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

by Martha Beck

Any of these ambitions might actually match your true purpose. If so, you’ll feel a powerful inward compulsion to follow that particular path. You’ll find the steps along the way fascinating and fulfilling, and as a result you’ll be good at them. But if you pursue any course of action solely because other people think it’s “purposeful,” prepare to hit dense fog. You’ll encounter baffling failures. You won’t get along with people. You won’t be able to drum up the energy to climb the success ladder—or for that matter, to wash your hair.

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.

But they all yearn for just a few things, and those things are remarkably consistent, even among people from very different cultures. They include peace, freedom, love, comfort, and belonging.

Anything you do solely to influence others, rather than to express your true nature, is a hustle. Being polite to get approval is a hustle. Flirting with people to make them feel special is a hustle. Sitting solemnly in church, consciously exuding piety, is a hustle. Acting a little bit stupid to avoid threatening others is a hustle. Using big words to impress is a hustle. Wearing certain clothes because you want to look professional, or sexy, or hip, or rich, or tall, or nonconformist, or demure—hustle, hustle, hustle.

As they say, the teacher appears when the student is ready. We make ourselves ready just by realizing we’re lost and committing to the way of integrity. A teacher will eventually show up, often in unexpected ways.

Tao te Ching, written around 2500 BC: “All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.”

If you give a soul teacher a lavish gift, she may thank you and then immediately hand over your precious item to a passing stranger (that actually happened to me once). No flattery, manipulation, or temper tantrum will move soul teachers one millimeter from their own true paths.

One of my favorite Indian sages, Nisargadatta Maharaj, put it this way, “The outer teacher is merely a milestone. It is only your inner teacher that will walk with you to the goal, for he [she] is the goal.”

every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao [Way], every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” When we go to war on something that we see as a war on us, the ultimate winner isn’t either side of the conflict, but war itself.

Maya Angelou wrote, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” Lying is the dark counterpart to courage: it’s the most important of all the vices, because without lying you can’t practice any other vice consistently (if you never lie, your terrorist plots just won’t pan out). Conversely, if you can’t stop lying—at least to yourself—you’ll never make it out of the inferno.

The light seemed to merge with me, and as it did all my worries and sorrows vanished. The light and I, which now felt like the same thing, were made of pure, unutterable joy. I realized that we could communicate, though we didn’t need words. The light “spoke” to me in direct downloads of information. You’re about to go through some hard times, it told me. But I am always with you. I’ve always been with you. Then it added, Don’t think you have to die to feel this way. The whole point of being human is learning to feel like this while you’re still alive.

In the years that followed I would chisel my way through thousands of lies, large and small, that were chaining parts of me to my internal inferno. The light was a blessed preview of the way I could feel, once I’d released myself from the countless errors I’d picked up during my sojourn on Earth.

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.

all the way to heaven really is heaven.

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

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

As they travel the upper reaches of purgatory, where souls are cleansed of sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust, Virgil explains something that stuns Dante. 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. This lack of balance doesn’t come when we allow union with our true nature, but when we split ourselves away from it. It’s misguided thinking, not natural behavior, that causes us to stray from our innocence.

“I spent a lot of my life lying to get what I thought I wanted. Here’s what I found out: if I live in the truth, I’ll always come out okay. Because only the truth has legs. At the end of the day, it’s the only thing left standing.”

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

our brains are biologically programmed to move toward awakening. This process kicks in every time we drop attachment to belief, shut down the “separation” and “control” areas of our brains, and allow ourselves to align with our true nature.

Since people who are “awake” experience everyone and everything as part of themselves, and since they are driven by compassion, their primary goal is to set themselves completely free by freeing other people.

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

on the path to happiness, our final destination is service.

love doesn’t divide the pool of goodness available to all humanity, but multiplies it for everyone.