PDF Summary:The Way of Integrity, by Martha Beck

Does something in your life feel “off"? If so, you may not be living in alignment with your true self. In The Way of Integrity, Martha Beck seeks to connect readers with their inner truths and lead them to a life of happiness, well-being, and spiritual growth. She argues that each of us has a deep, personal nature that tells us who we want to be and how we want to live. However, we lose touch with this nature as we internalize messages from our culture that tell us to chase things we don't really want.

Beck is a life coach and best-selling author. She draws her lessons from her own struggles and the lives of her clients. In this guide, you'll learn about the root causes of chronic unhappiness, how to challenge your false beliefs, and why changing yourself can also change the world around you. Along the way, we compare Beck’s advice to psychological research and extend her strategies with tips from other self-help authors.

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2. They will captivate you. Beck argues that you will be naturally drawn to this person. You might find that your attention naturally gravitates toward them in social settings, or you might find yourself thinking about them more than you usually think about someone you just met. This could be a strong sign that you want to be more like this person or that they have found something in their life that you are looking for in yours.

3. They will put you in touch with your nature. Beck explains that an integrity teacher isn't someone who tells you how or what to think, but who "wakes you up" to your own nature—your innate ability to sense truth and know your own feelings and desires.

While discovering an external teacher may be an important step in your process, Beck argues that the ultimate goal is to get in touch with your inner teacher. This is the part of you that intuitively knows what you need to grow and come back into alignment with yourself. A mentor can simply help you along the way.

What Kind of Integrity Teacher Do You Need?

Beck intentionally leaves her concept of an integrity teacher broad in order to accommodate a wide range of experiences. However, it's worth considering the different types of teachers you might encounter and how each type could contribute to your growth. Psychologists define three distinct roles that could fall under this umbrella.

1. A role model is a person you respect and emulate, but may never meet in person. This could be a public figure such as a musician, athlete, or politician. You learn from role models mainly by trying to follow their example and recreate their successes in your own life. A role model in integrity could be someone who has similarly struggled with your particular conflicts between culture and nature, found a solution for themselves, and publicly shared their story.

2. A mentor is someone with whom you build a long-term relationship and turn to for guidance and advice. A mentor is usually someone older and more experienced who can guide you through your personal growth. A mentor in integrity could be someone you talk to about specific yearnings of your personal nature or specific fears about running afoul of your cultural values.

3. A coach works with you to build and practice an important skill. Coaches are usually experts in this specific skill with a knack for teaching. Relationships with coaches tend to have clear boundaries of time and investment, and often involve a financial transaction. A coach in integrity could be someone like a professional therapist who you hire to help you practice listening to the yearnings of your nature or making small adjustments in your life to live with greater integrity.

2) Move Inward Toward Your Psyche's "Forbidden Zones"

Beck argues that you can discover your false beliefs by moving inward toward the painful places in your mind that you’re afraid to go. She explains that when you are living out of alignment with your nature, there are usually regions of your psyche where your conscious mind won’t go—your "forbidden zones." You don't yet know what's in these places, but you know that it is probably painful because of how much you've avoided it. You can usually tell where your forbidden zones are because these are the topics in your life that make you anxious to even think about.

As you approach these forbidden zones you may feel overwhelming feelings of dread, pain, sadness, or grief. However, you have a very powerful ally on your side—the yearning of your personal nature. Beck argues that at your deepest level, you want to live with integrity. This motivation will help you overcome the challenges of entering these terrifying places.

Once you have entered these painful places in your psyche, you will begin to notice the thoughts and beliefs that are causing the pain. You might not realize it yet, but many of these thoughts are actually the false beliefs that you have internalized from your culture. Even if the pain in these forbidden zones is caused by real experiences and events, there may be false beliefs making them even more painful. For example, if your forbidden zone holds the grief of losing a loved one, even though the grief is real, you may feel more pain if you falsely believe that you will never find another person who loves you.

Why Do People Create Forbidden Zones and How Do They Impact Us?

In her discussion of "forbidden zones," Beck is referring to a practice that psychologists may call repression or denial. Often people cope with negative aspects of their lives by simply trying to avoid or minimize the negative emotions that they cause. The things that you avoid then become your forbidden zones.

In the short run, coping with a problem this way isn't inherently harmful—you may need time to process and find a solution, and it helps to not feel overwhelmed in the meantime. However, this type of coping becomes maladaptive when you use it as a long-term strategy in place of a solution to the emotional problem.

