Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about integrity.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, here's a quote by Mark Neppo, who says, integrity is an unending process of letting our inner experience and our outer experience complete each other, in spite of our very human lapses.

I really like that one. It feels very much like my journey with integrity, and also the struggle. There's so often what feels like an inner sense of,

what is aligned, what is right, and then it just feels so much more complicated when coming out into the world, and there's like all these other variables, or all these things that feel compelling, or

challenges that pose of threats to this inner knowing, or at least the meeting of this inner experience with the outer experience.

And anyone who tells you that living a life in alignment, or in truth, or integrity, makes it an easier life, probably hasn't done it in a radical way.

On one level, yes, easier in the sense of like it's easier to be inside yourself, because there's not attention in the same way, and there's just a deep sense of being settled and calm and free.

And like you could argue that that is just the ultimate, but not easy in the sense of like looking, look at other people who have done that in history, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Jesus.

I mean, these are people, and endless other examples, who I've just like, this is what's true for me, and I am going to be uncompromising in my meeting of that with the outer experience.

And it's hard, it's very hard, just because something is true for us doesn't mean other people want to meet it.

And this will sound provocative, but they have their right to have their experience in the sense that no one can be responsible for another person's experience, and experiences are going to arise in the way that they do in others.

And so really all we have is our truth, and how we bring that into the world, and how we meet other people's truths, and hopefully there can be space for hearing and curiosity and understanding.

But at the end of the day, the only experience that we have responsibility over is our own.

And so I use this to just highlight that integrity is a hard process, can be a very hard process.

And if you've found that a struggle for yourself in your life, I just hope that when you can know that's normal, there are a lot of reasons that we might compromise a sense of our truth or what we feel to be right for other things that also feel right in a different way.

And so I think a big process in our own movement toward integrity is just getting clearer and clearer within ourselves of what is our deepest truth, what is our deepest value system, what is it that feels like the most simple expression of this is right right now.

And then what is it to meet that with the outer experience, and it's in those moments where the inner and the outer complete each other as Mark Neppo says, in spite of our very human lapses, and we fall, we step back up, we try again.

But this is a powerful and deep journey, and it really leads to some of the deepest freedom, at least that I know of, and the deepest calm in our being that we can experience.

So I hope it gives you something to think about on this big journey of practicing human.

Thank you for that practice. I'll talk to you soon. And until next time, take care.

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