Sometimes You Listen – Part 1

 

Photo Credit: Brenda McIntyre

Sometimes You Listen – Part 1

There is an ancient American Indian tale that goes something like this – An old Cherokee told his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil – anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego. The other is Good – joy, peace, harmony, love, hope, humility, kindness, compassion and truth. The boy thought about these wolves, and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man replied quietly, “The one you feed.”

I am sure all of you have read or heard about the above tale in some form or the other. In our quiet moments we may have all felt it too – the tugging feeling in the pit of the stomach or the hollow of one’s back or a constriction in the chest when something is not right. How many times have we known about a person or situation, but ignored it only to have our doubts confirmed? We are all looking outside for our answers, assuming that accessing our inner wisdom engenders mistrust, fear and doubt, especially when there is no material evidence to back it up!

Each one of us is gifted with this ‘inner knowingness’ and by building a relationship and trust with this quiet voice, this can lead to an empowered life filled with desirable results. Once you start paying attention, you will slowly begin to hear the different voices or ‘wolves’ within you, and then it is up to you which ‘wolf’ to feed!

A quiet voice has always been guiding us all our lives, sometimes gently, sometimes with great urgency. Very rarely we listen to it as most of the time or ego ensures that we just brush it off. This voice has different names, gut instinct, inner voice, inner guide, spiritual guide, inner wisdom and so on. It isn’t necessarily a voice but it could also be a sense or feeling or foreboding or hunch. “Listen to your gut”, has a legitimate basis as our gastrointestinal tract is very sensitive to our true emotions, and provides a very trustworthy indication to determine the right course of action.

One doesn’t have to be intuitive to experience all this – one is constantly taking millions of impressions throughout the day with all our finely tunes senses and also subconsciously simultaneously processing them. We begin to establish a connection only when we start paying close attention to these impressions and then responding to them accordingly. There are so many distractions in the outer world that we have stopped paying attention and have lost touch with the ability to connect inwards.

Hardly any of us know how to stay in the moment as we live most of our lives in the past or the future – which is basically the nature of the mind. The trick is to live in society and learn to bring our inner voice into play and then see the results. It is important to access that inner guidance to help us elevate ourselves both mentally and emotionally so as to live our life in a qualitatively better manner.