Researchers have found that our coping strategies often develop during childhood. Someone who has experienced unmanageable stress, trauma, or poor treatment as a child may be more likely to fall into a pattern of maladaptive coping.

Psychologists also argue that maladaptive coping can cause someone to mute positive emotions as well as negative ones—essentially shutting down the entire emotional system for a flat, neutral experience. Since most people want to experience positive emotions, this validates Beck's perception that at your deepest level, you don't really want to cope with your problems this way, even if it feels comfortable in the short term.

3) Observe Your Internalized Beliefs

As we discussed, once you are able to enter your brain's forbidden zones, you will be in proximity to the beliefs that keep you from alignment. Beck advises you to start by simply observing your painful thoughts and feelings. Get to understand your feelings of discomfort, and the kinds of beliefs that might be associated with them.

For example, if you believe that you only deserve love if you have an impressive career, spending some time with this belief can give you insight. When and where did you acquire this belief? How does it make you feel? Once you understand the beliefs that are causing you to live in chronic misery, then you can begin to challenge and overturn those beliefs, which we will explore in the next section.

How to Observe Yourself

Beck advises you to observe your own thoughts and feelings. Russ Harris, writing in The Happiness Trap, provides some pointers on how you can do so. Harris conceptualizes the self as existing in two parts: a thinking self and an observing self. Your thinking self narrates your experiences, fantasies, and decisions to yourself—telling a running story about your life. Your observing self simply takes in what you experience without judgment.

Harris argues you can shift your attention away from your thinking self to your observing self through mindfulness. Start by observing your senses: What do you see, hear, smell, feel, or taste at this moment? Once you settle into your observing self, you can move your attention to observing the internalized beliefs that make you unhappy.

Realignment Stage #2: Challenge the False Beliefs

Once you begin to recognize these false beliefs, it’s time to start challenging and overcoming them. Even though you might consciously understand that something isn't true, it can still feel true, and it is these feelings that you’ll have to change.

For example, one of the most common false beliefs people hold is that their value as a human is dependent on something external. They think they will be worthy of love only if they are successful, virtuous, or beautiful. You could ask these people whether these statements are true, and they will often tell you they are false. Yet nonetheless, many of us feel that statements like these are true—and suffer for it. This section will cover Beck’s techniques for questioning false beliefs and recognizing your inner truth.

How Strong Is Your Grip on Reality?

Beck asserts that many of us believe things even though we know on a deeper level that they aren't actually true. To some, this may sound as if she's claiming that people are naturally dishonest or crazy. However, many psychologists assert that our grip on reality may not be as strong as we believe, simply because of how our brains work.

The human brain requires an enormous amount of energy to run. This causes two distinct consequences. First, when forming memories, we often retain the minimum amount of information our brain thinks we need. This can make it more difficult to learn from our experiences. Second, our brains tend to rely heavily on autopilot: our habitual patterns of thought and perception. Therefore, once an idea about how the world works has become part of our default programming, dislodging this idea could take a lot of effort, particularly as our brains have to learn and develop new habits of thought. In light of these tendencies, we shouldn’t be surprised that someone may continue to hold onto a belief, even when they are repeatedly exposed to contradictory evidence.

Question False Beliefs

Recall that as you explored your mind's forbidden zones, you discovered false beliefs that caused you pain. The next step is to challenge and overturn these beliefs. Drawing on the work of self-help author Byron Katie, Beck offers two strategies for overturning false beliefs.

1. Ask yourself—can you be absolutely sure it’s true? While your false beliefs may feel intuitively plausible, it's hard to be absolutely sure of something if, on some level, you know that it’s technically false. Asking if you are absolutely sure something is true often introduces the first crack of doubt into your belief. For example, let's say you believe that you will never be happy. Ask yourself, can you be absolutely sure that you won't ever be happy in your life? Not even once, for one second? If you can come up with just one tiny counterexample, then you can't be absolutely sure.

2. Reverse the formula. Beck also recommends challenging false beliefs by inverting the statement. She recommends testing out new beliefs by switching out words for their opposites or reversing word order to come up with a new meaning. For example, if your false belief is, “I can't be happy unless other people love me,” you might switch up to “I can be happy because I love other people.” If the reversed belief feels more true, then you might have stumbled on a way out of the false belief. In this next section, we'll discuss how your emotions can help you to recognize the truth.

