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

by Martha Beck

The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying.

Many of us might use the word love to describe the kind of devotion spiders feel for flies. Spiders genuinely love flies (the way they taste, the way they crunch). They express that love by wrapping up any fly they can catch and keeping it close, slurping out its life force bit by bit. I’ve had many clients whose parents, friends, or lovers treated them this way. I call it “spider love,”

Pain comes from events, while suffering comes from the way we handle events—what

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.

Doing things that so blatantly contradict our own intentions is a sign that somewhere inside us, a civil war is in progress.

Healthy anger motivates discernment. It focuses on specific problems. It works toward changing conditions, and when those conditions change, it subsides. Righteous error attacks for vague, ill-defined, or contradictory reasons, and doesn’t change with circumstances. It passes judgment, often without evidence. Healthy anger makes judgments, discerning what is fair and what isn’t.

(1) observe thoughts that cause suffering, (2) question them, and (3) move on.

the opposite of the Golden Rule (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.”

it’s time to follow your own way of integrity, at whatever speed you like, indefinitely.

while we may be genuinely victimized, we never have to accept “victim” as an identity.