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

by Martha Beck

To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided.

Emotionally, we feel grumpy, sad, or numb. Physically, our immune systems and muscles weaken; we might get sick, and even if we don’t, our energy flattens. Mentally, we lose focus and clarity. That’s how it feels to be out of integrity.

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. This split from integrity is almost always unconscious. The people I know who experience it aren’t wicked; in fact, most of them are perfectly lovely. They strive to cooperate with every rule for living they’ve learned from their respective cultures. Which is a terrific way to run your life if you like to look good and feel bad.

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. If the feelings don’t go away even though you’re taking your medication and meeting regularly with your therapist, you can be quite sure you’re somehow out of integrity.

every time we make choices or assume appearances that don’t align with our integrity, we really do become more vulnerable to physical problems,

It’s simple logic: if you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.

The folks you meet along the way either genuinely love these things, or they’re faking it as hard as you are. Either way, your connection with them will be artificial. You’ll send out a pretend personality to meet other (potentially pretend) personalities, creating nothing but pretend relationships.

If you feel unable to stop an activity, if you’re spending the rent money on it, if you hide it from others and feel a creeping obsession slowly consuming you, your first step toward integrity—a big one—might be acknowledging that you’re addicted.

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.

Anything you do solely to influence others, rather than to express your true nature, is a hustle.

Acting a little bit stupid to avoid threatening others is a hustle. Using big words to impress is a hustle.

it also means you’re split from your true nature. In millions of small ways and some huge ones, you ignore what you naturally yearn for and hustle along to get the things you’ve been taught to want.

EXERCISE: Detecting your hustle

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

The only change to make at this point on your way of integrity is to admit—just to yourself—that some of your actions are designed to impress or fit in with other people. These actions aren’t spontaneous, and they aren’t in harmony with your truth.

No one can give us pure integrity: knowing our truth is something we can and must learn to do on our own.

If your heart yearns to follow such a person, go ahead. But beware of the craving that can arise in you when you’re subjected to advertising. A real soul teacher will draw your attention in a way that makes you feel inwardly driven, not dazed by powerful marketing

Real love doesn’t want anyone to be immobilized or attached, certainly not in the dark wood of error. It wants—always, always, always—to set us free.

No external guide you’ll meet will ever be as accurate as the teacher in your soul, and none can ever be as constant.

When we think, hear, or understand something that’s deeply true for us, our inner teachers rise in us as a delicious, lucid resonance. When we grasp truth—any truth, from the correct solution to a math problem to the capacity for love—all of our ways of knowing align. We recognize this alignment as our ideal state of being. It feels calm, clear, still, open. That feeling is the inner teacher saying yes. The way of integrity is simply to listen to this voice, to sustain this feeling not just occasionally, but often—even continuously.

listening to our inner teacher is the most important skill we need to follow the way of integrity.

another characteristic of the inner teacher—the most important one—is that you can feel it in all aspects of your being (body/mind/heart/soul) at once.

The body’s reaction to recognizing truth is relaxation, a literal, involuntary release of muscle tension.

When our minds recognize truth, we experience that invisible cartoon light bulb going on in our heads, the feeling of a riddle being solved. “Aha!” we think, or “I get it!” or “Of course!” All the puzzle pieces fit. The math works. Everything makes logical sense.

To our heart, the ring of truth feels like a flower opening up. In total integrity, we’re completely available to all emotion: overwhelming love, deep grief, terrible anger, sharp fear. This emotion may be painful, but it doesn’t cause the intense, dull suffering we feel in the dark wood of error.

The emotional pain of a hard truth is eased by our soul’s response to aligning with reality. Around and beyond mere emotion, we feel a sense of freedom, a vast openness that includes all aspects of our experience. We connect with an unalterable stillness around and within us.

Spiritual confirmation is present when we remember a phone number, laugh at a joke, or forgive ourselves for a mistake. It waves at us cheerfully from the most mundane things, like little Yoda scuttling after Luke Skywalker as Luke searches for the Jedi master he assumes must be huge and imposing.

