My Business, Your Business, God’s Business

I recently posted an article entitled “Are Your Thoughts Causing You Pain?”.  In this article, I mentioned a well-known spiritual teacher named Byron Katie.   Byron Katie is best known for  “The Work.”  “The Work” is an exercise that assist you in questioning your thoughts in order to relieve you from the monsters living within your head.  Another concept that she teaches is, “My Business, Your Business, God’s Business”.

My Business, Your Business, and God’s Business teaches us that we are each responsible for our own happiness.   No one is coming to our rescue.  We are our own salvation.  Although it is quite humanitarian of us to reach out to others, we are not truly able to ‘help’ others until we help ourselves.  Before reaching out, we must first reach within.

Let’s take a brief walk along the path of each of these concepts:

My Business: my personal growth, my beliefs, my values, my actions/reactions, my relationship with my significant other, caring for my children, my work ethics….  Not to say that I am selfish.  Just to show you that there’s enough ‘work’  for me to perform on myself without interfering in Your Business and/or God’s Business.

Your Business: how each of my 3 sons decides to live their lives, how my mother handles her illnesses, how my sisters care for their children, the choices my brother makes,   how my partner shows up in our relationship, how my clients choose to operate their companies….  Although each one of these things may have some sort of affect on me, none of it is really any of my business.  How can I ever know what’s best for another?  I don’t know enough about anything to make the call of ‘right and wrong’, good and bad’.  Especially when it comes to the lives of another.

God’s Business: life, death, disease, natural disasters .  I have no control over any of those things….only God does.  I will only cause continued stress and unhappiness if I choose to place these things in the ‘My Business’ category.

I was home visiting family on last week.  While I was there,  I was given the opportunity to place things in one of those 3 categories.  I realized that most of the things that frustrated me was not even My Business.  They resided outside of what I control.  Therefore, I relinquished my ‘rights’ to them and offered them to their proper owner.  I must say, it was quite a relief.