What if you lived in the truth instead of simply telling it?
Many of us live lives of quiet desperation. The goals we pursue are always veiled. We move towards them thinking they will fulfill us, only to arrive feeling empty handed.
We get the new house and eventually it’s just a house that needs cleaned. We get the dream job, and eventually it’s another Monday morning. We find the person of our dreams and still we wonder whether we’re enough.
These goals seem to carry us over thresholds and into new lives only for us to realize we’re still the same person living it.
When we set goals for the future, they are mostly outcomes based on expectations of our past. Behind these goals is an identity state we wish to embody. It’s not about running a marathon or losing weight as much as the desire to be healthier. The new job isn’t what you crave so much as it is spending more of your time working on things that fulfill you. You don’t want to read more books, you want to learn more about what interests you.
These goals function as evidence that supports the person you want to become, but they aren’t the end all, be all. A better way to approach these goals is to focus on the repeatable behaviors that function as inputs that will achieve the outputs you desire.
Now, instead of running a marathon it’s simply putting one foot in front of the other. Learning that new skill is forged through trial and error and with enough practice, it becomes permanent.
In other words, it’s less about having something and more about becoming someone.
At this point it becomes less about the number on the scale and more about answering the question: Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?
But how do we move forward if we don’t know who we want to be? I believe the answer lies in living with integrity and aligning ourselves with our inner truth.
The Four Stages of Living with Integrity
You’re born into this world knowing who you are, but you learn to forget when the world tells you who to be.
Integrity means to be intact, “integer” in Latin. To be in integrity means being one thing—whole and undivided. It’s the alignment of thoughts, words, and actions into a cohesive self.
Living with integrity is ensuring that your inner self and outer self are integrated. This requires you to show up as you are, wherever you are, no matter the consequences.
The reason for this is simple: dividing yourself into two—the shown self and the hidden self—that is brokenness, a loss of integrity, a fracturing of the soul. You must do whatever it takes to stay whole.
When you live with integrity, you align yourself with reality, with the way things are, with the truth you carry.
The journey to integrity moves through four stages. Each stage represents a shift from living out of alignment to finding wholeness.
The Path of Not Here
The first stage begins with your awareness. This is The Path of Not Here – this is where you’re feeling lost, stuck, or disconnected from your true self. This is usually where life steps in and asks you how much you’ve been going through the motions instead of living with intentionally.
Regaining your sense of integrity begins with admitting to yourself just how lost you really are. Without first coming into awareness that you are out of alignment, you would continue performing a role you were never assigned, and just keep going, and going, and going, without realizing there hasn’t been a footprint in the sands for a very long time.
The Inferno
After the awareness sits in, you enter the second stage towards living with integrity, which is known as the inferno. It sounds scary and it is, but it’s also extremely freeing. This is where we face our deepest fears, the false identities we carry, and the limiting beliefs we hold and bring them out into the light.
It’s the moment we realize that the life we’ve been living—or the stories we’ve been telling ourselves—are out of alignment with our truth. It’s where we begin to put the shape of our thoughts into the shape of words and hope they remain true.
Entering Purgatory
The third stage we reach on the road to integrity is purgatory, a word that means “cleansing.” This cleansing is part of our transformation. You must uncover before you can recover, so we uncover what is not true and actively choose what is.
After facing our fears and observing the false beliefs we hold, now is our chance to shed the old way of being and align our external life with our internal truth. This stage signifies a change in our exterior that reflects what’s internal. This is where we begin to shift our external behavior to align with what we know to be true within.
Living in Your Truth
The final stage of integrity is paradise—the state where your inner truth and outer life are fully aligned. You no longer struggle to maintain integrity because it has become your natural way of being.
Living in paradise isn’t about perfection—it’s about freedom. Living within your truth sets you free, as you’re no longer shackled by limiting beliefs, false narratives, or the weight of external expectations.
This cycle plays out in small and large ways throughout life. Recognizing these stages helps navigate challenges with clarity, knowing they are steps toward true integrity.
We shift out of integrity when we put our culture above our nature. In other words, when we suppress our true selves to fit external expectations. We do everything we can to “be good” but we don’t “feel good”. This is the most common reason we end up in the dark wood of error, by “doing what we’re supposed to do.”
Living in integrity means bridging the gap between culture and nature—living in a way that honors our inner truth and the world we navigate.
This is how we begin to live within our truth, this is how we begin to allow the truth to come and set us free.