So, what are your flinch areas, your Do Not Mention Zones? Whatever you least want to know, whatever makes you most fidgety, uncomfortable, irritable, and anxious, is the general area of a gate to hell. Approaching that gate is the next step toward integrity.

Be brave, my friend. You don’t have to figure out your whole life right now. Just take one step toward the gate by identifying some things you do not want to think about.

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.

I make a distinction between the words pain and suffering: Pain comes from events, while suffering comes from the way we handle events—what we do about them and, especially, what we think about them.

As Epictetus wrote in the second century AD, “What upsets people is not what happens to them, but their thoughts about what happens.”

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

Believing things that aren’t true for us at the deepest level is the commonest way in which we lose our integrity. Then suffering arises—not as punishment, but as a signal that we’re being torn apart. The purpose of suffering is to help us locate our internal divisions, reclaim our reality, and heal these inner rifts.

Many of my clients, having dipped a toe in popular psychology, believe that “positive” thoughts, like “I love my job,” make us happy, while negative thoughts, like “I hate my job,” make us unhappy. But a cheerful statement can feel like soulmurder if you know it isn’t true, while a supposedly “negative” thought can set you free to experience joy.

So it’s not the positivity or negativity of a thought that makes us feel happy or sad, trapped or free. The operative variable is whether the thoughts we believe match what we deeply feel to be the truth. Being split from ourselves is hell.

First, we must become the observers of our suffering, instead of drowning in it like swimmers sucked into a maelstrom. Second, we must question each belief that traps us in misery until we figure out where it diverts us from our sense of truth. At that point, our infernal chains break, and step three—moving on—is almost automatic.

Let your inner child be comforted. Next, call to mind one of the hell thoughts you’ve been using in this chapter. Imagine you can hear your own voice from a future version of yourself. It’s saying, in a confident, comforting voice, “I am from your future. I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that this thing you fear won’t happen, and you won’t always be afraid of it.”

Whatever your terrors are right now, whatever your inner demons are screaming at you, notice that they don’t feel like your inner teacher, that clear chime of truth. They aren’t just unnecessary, they’re toxic. Your true self is showing you that. It’s trying to get your attention, to help you question, doubt, and drop the beliefs that are trapping you in hell.

Each choice against our sense of truth, no matter how trivial, makes us more likely to self-sabotage. It’s as if, by splitting ourselves, we launch the alter ego that destroys our best intentions.

focusing on values has an almost magical ability to accomplish the very things we think we’ll get by attacking our enemies.

Simply shifting our attention from attacking our enemies to defining our values can “reduce physiological stress responses, buffer the impact from negative judgments of others, reduce our defensiveness, and help us be more receptive to information that may be hard to accept.”

When we deliberately leave our own truth, we live in a foggy world where nothing we experience feels trustworthy or reliable, because we ourselves aren’t trustworthy and reliable.

A lot of my clients try to follow the Golden Rule to a fault: they are continually accepting, even apologetic, toward people who treat them badly. “Well,” they reason, “I’m treating others the way I want them to treat me.” These people are telling as many lies as Cindy, though a very different kind.

(I call this the Elur Nedlog, which is Golden Rule spelled backward). This version says, “Never allow others to treat you in ways you would never treat someone else.”

If someone in your life consistently hurts you, ask yourself if you would treat anyone else the way you’re letting yourself be treated. If the answer is no, then to stay in integrity you must start thinking of ways to change the situation.

to accept your own mistreatment is to participate in a lie.

You are infinitely worthy. You are infinitely precious. You have always been enough. You will always be enough. There is no place you don’t belong. You are lovable. You are loved. You are love.

book (Leaving the Saints).

EXERCISE: The no-lie challenge Step one Decide on a time period for your no-lie challenge. I’d suggest a week minimum. There is no maximum. Write it here: I commit to Not Lying at All for the following period of time: Step two Don’t lie at all for that period of time. Step three Keep a journal where you can write about what happens once you stop lying. You may see health benefits and improved relationships—most people do. On the other hand, if things get tough, expressing your truth on the page is a safe way to keep telling the truth. Step four If you do lie, don’t stop your challenge. Forgive yourself. Then recommit to not lying until the challenge is over.