This week, until 15 November, Kevin Mayhew Ltd are offering 10 per cent off The Teacher, normally retailing at £14.99. That means a saving of £1.50 using the code UNFOLDING10 when ordering the book from the company’s website. Just type the code into the relevant box at the online checkout between the dates given.
Meanwhile, here’s the sixth of the sessions I’ll be posting this week from the book, to run alongside this promotion.
Integrity
I grinned self-consciously, swaggered, cowered, spoke out, kept quiet – each depending on who I was with, my persona changing according to the company I kept.
And I asked myself, confused, ‘Which of these is me?’ For I saw how swiftly I sway with the breeze, drifting now this way, now that, according to which way the wind is blowing.
Then I said to the Teacher, ‘Speak to me about integrity. About truly being myself.’
And the Teacher answered, ‘Those who preserve their integrity will protect their soul; those who surrender it consign themselves to a bottomless pit from which there is no escaping. Better not to have much and be true to yourself than to have all the riches in the world at the cost of your own integrity.’
Then I understood that to live fully we must first be able to live with ourselves, true to what lies within us. For though, like a reed, we must be willing to bend, flexible in our opinions and ready, where necessary, to change, yet we can never be all things to all people, for then we will be nothing to anyone. Better to be rejected for who we are than accepted for who we are not.
I recognised, likewise, the importance of living by our principles, ensuring that our words and deeds are consistent. For whoever says one thing and does another is like an unfaithful lover – not to be trusted and sure to be spurned – whereas those who practise what they preach, their answers honest and motives transparent, are like a harbour in a storm and an anchor in a tempest: a constant in a sea of change.
And I saw further that though we all wear many faces, depending on who we’re with and where we find ourselves – and that each of these is part of who and what we are, a facet of the whole – we should never be two-faced, knowingly duplicitous, adopting one or the other guise for gain or comfort.
For truly to be ourselves with another is the greatest compliment we can pay them, the deepest expression of trust and the surest key to friendship. And when we fail to be ourselves we sell not just them short but us as well.
So then, my counsel is this: pretend to be who you are not and you may lose sight of who you are. Better a semi-precious stone than a counterfeit diamond. Better the mundane that is real than a mirage in the desert. Better a mind at peace with itself than a self at peace with nothing.