Top highlights from The Way of Integrity
Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
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What upsets people is not what happens to them, but their thoughts about what happens.
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And, above all, please learn to trust your inner teacher, the burst of relaxation and freedom that rings through your whole body.
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And if the whine and sting of purposelessness isnt enough to shake us out of our sleepwalking, our subconscious minds will up the ante. Theyll summon the megafauna, the mental wild beasts we call mood states.
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we tend to measure our own well-being not by how we feel, but by how our lives compare to other peoples.
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Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to question 3.) Can I absolutely know that its true? (Yes or no.) How do I react, what happens, when I believe that thought? Who or what would I be without the thought?
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express anger. But their reaction is to create justice, rather than merely destroy whatever is bothering them.
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They include peace, freedom, love, comfort, and belonging.
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The Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj once commented, The only true statement the mind can make is I do not know.
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This was how I discovered the most powerful way I know to kill our own cowardice as we approach a gate to hell. We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attentionall of iton the present moment.
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To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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At the deepest level, you know what makes you happy and how to create your best possible life. That knowledge is coded into your very nature. But your nature is forever colliding with a force that can tear it apart: culture.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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Contemplating integrity as a way of life is like deciding to leave your homeland and become a citizen of a new country: it involves a major identity
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In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings - even intense ones, like longing or anguish - to please our cultures. At that point, we're divided against ourselves. We aren't in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (multiple things).
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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Because our true nature is serious about restoring us to wholeness, it hauls out the one tool that reliably gets our attention: suffering.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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Psychological suffering always comes from internal splits between what your encultured mind believes and what feels deeply true to you.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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No one can sleepwalk away from integrity indefinitely, because things get worse the further we travel in the wrong direction.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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If you don't walk your true path, you don't find your true people. You end up in places you don't like, learning skills that don't fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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There are infinite ways to make a living. At some level - a deep, instinctive level - you know which of them will work for you. You can feel it immediately when a job requires you to push aside your true desires.
Martha Beck,
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self
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