Examining the Consequences of False Beliefs

Beck draws on the work of self-help author Byron Katie (Loving What Is) in her techniques for challenging false beliefs. However, when pushing back on your false beliefs, Katie recommends thinking not just about the truth of these statements, but also about their consequences. She encourages you to ask yourself the following questions:

1. How does this thought benefit me?

2. How would I feel and behave without this thought?

She argues that if you can directly see the ways your false beliefs are harming your life and holding you back, this can provide a strong boost of motivation to let go of these thoughts once and for all.

Recognize Your Inner Truth

After you challenge false beliefs, how do you recognize truths? Beck argues that you can distinguish between inner truths and false beliefs by paying attention to your body and moods. She identifies four qualities you experience while discovering an inner truth.

1. Physical relaxation: When you discover an inner truth, your body will relax. This is often because repression and misalignment take energy to maintain. You will experience a relaxing sense of physical relief as you let go of the need to control your emotions.

2. An "aha" moment: Recognizing truth will feel mentally like a sudden epiphany or insight. You may experience a sense of ideas clicking into place or a feeling of viewing your life from a new vantage point.

3. Feeling of openness: Recognizing truth often comes with a sense of feeling open. You will feel more receptive to new experiences, emotions, and sensations than before.

4. Feeling of freedom: You will experience a greater feeling of freedom to be yourself and choose your actions. As you let go of restricting false beliefs, new possibilities for your life will present themselves.

Can You Recognize Self-Deception?

Beck explains four ways to tell if you are recognizing your inner truth. However, it may be just as important to recognize when you are deceiving yourself. Psychologists argue that you can also recognize self-deception if you pay attention—though by definition, self-deception is hard to notice. Furthermore, many of the signs appear to be the inverse of Beck's techniques for recognizing your truth.

1. Notice your body. Psychologists argue that self-deception will make you feel anxious and tense—the opposite of the physical relaxation you can expect to feel while recognizing your truth.

2. Notice your mind. Beck contends that recognizing your truth will give you an "aha" moment, whereas psychologists argue that self-deception will feel like a knee-jerk reaction—something that happens quickly and feels out of your control.

3. Notice your feelings. Beck argues that recognizing your truth produces feelings of openness and freedom. Psychologists explain that self-deception often produces feelings of shame—an emotion that makes people close down and withdraw into themselves—reducing their openness and constricting their freedom.

Realignment Stage #3: Live With Integrity

Once you free yourself from false beliefs and understand your inner truths, then you can begin aligning your life with these truths. This is going to be challenging at first, because you will be acting against your habits. However, it will get easier as you make it into a practice. In this section, we'll cover Beck's five techniques for living with integrity: Commit to telling the truth, focus on making small adjustments, focus on your yearning, enjoy the benefits of integrity, and forgive yourself for violating your integrity.

1) Commit to Telling the Truth

When you live in your false beliefs internalized from your culture, you are not just lying to yourself—you also have to lie to family, friends, and colleagues. Living your truth will require telling it to others and making them understand who you really are. You may risk losing the identity you have built for yourself as well as your social relationships. However, Beck argues this may be the price you have to pay for living with integrity.

She cautions you to expect pushback, especially if living your truth requires violating the rules of your culture. For example, if you belong to a community that expects everyone to follow traditional gender roles, coming out as transgender may result in ostracization, social pressure, and outright hostility, even if your nature tells you this is who you really are.

How to Manage Public Backlash

Beck cautions that being yourself in public may lead to intense backlash from your culture. In So You've Been Publicly Shamed, journalist Ron Jonson suggests four strategies for managing intense public backlash, based on his interviews of people who have been ostracized and attacked online.

1. Tell your own story. When facing public backlash, your detractors may try to tell a negative story about you to the public. Get out in front of the damage by telling your own version of the story.

2. Wait it out. Sometimes public backlash will blow over as it becomes old news and your detractors move on to other targets. However, this is a risky strategy, as you might not be able to repair your reputation when returning to your public life. But it has worked for some people.

3. Develop emotional resilience to shame. Refuse to feel ashamed of the things others think you ought to be ashamed of. This will take away your detractors' ability to harm your emotional well-being.

4. Hire a reputation management company. While not everyone can afford these services, reputation management companies can help you by creating new online content that will knock damaging online content out of the first page of search results. This will prevent negative content from becoming your entire public image.

2) Focus on Making Small Adjustments

Beck also encourages you to realign your life by changing one small thing at a time. She stresses that aligning your life with your inner truth may take a long time and a lot of work, and you can't expect to achieve all of it at once. However, small changes will add up over time to create a life where you are free to be yourself and live out your true nature.

For example, if you live in a big city, but deep down you want to spend more time in nature, you don't have to start by uprooting your entire life and moving to the country. You could try planning a camping trip, or going on regular walks in a park.

