Pride doesn’t just say “I am good,” it says “I’m better than someone else.” Envy doesn’t just make us want stuff, it makes us want at least as much stuff as someone else. Wrath isn’t random; it’s targeted at someone else. When we lock into errors of righteousness, we invariably point at someone else and turn them into what therapist Bill Eddy calls

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. You may phrase this thought a little differently. Maybe for you, the deepest lie is “I’m defective,” “No one wants me,” “I have no community,” “I don’t fit in anywhere,” or any of a thousand other

Getting out of a triangle drama is also simple, though not easy. It hinges on one act of integrity: acknowledging that we’re capable of choosing our responses to other people and situations, no matter what.

Every day you make thousands of tiny decisions about what to do with your time. Every single choice is a chance to turn toward the life you really want. Repeatedly putting a little less time into what you don’t love, and a little more into what you do love, is your next step on the way of integrity.

The reason I ignored all these signals and kept working was that I’m strongly attached to a belief that’s very common in our culture: continuing to work is always more virtuous than stopping to rest. Now, I’m not saying that tenacious persistence isn’t a good idea sometimes.

Whenever you lose your integrity, you’ll feel your own unique brew of bad moods, depending on your personality. You may tend, as I do, toward anxiety and depression. Or you may feel free-floating hostility, itching to punch everyone in your office, family, zip code. You may have full-on panic attacks, especially during special occasions (blind

In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao [Way], every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

being out of integrity isn’t a sign you’re bad—only that you’ve internalized false assumptions, usually in an effort to be good. The most moral, well-meaning people often have the biggest infernal landscapes, filled with the most frightening demons.

“I spent a lot of my life lying to get what I thought I wanted. Here’s what I found out: if I live in the truth, I’ll always come out okay. Because only the truth has legs. At the end of the day, it’s the only thing left standing.”