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

Your awareness of your true career path may be buried deep under layers of acculturated false beliefs. But it’s still there, like a flower trying to grow through toxic sludge.

total integrity, we’re completely available to all emotion: overwhelming love, deep grief, terrible anger, sharp fear. This emotion may be painful, but it doesn’t cause the intense, dull suffering we feel in the dark wood of error.

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 their mock victories. But they don’t pull out their own hair and feathers if they fail to accrue a billion times as much birdseed or dead rabbits as the next sparrow or coyote. Mo

Neuroscientists have shown that meditators who’ve spent many hours observing their thoughts and focusing on compassion have less neural activity in parts of the brain associated with negative emotions, and unusually dense neural tissue in areas linked to empathy, love, and joy. The longer these people practice, the greater the change. They are lite

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

listening to our inner teacher is the most important skill we need to follow the way of integrity. When we meet external soul teachers, we know to trust them only because we feel the ring of truth internally. And even when no external teacher is available, the inner teacher always is.

maybe you repeatedly carve out time to write that novel, then fall down a rabbit hole by watching YouTube videos of, say, rabbit holes

we accept that at a deep, existential level, we are free.

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.

Studies in psychoneuroimmunology show that if we plunge too quickly into any major change, even a good one, our bodies and minds can’t absorb the shock. We must give our psychological and physiological systems time to adjust. We do this by allowing something that neuroscientist and cultural anthropologist Mario Martinez calls “mourning the known mi