Which wolf do you feed the most?

There is a beautiful, apparently original Native American story about two wolves. It goes like that:

A Cherokee elder was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me…..it is a terrible fight and I see it as being between two wolves”. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

“This same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person too”, said the elder to his grandchildren. The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The grandfather simply replied, “The one you feed the most”.

I read it for the first time a long time ago and somehow have forgotten about it. Recently I talked with a young client of mine and remembered the story again. It really spoke to her.

You too probably heard many times that “happiness is the matter of choice”,  “you see what you look for”, “be positive, focus on good things”, etc. etc. It is simple, isn’t it? Yet somehow we often forget about this simple truth that we have a say in our destiny, that we can choose what kind of a day we are having, what we see in the world, what do we focus our attention on. We forget what wolf we want to feed.

For some reason, it is easier to feed the black wolf. We tend to find all the negatives in life, focus on fears, failures, bad luck, dark moments. I read once that we have been programmed this way by nature, so we can sharpen our attention and be ready for dangers and obstacles in our life.

I am not sure who programmed us this way and why, but I see it often to be true. Why is it so difficult to get up in the morning and say: “it is going to be a very good day today”?

I think it is a matter of taking a responsibility. It is so much easier to be a victim of circumstances or a victim of others. It is easier to have things “happening to us” rather than seeing them as a summary of our own choices. It is easier to say “you know what they did to me?” than “you know what a dumb decision I have made?”.

When things happen in our life we look for someone to blame. Once we find them, we can direct our anger, our disappointment, our resentment towards them. It may even give us the energy to fight back. Anger is very powerful, isn’t it? It may fuel us, give us a purpose for the next little while. But it may also make us feel sick, powerless, defeated. In a long run, it doesn’t make sense. Think about it when you get up in the morning and decide which wolf you are going to feed that day.

By Eva Sadowski