managed to move from the story and go to the reality, which is “The Present.” That happened when I went to The School for The Work and spent nine days with Byron Katie in August 2008.
Who is Byron Katie?
Byron Kathleen, commonly known as Katie, is married to author Stephen Michelle. Katie always gives a smile that reflects intense peace in her. She is calm sometimes—especially when she is presenting her materials. She always fixes her eyes on the person she is talking to and adopts a “listening character,” and, amicably, uses fraternal words like, “Sweetheart, Honey, Angel.”
Hundreds of people have described Katie and the way she inspired them in the self-inquiry process, “The Work.”
My wife Bernadette, having heard of Byron Katie from my debates and workshops and having read her book Loving What Is, said: “Byron Katie is a leader of the Peaceful team; her job burns suffering by leaving the place to love.”
My elder brother Leopold, who had the opportunity to go to The School for The Work with Byron Katie in Los Angeles, described Byron Katie as water from a rocky river. She is clear and good to hear when you’re thirsty for peace.
I know a writer and friend of peace called Richard Lawrence Cohen, who was born in New York but then became Austinate as he uses to say, because he is now living in Austin; he was my roommate during The School for The Work, then became a friend and is currently brother of many Rwandans. He said something on Byron Katie’s personality.
In his article called “I am in Love,” this is how Richard depicts the way he saw Byron Katie. “Who Is Byron Katie?”
Funny question. I hear her replying, “The one holding this cup of tea right now,” or, “Who knows?”All I can tell you is who I heard and saw. At the beginning of each day’s session, without any introduction, Katie walks in and sits in a large gray easy chair on the little stage. There is a folding screen behind her, a large vase of sunflowers, and a small table with a pitcher of hot herbal tea. She appears to be in her mid-60s, about five feet five (165 cm), with short silver hair worn in bangs, and makeup. Rectangular rimless glasses come out when she needs to read something. She dresses in soft, good-quality natural fabrics, often of purple or pink-beige, and favors large shawls. Her voice is clear, direct, accentless, becoming slightly scratchy if the day has worn on. She does not seem affected in anyway. The bangs give an impish quality that balances her quiet forcefulness and occasional sternness. She smiles and laughs at the same times you or I would; she can be spontaneously funny (she can also laugh at herself, as we saw during a graduation parody performed by the staff), and she’s warm when greeting individuals or groups, but she’s not a smiley-face; she has serious work for us and for herself. She speaks in well-thought-out sentences, some of which sound like things she has said often before (and in many cases are familiar from her books) and which she repeats because they are, for her, bedrock truths. At other times, she says things off the cuff that are startling in their aptness. She responds readily to every question and seems unconcerned whether her answers will please us or not. —Richard Lawrence Cohen’s blog, “Writer Without a Story,” (richardlawrencecohen.blogspot.com) April 29, 2007.
There came my time to question my mind and myself—to jump into the mind-questioning process. My mind was creating a fearful resistance to the first steps of the inquiry process. That is what happens. All the time it’s very painful to discover conflict and hatred that ruins our lives. If we do not keep inviting our mind to an inquiry conversation, we end up by being consumed by fear and anger. However, we have the ability to change our life to a lovely one, since peace is not something you can get from someone, from school, from a store or from a factory—it is there, inside us and we have to discover it. Just notice the ability to do so.
I realized that my being shouldn’t continue to be fed by my fearful mind, and I embraced The Work that brings peace in me. Now, “whose business when I am living with stress, anger, conflict, or hatred?” The Work responded.
I invite everyone, while reading this book, to take a deep breath, get into your own self, take a moment and go with questioning interaction with the mind. Use the “I” that repeatedly appears in this book as if you are talking to yourself and see if you are really peaceful or stressful.
Costa Ndayisabye,
March 2012
The Work is a simple yet powerful process of inquiry that teaches people to identify and question thoughts that cause all the suffering within us. It’s a way to understand what’s hurting one’s self and to address problems with clarity.
The process considers four questions plus the Turnaround.
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
Then you turn the thought around, once, two times, three times, as many times as you need. For example: He doesn’t love me. Turnaround: He loves me. How? He called me and said, “Happy birthday.”
