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

by Martha Beck

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once we commit to being our true selves in every word and action, we emanate the love that is our essence. Having left the anguish of being split and come into the blessed relief of being whole and undivided, we want—deeply want—to offer the same relief to others. Your way of integrity might be to raise one happy child—or for that matter, one happy kitten. Or you may surprise yourself by becoming a social activist, or a healer of bodies, hearts, systems, the planet. You’ll want to make the world a kinder, healthier, fairer place. You’ll want to do it all the time.

Everything that truly makes us happy is limitless and multiplicative, not scarce and divisive.

“Don’t know mind” is, above all, freedom from limiting beliefs. Knowing that you don’t know everything doesn’t turn you into a drooling ignoramus. On the contrary, it liberates your vastly intelligent true nature to see reality as it is, not as your culture taught you to see it.

As you move closer and closer to pure integrity, as the windowpane of your mind grows more and more transparent, you will begin to love everything, and it will be obvious to you that everything loves you back.