How to Form Habits

Making small adjustments in your life leads to much larger improvements over time only if you can turn those small adjustments into habits. As James Clear explains in Atomic Habits, each new habit you create becomes the foundation on which to build the next positive habit. Therefore, in changing your life through small adjustments, it helps to understand how to form an activity into a habit. Clear identifies four stages of developing habits.

1. The cue triggers your brain to notice an opportunity to do something.

2. The craving is the emotional response attached to a certain cue—your emotional desire to do something.

3. The response is how you act to fulfill the craving.

4. The reward is the satisfaction you gain from the action you took.

In deciding on a positive step that you would like to turn into a habit, try writing out your new habit with each of these four steps.

3) Focus on Your Yearning

Beck explains that if you find yourself stuck while trying to get your life in alignment, it helps to focus on your deepest yearning. This yearning comes from your personal nature and tells you what you want to be doing with your life. It also provides the motivation you need to make hard changes like telling the truth with high social risks, or making consistent small changes to realign your life. Beck also argues that you can't force yourself to make hard changes until you are ready—but getting in touch with your yearning will bring you closer to readiness.

(Shortform note: In learning to listen to your yearning, it's helpful to draw a distinction between yearnings and cravings. Cravings are short-term desires that, when fulfilled, are quickly replaced with other cravings. Yearnings are long-term desires felt more deeply and can guide your life in accordance with your personal nature. However, it can be difficult to tell them apart while you are in a state of craving. Psychologists, therefore, suggest that you can reduce your experience of cravings through mindfulness and meditation. If you calm your mind and free yourself of cravings, you will have an easier time listening to that underlying yearning that motivates you toward a better life.)

4) Enjoy the Benefits of Integrity

As you get closer to realignment, you will begin to feel more at peace with yourself. Recall the three pieces of alignment: Accept your personal knowledge, accept your feelings, and spend your time on what you love. As you make this your practice, you will experience a greater sense of wholeness and well-being. Learning to love and enjoy this lifestyle will provide further motivation to continue the difficult process of realignment.

(Shortform note: In making important life changes, motivational experts stress the importance of reinforcing a change to make it stick. In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath argue that celebrating progress—no matter how small—can bolster your motivation to continue making the change. Therefore, by taking the time to savor even small moments of feeling aligned, you can strengthen your resolve to keep going.)

5) Forgive Yourself for Violating Your Integrity

Finally, as you get your life in alignment with your deepest nature, Beck highlights the importance of forgiving yourself for falling out of alignment with your integrity. Many people devote years of their lives to living out false beliefs and may be tempted to beat themselves up for their mistakes. Beck argues that the best thing you can do is let go of the past while forgiving yourself for the false beliefs you internalized from your culture.

The Five Steps of Self-Forgiveness

If you're struggling to forgive yourself for living against your integrity, psychologists recommend five steps.

• Own what you have done. Accept accountability for your actions and their consequences.

• Understand why you lived outside of your integrity. Look back on your past actions with honesty and compassion and determine the need you were trying to fulfill.

• Learn from your mistakes. Think about the lessons you can apply and make a plan for your future.

• Make amends. Try to set things right with those who have harmed when living outside of your integrity.

• Choose to forgive yourself. Make a conscious decision to let go of your guilt moving forward.

Realignment Stage #4: Transformation

Beck argues that as you practice integrity, you might find yourself changing in ways that you didn't expect. Your nature may call you to a higher sense of purpose and a higher spiritual awareness of the world around you. Beck calls on you to trust your process and embrace this transformation, even though its outcomes may be uncertain. She gives four pieces of advice for navigating this stage in your journey: Embrace the unknown, embrace unity and connectedness, find a purpose, and spread alignment to others.

1) Embrace the Unknown

Beck encourages you to allow yourself to be open to aspects of life and experience that you don't fully understand. She argues that living in alignment with your true nature won't simply help you become healthier and happier—it may also lead you to a higher spiritual awareness. This will require an openness to unknown experiences because the spiritual aspects of your life and world may be unfamiliar and unknown to you, especially if you have been living in misalignment. Just because you don't fully know what you are experiencing doesn't mean you can't continue trusting the process and being receptive to new spiritual experiences.

What Is “Spirituality?”

Beck argues that the path of integrity leads not simply to better psychological health and well-being, but also to a greater state of spiritual enlightenment. However, the term "spiritual" can mean very different things depending on the context. Reviewing a few common understandings of the term will shed light on Beck's ideas.

