Says the Cherokee Grandfather to his grandson.
“One of them is angry and hateful, the other is generous and compassionate.”
His grandson asked, “Which one will win, Grandpa?”
The old man replied, “The one I feed.”
– from Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, by Alberto Villoldo
Let this tale reverberate inside you for a moment.
I am betting you can intuitively sense its truth.
Are you generally a positive or a negative person?
Are your thoughts filled with more of one category than the other?
Do you view the world with a hate and fearful lens?
Or is it full of joy and optimism?
What holds you in place as either?
What reinforces your place there?
The inputs to our being shape what it looks like.
They come partly from our environment – news, media, where we live.
They come partly from our experiences – childhood, school, friends and bullies, presence and absence of love.
They come partly from ourselves – thoughts and feelings we continue to hold onto, stories we tell ourselves, beliefs, values, passions, our perceptions and their distortions.
Every week I have clients coming to me with facets of their being they want to change.
We go through what is feeding this side of them. What reinforces it. Where it came from.
Then we look to find more desirable food. How we feed our being from this point forward will reshape what their being will become.
It’s that simple. Often difficult to deploy. Yet with awareness of what is being fed and how, the changes become clearer and thus easier to start.
And how about you?
Which parts of you are feeding now?
How might you change the inputs you feed yourself to change your being to one that serves you more?
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