Find more genuine examples for the Turnaround at www.thework.com.
These four questions and the Turnaround, which I exercised frequently and profoundly, showed me that the judgments I carried against other people, were harshly amplifying my own sufferings.
By 1959 my country Rwanda had fallen into chaos. Fear developed among a group of people, full of their stories, and they turned against their fellow citizens and began killing them.
Who would have given these characteristics to the Rwandans? Was it necessary to believe the hateful ambitions said to such Rwandan brothers?
Hate purveyors said “How can you, the cultivators who represent a big number in the population of Rwanda, be dominated by this small group of stockbreeders?” They added by saying to them that these stockbreeders have physical characteristics different from those of you cultivators. The cultivators were then called Hutus and the stockbreeders were called Tutsis, and many minds believed that.
Hate took on its expansion, a big number of innocent Tutsis were killed in a horrible manner and other ones set off as exiles, including my father Ndayisabye Claver, who was eleven years old and my mother Mukamazimpaka Marthe, who was seven years old; their surviving families of massacres headed to Burundi.
A life of exile began, a life of suffering, begging to survive, in Burundi, a country where now-well-known tribal atrocities occurred afterwards.
In 1968 my mother Martha married Claver, both from the so-called Tutsis’ ethnic group, who fled Rwanda. I was born seven years later, on July 5th.
Life in Burundi became harder and harder and my family decided to move to the Eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre) and now called Uvira. We were told several times by our parents that the reason why we are experiencing a difficult life is because we are refugees.
Reflecting on my childhood, I remember when I was six, just a few days before my father died. At the time I was studying at Munanira primary school in Uvira, Democratic Republic of Congo. On the way back home, I picked up a nice pin badge. I did not know the person in the picture on that badge. I attached it on my school uniform shirt. It was so nice and I was proud of it. Arriving home, my father saw it and found that the man on the badge was the president of Rwanda at that time, Juvenal Habyarimana. He started stinging my ears with the pin on the badge. My ears were bleeding and my father emphasized that all suffering, starvation, and vulnerability that my family was experiencing derived from that president, Juvenal Habyarimana and “I” believed that.
I grew up knowing that there is a president in Rwanda who is causing our suffering. My mind started amplifying and storing that statement. As I was growing up, my mind continued to develop the links between the suffering of my ears and that of the president, furthermore, his ethnicity.
In 1981, my father passed away from an abrupt death when my mom was in Burundi giving birth to a new baby. He died when he was expecting to meet his first daughter, whom he had named Anitha Murekatete, Murekatete, meaning, “Give to her a lovely freedom.”
In our house there were new baby clothes, a large quantity of rice and beans, food that father did not eat because the day before my mom came from Burundi with a new baby, he died. I had been told for many years that my father had purchased that special food for a party he was planning for our family which was going to have its first girl after five boys. My father died. My father died. My father died. He died, without completing the party he planned. He died without seeing his first daughter Anitha. He did not see her. My mind kept reminding me of that repeatedly, over and over.
Food my father purchased for the birth event of his new baby was unexpectedly served during the mourning process of his death.
I can still remember my mom’s face during the mourning period, though I was very young. She was crying looking at us near the coffin where my father’s body laid, with her newly bald head, which was required by Congolese culture for a wife who has lost her husband.
It was said that Helena witched him since she was jealous of how my father was preparing to welcome our first sister Anitha Murekatete.
A widow called Helena, a neighbor, was responsible for my father’s death since he fell down and died abruptly in Helena’s yard. My Uncle Callixte, who was close to my father, confirmed that. All of us were informed that Helena witched our father Claver and we believed that.
My paternal aunt, Anastasie Mukamana, who fled Rwanda with my father on her shoulder after losing relatives in 1959 Tutsis’ massacres, fell down in a faint.
It was very sad at that time, seeing my mom holding Anitha, a four-day-old new baby, crying on the side of a wooden coffin while looking down at her dead husband.
Within my mind, I grew up thinking that Helena caused my mom to become a widow. So did my siblings who repeatedly told me to plan revenge for our dear father. What could we do as young boys? Was that a fair decision to satisfy our minds?