• The term "spiritual" comes from the Latin spiritus, originally meaning "breath" or "wind." To this day, the term carries a sense of both "life force" and "non-materiality" that hearken back to these roots.

• Some define spirituality as a set of emotional experiences, particularly a sense of awe, wonder, acceptance, and inner peace.

• Others define spirituality as a sense of greater connection, either to the world around us, to a higher power, or to something greater than ourselves.

• Finally, others define spirituality as an experience of deeper connection to one's own sense of values and purpose—an experience of clarity about the source of one's meaning in life.

2) Embrace Unity and Connectedness

As you embrace your true nature and find yourself ascending to new levels of spiritual awareness, you will find the divisions between yourself and the rest of the universe becoming less important. Beck argues that interconnectedness is the true nature of the world and that we learn from culture to put boundaries between ourselves and the universe. Beck argues that the more we get in touch with our true natures, the more we will experience belonging and connection as part of a vast, interconnected unity.

Religious Teachings on Interconnectedness and Unity

In arguing that higher spiritual awareness will lead to a greater sense of interconnectedness, Beck implicitly draws on a range of religious traditions that have proclaimed a "oneness" or "unity" of the world.

• In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu argues that the Tao is an eternal force manifest in all things, and that the highest spiritual state is to harmonize your life with the Tao.

• Some Hindu traditions proclaim that there is a universal soul called atman, and that spiritual practice allows you to commune or fuse with this single universal soul.

• The Buddhist concept of sunyata posits a philosophy of "non-dualism"—a rejection of distinctions between the objects or entities of the world in favor of a single, undifferentiated whole.

3) Find a Higher Purpose

Beck notes that as you become more aligned with yourself, you may discover opportunities to contribute and help others that would have never occurred to you while you were living in misalignment. This happens for several reasons. As you become at peace with yourself, you won't use up as much energy trying to control your life and emotions. This creates an opportunity to become less self-focused and more other-focused. For example, if you're not spending all of your time managing cognitive dissonance or ruminating on your emotional anguish, you might notice opportunities to volunteer in your community.

Second, as you become more aware of your interconnectedness with others, you will naturally become more alert to opportunities to contribute. Beck advises you to embrace these opportunities and live out a higher purpose for yourself by helping others.

How to Find Meaning in Life

In Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl builds on the idea that you can find meaning in your life by looking to the world around you. He argues that life doesn't have one single, inherent meaning, but instead each of us has opportunities to make meaningful contributions that only exist in certain moments and contexts of our lives. A meaningful life, he asserts, lies in recognizing these opportunities and taking them as they come, which Beck might argue is easier to do once you are living in integrity. Frankl suggests three paths to finding meaning:

1. Actions: A meaningful action is one that contributes to something larger than yourself, like a community, family, or cause.

2. Experiences: People find meaning in positive experiences, such as feelings of love toward others, experiences of beauty in nature and art, or experiencing truth through learning and contemplation.

3. Responses to adversity: Frankl writes that when people experience suffering or setbacks in life, they can find meaning in these events based on how they respond. Someone who sees their hardship as an opportunity to grow will find meaning in the suffering they experienced along the way.

4) Spread Alignment to Others

Finally, Beck argues that as you become more aligned with yourself, you have an opportunity to spread the influence of alignment to others around you. She describes the process of spreading alignment from yourself to others as similar to the repetition of shapes in a fractal.

Recall that the discovery of false beliefs often comes from encountering a teacher—someone who has found integrity and is already free to be themselves. Once you begin living in greater alignment with yourself, you have the opportunity to be that teacher for others. Beck argues that becoming aligned doesn't simply benefit you. Being the best version of yourself contributes to creating a greater culture of alignment around you, spreading health and spiritual transformation throughout the world.

Modeling the Spread of Alignment

Beck describes the spread of alignment as a fractal—an infinite pattern that is self-similar at different scales. However, this refers to the finished shape, while she is mainly describing a process of spreading.

We might more effectively describe this process as a "cascade effect." Also sometimes called a "domino" or "ripple" effect, a cascade occurs when an action triggers the conditions that enable the same action to occur again. For example, in ecology, the extinction of one species can cause the extinction of other species that relied on it for food, moving up the food chain in a cascade of extinctions. This can also move in the opposite direction: The decomposition of a plant can add nutrients to the soil, allowing for the growth of new plants that will eventually die and enrich the soil themselves. Therefore, by finding our own alignment, each of us has the opportunity to participate in a cascade that could spread alignment far beyond ourselves.