The Way of Integrity: Finding the path to your true self

by Martha Beck

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. This split

from integrity is almost always unconscious. The people I know who experience it aren’t wicked; in fact, most of them are perfectly lovely. They strive to cooperate with every rule for living they’ve learned from their respective cultures. Which is a terrific way to run your life if you like to look good and feel bad. But there’s another

“I have seen all the things that are done under the sun, and behold; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” In other words, “Life

There’s a whole field of medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, that focuses on the way psychological stress, including the stress of lying or keeping secrets, contributes to illness. Studies have linked deception and secret-keeping to elevated heart rate and blood pressure, increased stress hormones, higher bad-cholesterol and glucose levels, and reduced immune responses.

You’ll send out a pretend personality to meet other (potentially pretend) personalities, creating nothing but pretend relationships. I’ll never forget one wealthy, beautiful celebrity who confided to me, after attending yet another glamorous party, “I’m exhausted by my own hypocrisy.”

Listen: the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you. Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth. They didn’t come from your own natural inclinations. They came from the

two forces that drive us all off our true paths: trauma and socialization.

At the heart of climbing Mount Delectable is what 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. An almost universal dark-wood error is believing that happiness will arrive when

we’re above others in some socially defined way. And because that way is shaped by culture, not nature, people can climb Mount Delectable by doing the weirdest things. For example, for women in traditional China, climbing the social ladder required having teeny-tiny feet. Generations of girls and women had their feet bound and crushed, crippling them to make them better. In Victorian England, women wore fabrics dyed with arsenic that caused skin ulcers and had a tendency to burst into

flames—a small price to pay for looking better than their fashion rivals! In our society, people will virtually kill themselves trying to be better by decorating the fanciest cake, or breeding the most standard of all standard po...

You won’t catch wild animals pouring their energy into such random activities. Some creatures compete for food, territory, and mates. Many love to play, and seem to enjoy the...

own hair and feathers if they fail to accrue a billion times as much birdseed or dead rabbits as the next sparrow or coyote. Mount Delectable is built on the uniquely human characteristic of assigning “achievement” v...

Your true self, by contrast, is pure nature. It doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who wore it best, or if anyone wore it at all. Olympic medals and Pulitzer Prizes interest it only becaus...

their capacity to bring genuine delight, right here, right now. It loves romps, friends, skin contact, sunlight, water, laughter, the smell of tree...

According to my online dictionaries, hustle has a bevy of interesting meanings in modern English. Here are a few. These aren’t in my own words; they’re real quotes from dictionaries. Definitions of “Hustle” 1. Have the courage, confidence, self-belief, and self-determination to go out there and work

it out until you find the opportunities you want in life. 2. Force (someone) to move hurriedly in a specified direction. 3. Coerce or pressure someone into doing or choosing something. 4. Engage in prostitution. 5. Obtain by illicit action; swindle; cheat.

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 ric...

Mind you, hustling doesn’t mean you’re bad. It means you’re well socialized, cooperating beautifully with culture. But it also means you’re split from your true nature. In...

Whenever you go against your true nature to serve your culture, you freaking hate

Here’s an example, from my favorite book, the 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.”

We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attention—all of it—on the present moment. Then we do something so simple it sounds almost nonsensical: we trust that in this moment, everything is all right, just as it is. We don’t have to trust that we’ll be okay in ten minutes or ten seconds, only in this razor-thin instant called NOW.

Presence is the sanctuary integrity offers us as denial comes to its dreaded end. You

“Adam!” I said, shaking him awake. “I’m so sorry I’m late! Why didn’t you call me?” Adam rubbed his eyes, sighed peacefully, and said, “I wasn’t worried. I was just tired.” He hadn’t spent one second of that day being a tragically disabled young man forgotten by his loopy mother, wondering if and when help would come. He was just a tired guy in a comfortable chair on a sunny day, ideally situated to take a nap. Twenty years earlier, thanks

When we feel most helpless and mute, says the poet Rumi, “a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.” Whatever gate of hell you may be facing, you can drop into the stretcher from grace, the present moment. You can handle the entire universe being as it is in this precise moment. Look, you just handled it. There, you did it again. And again. You are crushing this! To get even better at this,

I surrender all resistance to the universe being as it is in this moment.

The path to that particular gate of hell had been awful, but one step past the gate, one step beyond hope, everything was fine. I didn’t even need hope anymore, because I wasn’t worried. I was just tired.

Our worst psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe, while simultaneously knowing they aren’t true.

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.

For example, when the shy, gentle British author C. S. Lewis first began observing his own mind, he wrote, “There I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions,

a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.”

act like detectives on a case, testing every bit of evidence, seeing if it makes sense. Organizational behaviorist Chris Argyris calls this “seeking disconfirmation.” In other words, we have to deliberately search for reasons that whatever we believe might not be accurate.

I recall people who died on Everest because they wouldn’t stop climbing when the weather turned ugly.

(For example, Martin Luther King Jr. based his civil-rights agitation on an appeal to equal rights. James Earl Ray, who killed Dr. King, was under no actual threat; his actions were based on fear of change and reflexive self-righteousness.)

If this is how you feel about, say, the people who keep changing the software on your smartphone, consider the possibility that you may be stuck in errors of righteousness. Allowing yourself to stand up against unfairness is healthy. Staying in constant righteous attack mode isn’t. It will give you dark wood of error symptoms just like any other departure from integrity.

Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi freely expresses his anger at racial oppression. But he also methodically, logically, and consistently requires of himself the same fair-mindedness and wisdom he wishes to see in all people. He cautions against the righteous high that “avoids the mirror.”

What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods,

refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop the insanity of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? Self-critique allows change.

“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).

This version says, “Never

allow others to treat you in ways you would never treat someone else.”

One study showed that people who present “an idealized image of themselves” had higher

hormonal reactions to stress; elevated cortisol, glucose, and cholesterol levels; and reduced immune-system functioning. Lying and keeping secrets have been linked to heart disease, certain cancers, and a host of emotional symptoms like depression, anxiety, and free-floating hostility.

don’t think that missing your old life means you should go back to it.

Yes! But something about the power of the decision seems to send a shockwave through the people who socialized you. Julia Cameron, author, creativity guide, and so-called Queen of Change puts it this way: “When you’re going to leave, they know.”

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

The Varieties of Religious Experience,

You could be, as the ancient Taoist teacher Chuang Tzu wrote, “a butterfly dreaming that it is a person.” The Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj once commented, “The only true statement the mind can make is ‘I do not know.’”