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

by Martha Beck

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.

We simply can’t chart a course to happiness by linking up with others who are as lost as we are.

When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern.

You’ll probably have a sequence of mistakes and unlucky breaks at work (actually these are lucky breaks, your true self stopping you from wandering further into the dark wood of error, but you won’t see it that way at the time).

I myself have been known to spend hours solving urgent problems that existed only as pixels of colorful light on my smartphone. (Though, in my defense, all that candy wasn’t going to crush itself.)

Listen: the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you.

psychologists call “social comparison theory.” It means that we tend to measure our own well-being not by how we feel, but by how our lives compare to other people’s.

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

We recognize this alignment as our ideal state of being. It feels calm, clear, still, open. That feeling is the inner teacher saying yes.

We connect with an unalterable stillness around and within us. There’s space for pain. There’s space for joy. And the space in which all sensation happens is made up of absolute well-being.

But beneath this effort to control the universe, we feel a dreadful deeper truth: the universe is not ours to control.

(This is true even if you’re in physical pain. During my own years of chronic pain, I suffered much more from my thoughts—“I can’t bear this!” “It will last forever!” “I’ll never have a normal life!”—than from the actual physical sensations.)

All their cheating, all their fudging, all their repressing, all their fraud and betrayal, is driven by some version of one single lie: I am not loved.

But don’t think that missing your old life means you should go back to it. Everyone who decides to embrace integrity must mourn the known misery, the familiar patterns and dysfunctional relationships they’ve left behind.

Each time, you’ll get better at it. A stumble isn’t the end of the world.