Martha Beck > Quotes

“What upsets people is not what happens to them, but their thoughts about what happens.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“Believing things that aren’t true for us at the deepest level is the commonest way in which we lose our integrity. Then suffering arises—not as punishment, but as a signal that we’re being torn apart. The purpose of suffering is to help us locate our internal divisions, reclaim our reality, and heal these inner rifts.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you.”
― Martha Beck

“In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings - even intense ones, like longing or anguish - to please our cultures. At that point, we're divided against ourselves. We aren't in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (multiple things).”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“At the deepest level, you know what makes you happy and how to create your best possible life. That knowledge is coded into your very nature. But your nature is forever colliding with a force that can tear it apart: culture.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“There’s a Chinese word that means “soul sister,” and that is the word I would use to address you in my heart. Listen to me, soul sister: Fate or luck or destiny already put you through hell once. Please don’t make it worse by condemning yourself. There is no choice that would have left you feeling no guilt. Every time I watch Adam struggle to speak, every time I see another child laugh and point at him, every time I watch his face fall as he realizes he is not going to be treated like the other kids, I feel wrenched by guilt just as you did when you heard my story. Life is hard. We make the best choices we can. Condemnation, whether it comes from around you or inside you, only robs the world of another dram of compassion. God knows, we need all the compassion we can get. If you promise to try to forgive yourself, I’ll try to forgive myself as well. I think, in my heart of hearts, that there is nothing for either one of us to forgive.”
― Martha Beck

“Criticism is an alluring substitute for creation, because tearing things down, unlike building them up, really is as easy as falling off a stump. It’s blissfully simple to strike a savvy, sophisticated pose by attacking someone else’s creations, but the old adage is right: Any fool can burn down a barn. Building one is something else again.”
― Martha Beck

“This was how I discovered the most powerful way I know to kill our own cowardice as we approach a gate to hell. We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attention—all of it—on the present moment.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“whatever your lies are, digging through them will eventually take you to the center of your inferno. There you’ll encounter three major aspects of your own psyche: the monster, the betrayer, and the betrayed.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“If you don't walk your true path, you don't find your true people. You end up in places you don't like, learning skills that don't fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“My story is a love story, but only those who are tortured by love can understand what I mean.”
― Martha Beck

“And, above all, please learn to trust your inner teacher, the burst of relaxation and freedom that rings through your whole body.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“Because our true nature is serious about restoring us to wholeness, it hauls out the one tool that reliably gets our attention: suffering.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“The Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj once commented, “The only true statement the mind can make is ‘I do not know.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“This is their journey. I’ll have my time to go through xyz, but now is not my time. Everyone gets their time.”
― Martha Beck

“I’ve learned that the worst pain, fear, and torment I’ve ever experienced has only deepened my ability to experience joy. I feel this even when I’m hurting, because while pain and pleasure are mutually exclusive, pain and joy are not.”
― Martha Beck

“A lot of things you believe to be impossible are actually well within your reach.”
― Martha Beck, Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

“When you feel like a victim, always suspect that you may be caught in your own errors of righteousness.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“I am bewildering you a little. Just enough to help you forget what you came to believe, so that you can remember what you’ve always known.”
― Martha Beck

“And if the whine and sting of purposelessness isn’t enough to shake us out of our sleepwalking, our subconscious minds will up the ante. They’ll summon the megafauna, the mental wild beasts we call mood states.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“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. We can end the futile drama of human conflict only when we accept that at a deep, existential level, we are free.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“our ultimate freedom lies in our capacity to interpret the world in new ways.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.”
― Martha Beck

“Contemplating integrity as a way of life is like deciding to leave your homeland and become a citizen of a new country: it involves a major identity”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“An author named David Emerald did just that after he studied Karpman’s work. He developed a kind of anti-triangle, which he called the “empowerment dynamic.” In this pattern, people who were once seen as persecutors become “challengers.” They force others to rise to new levels of strength and competency. Rescuers become “coaches.” Instead of jumping in to soothe and fix (“Poor you! Let me do that for you!”), they say, “Wow, that’s an awful situation. What are you going to do about it?” And in the most empowering shift of all, Emerald suggests that victims become “creators.” Where victims believe “This situation is unbearable and I’m helpless,” creators ask themselves, “This situation is messed up. What can I make from it?” Remember, creativity is the opposite of violence, which is pure destruction. If we can find any way to see ourselves as creators, no matter what our situation, we can turn drama triangles into empowerment dynamics. Instead of getting trapped in violence and hatred, we can use relationship dynamics to reach higher and higher levels of integrity.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“Psychologist Steven Hayes calls this connecting with our “core values.” His research shows that focusing on values has an almost magical ability to accomplish the very things we think we’ll get by attacking our enemies. Simply shifting our attention from attacking our enemies to defining our values can “reduce physiological stress responses, buffer the impact from negative judgments of others, reduce our defensiveness, and help us be more receptive to information that may be hard to accept.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

“A closed mind is like a weapon whose only function is to harm. It grips the thought “I exist in continuous violent reaction to whatever is threatening.” By addressing problems with core values and creativity, we choose a different mode de vie: “I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present.” Sacrificing our reflexive tendency toward destruction gives us access to a much greater power: creation.”
― Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self