You are Meant to Live in Peace—with Martha Beck
“Peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it. And, everything you long for will meet you there.”
Dear Friends,
When I find myself consumed by feelings of grasping or attachment, I repeat this quote from Martha Beck’s book, The Way of Integrity: “Peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it. And, everything you long for will meet you there.”
Martha defines integrity as living your truth, rather than adapting to cultural norms and pressures. “Integrity means intact,” she says. “You don’t leave it because you’re bad. You leave it because you’re trying to be good.”
Still, over decades of coaching, she’s observed that “splitting away from your true nature is the source of all psychological suffering.” Here's how that process tends to unfold…
“The first sign of it is a loss of a sense of purpose, because we've lost our true meaning-making with our soul. Then, we start to feel bad emotionally and physically. We may develop a compulsion or addiction because we're in so much pain. When someone says the actual truth to us, it comes as this huge shift away from all of the scattered things that we've been believing.
I've asked thousands of people all over the world: What makes you feel like the truth is coming home to you more than anything else? I've found a sentence that makes people feel this ring of truth: “I am meant to live in peace.”
As that lands, the body relaxes physically. Your immune system gets better with one moment of truth. Emotionally, you start to recover from depression, anxiety, and hostility. Then, there’s this part that is soul and it feels like freedom.
As the Buddha said: When you find the ocean, whatever it looks like, you can tell it's the ocean because the ocean always tastes of salt. When you find enlightenment, whatever it looks like, you can recognize it because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. There's this physical, emotional, spiritual, and logical alignment.”
So, how can we return to our true nature?
“When we’re open to acknowledging that things aren’t perfect and we want to feel whole again, I believe that circumstances start bringing us teachers. But, the only way that we can recognize teachers—whether it's in a book, somebody we see online, or even a situation—the only way that we can decide whether it's telling us the truth is by the ring of truth: the resonance of truth in our own meaning-making systems, not just our minds, but our bodies, hearts, and souls.
When you're in that resonance of truth, you're like an airplane in structural integrity. You can fly anywhere. Fall out of structural integrity and you can't fly. It’s not a punishment. It's just the way things work. Your inner teacher will start talking to you if you begin listening.”
It takes courage to live in integrity. Still, this alignment allows us to be in flow with life. As Martha describes, it even changes our brain. She illustrates how in the passage I share most often from her book…
“As this internal shift occurred, life seemed to deliver more and more of the things I’d longed for during my life. I began to imagine that the universe works like this: whenever we humans long for something, the Powers That Be immediately send it. But everything we’ve ordered is always delivered to our real home address: peace. Go back to the resonance of the statement: “I am meant to live in peace.” Can you feel yourself relaxing as your whole self aligns with that idea? This is why, when we struggle for things in a state of desperation, they don’t come to us—nothing works when it’s misaligned. But when we return to a state of peace, the things we’ve “ordered” can finally reach us.
It boils down to this: Peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it. And everything you long for will meet you there.”
Now, close your eyes and reflect on something you’re longing for. Take a few deep breaths and repeat Martha’s statement: I am meant to live in peace. Consider residing in that energy today.
With love,
Jenna