5 Key Teachings: THE WAY OF INTEGRITY, by Martha Beck

TRANSCRIPT:

On this week’s episode of Pulling the Thread, I had the chance to interview Martha Beck, and she said something that changed my life. Effectively, her latest book, The Way of Integrity, is abotu the journey back to wholeness, and that true self that’s within each of us. And she said that when they studied the minds of monks, when they really look at what it looks like to be in alignment or in enlightenment, two things are true. One, you no longer perceive yourself as separate from the world or other people. And two, the instinct to control your behavior evaporates. And that is freedom. I think, I feel that need to control myself so intensely. When she said it, it actually made me cry a little bit.

5 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. When we are out of alignment, out of integrity, living a lie, it affects your health.

Here’s Beck: “But speaking of science, solid research shows all sorts of links between living in harmony with our truth and maintaining good health. 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. The more significant our deceptive behavior, the worse the effect on health.

          “For example, in one study of gay men with HIV, researchers discovered that the more closeted the men were about their sexuality, the faster their disease progressed. There was a dose-response relationship between the level of concealment and immune status—in other words, the greater the concealment, the higher the rates of disease and death. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ sounds benign, but living in even tacit separation from our real identity can literally hasten our death.” (p. 11)

2. Our cultural devotion to “hustle” is doing us no favors.