The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

by Martha Beck

When you experience unity of intention, fascination, and purpose, you live like a bloodhound on a scent, joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment.

Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period. Of all the strategies and skills I’ve ever learned, the ones that actually work are those that help people see where they’ve abandoned their own deep sense of truth and followed some other set of directives.

Whatever your repeated or persistent negative emotions, try thinking of them as Dante’s wild beasts, whose job it is to make your life unbearable when you stray from your true path.

Listen: the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you. Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth. They didn’t come from your own natural inclinations. They came from the two forces that drive us all off our true paths: trauma and socialization.

Your true nature loves things for their capacity to bring genuine delight, right here, right now. It loves romps, friends, skin contact, sunlight, water, laughter, the smell of trees, the delicious stillness of deep sleep.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: if you spend your life pursuing culturally defined goals (climbing Mount Delectable), you may manage to get what you want, but you probably won’t get what you yearn for. If you choose to leave Mount Delectable behind, you might not get what you want in that socially driven, craving kind of way. But you won’t care, because your entire world will fill up—pressed down, shaken together, and running over, as the Good Book says—with all the things for which you yearn. And here is how to leave Mount Delectable behind: stop with the hustle.

Whenever you go against your true nature to serve your culture, you freaking hate it.

Joseph Campbell, the famous professor of comparative mythology, noticed that in legends from around the world, some kind of mentor arrives shortly after a hero has accepted a call to adventure. Embarking on the way of integrity is just such a situation. We tend to meet teachers after we’ve realized we’re wandering in a dark wood of error, after we’ve tried and failed to get out of it by climbing Mount Delectable, and while we’re still being dogged by the wild beasts of our painful emotions.

The role of the soul guide is simply to put us in touch with our innate ability to sense the truth.

Through me to the city of sorrow, through me to eternal woe, through me to the way among the lost people. . . . Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

This was how I discovered the most powerful way I know to kill our own cowardice as we approach a gate to hell. We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attention—all of it—on the present moment. Then we do something so simple it sounds almost nonsensical: we trust that in this moment, everything is all right, just as it is. We don’t have to trust that we’ll be okay in ten minutes or ten seconds, only in this razor-thin instant called NOW.

Our worst psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe, while simultaneously knowing they aren’t true.

six of the nine levels of hell—two-thirds of the inferno—are reserved for what Dante calls “sins of incontinence.” This has nothing to do with adult diapers. By “incontinence,” Dante means any inability to control an aspect of one’s own behavior.