We live in a fast paced, often chaotic world. These are challenging times. Developing integrity can help stabilize your life and smoothen out its flow. It can help bring you into more and more clarity.
We are usually not taught to develop our characters and often times the influence of the world can take us in the opposite direction. Developing your character is beneficial as it determines the way in which you handle life’s problems and challenges. By handling things in a good way, you smooth out problems and put them behind you so to speak. By handling things in a poor way, your problems can intensify and hang around longer than necessary.
When I speak of integrity and character what I’m really talking about is developing your virtues. That is, developing those traits and attributes that will serve you in this life. The list of virtues are many, but for this blog post I will focus on a few that I think will be most effective at giving you a start and propelling you into greater levels of freedom.
Courage. Much of the modern world’s infrastructure exists in a way that can instigate fear in the individual. It is what it is. Developing courage will allow you to see that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors. It ain’t necessarily true.
Purity. Life is challenging and there are a lot of shady characters out there and a lot of manipulation etc. Purity prevents you from becoming the same as those things.
Humility. Society often teaches us that ‘up’ is the correct way by glamourizing and focusing on celebrity, status, and materialism. It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with those things, it’s just that the path of elitism is ultimately disempowering. It’s better to stay humble.
Belief. We are often led to doubt ourselves and to have a mistrust in life. But we gotta keep on believing in ourselves and in the goodness of life.
So those are a few virtues to get started with. Studying them and applying them in your everyday life, day after day, step after step, is the way to develop your character. And as you do that over time, you should see an improvement in the quality of your life and in the quality of your well being.
