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

by Martha Beck

But my hidden agenda was always trying to figure out how I, and other people, could create lives we actually enjoyed.

Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.

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.

They include peace, freedom, love, comfort, and belonging.

when you’re doing something because it’s prescribed by culture, and when an action arises from your true nature.

admit—just to yourself—that some of your actions are designed to impress or fit in with other people.

After all, we wandered off course because of ideas and behaviors we’ve been learning since birth.

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.

Spiritual confirmation is present when we remember a phone number, laugh at a joke, or forgive ourselves for a mistake.

Every external teacher you’ll ever meet will be there only to help you connect with this sense of truth, this body-mind-heart-soul chime that is your ultimate inner teacher.

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.

Here it is: your thoughts, even thoughts you absolutely believe, may not always be true.

Here’s what I have to say about that: if you believe a thought is true and it also makes you happy, terrific.

Their culture says they’re comfortable. Their nature knows they’re not.

But you have a good mind and a working imagination. Use them to put a bit of doubt between you and your tormenting story.

Write down a fear that bothered you in the past but doesn’t bother you now.

Clear memory helps a great deal for the next step, which is called “walking back the cat.”

was happening around me at that precise time, (2) what I was doing, (3) what I was feeling, and (4) what I was thinking.

I felt guilty for exhausting myself too much to really show up for any of my tasks or relationships.

At this point I want to make it very clear that violence and anger are very different things.

It takes wisdom and maturity to use anger for positive change without becoming mindlessly violent.

In fact, we may feel threatened by people we’re dominating,

or anything that may potentially change us.

We’re especially leery of people or ideas that might shake us out of our cultural assumptions and preconceptions.

This means that the violent mind literally can’t hear reason.

phrase like “teaching compassionately,” “loving courageously,” or “serving honorably.”

By addressing problems with core values and creativity, we choose a different mode de vie:

Maya Angelou wrote, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”

Just focus completely on the yearning to belong, to feel completely safe, and to know you are unconditionally accepted. This is your true self longing for total integrity. The more you focus on it, the stronger your wings.

true to me was the light I’d encountered during my surgery. My body, mind, heart, and soul experienced it as the most real thing

Because while my culture said I was headed for outer darkness, everything inside me felt the opposite: I was moving toward inner light. I could feel myself knitting together inside, like a wound healing. I had the strangest, most beautiful sense of lifting.

For the first time I could remember, everything inside me felt connected, harmonious, true.

If just speaking the truth bothers your culture, you can imagine what happens when you start acting with integrity. You might stop laughing at your coworker’s crude jokes.

I felt paradoxical waves of intense sorrow for my old familiar ways of behaving.

I promise: if you give your grief space and time, it will eventually bring you to a level of joy you may never have imagined.

Some people become therapy or seminar addicts, constantly seeking environments where they can be themselves without upsetting any apple carts.

Your loved ones may shame and blame you for disobeying the cultural rules of your relationship.

They may try to manipulate you with displays of neediness, anger, or straight-up aggression.

My Catholic-school-educated readers may recall there are seven “deadly sins”: sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, envy, and wrath.

Ironically, change-back attacks—especially the ones that hurt most—can be some of our most powerful helpers on our way to integrity.

instead of raging, define our values and get creative about responding to our attackers.

I felt vulnerable, scared, and angry. This is the energy of victimization and judgment. It sucked.

This is the energy of power—not invulnerability, but power. It will put breath in your lungs and strength in your spine.

Learning to hold—and repeat to yourself—all the supportive things you wish to hear from others puts you back in alignment with your inner teacher, your sense of truth.

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

“Know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, and do what you really want.”

Every day you make thousands of tiny decisions about what to do with your time. Every single choice is a chance to turn toward the life you really want. Repeatedly putting a little less time into what you don’t love, and a little more into what you do love, is your next step on the way of integrity.

give us the feelings we yearn for—peace, purpose, belonging, fulfillment. And when one person gets more of those truly innately delicious things, their joy isn’t divisive. It’s multiplicative. The more of these beautiful feelings we receive, the more we create.

All these “sins” are actually based in love. Sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust are simply unbalanced relationships with rest, abundance, nourishment, and sex. We can err by either compulsively indulging or rigidly repressing our natural relationship with these things.

But you’ll connect with ideas and states of mind that go beyond culture, to a way of being that’s more vivid, fearless, and in love with life.