The battle inside us all, is simply our choice to call.

Is there a more profound fable speaking to the chasm of fear-limiting beliefs versus soul-loving living than the Light Wolf and the Dark Wolf?

Even if you know the fable by heart, perhaps you may welcome the Native American wisdom from wherever you are in this precise moment, allowing the meaning behind these words to permeate what is weighing you down, or lighting you up.

One evening, a Native American grandmother sat around the crackle of the village fire telling stories to the young.

“There is a battle going on inside every human. Including you. It’s a battle of two wolves — a dark and a light wolf. The dark wolf represents envy, arrogance, anxiety, ego, inferiority, regret, greed, self-pity, guilt, false pride, fear, pain, anger, jealousy, rage; the light wolf represents love, peace, humility, kindness, serenity, generosity, trust, tranquility, compassion, empathy, joy, gratitude.”

The grandmother sips her tea and turns silent, waiting for one of the wide-eyed kids to take the bait.

One finally does. “Grandma, which wolf wins?”

The Grandmother responds, “Whichever one you choose to feed.”

===

I love this fable.

I could receive this grandmother wisdom every day as a catalyst for my own empathy toward self-awareness | understanding | compassion. Because every moment, it may inform differently based on the battle of whatever is alive inside juxtaposed by whatever resistance resides inside.

And yet, I feel there is a missing epilogue to this fable that equally deserves to be told. The headline might go something like this:

The dark wolf inside us needn’t be the enemy.

This one may even take a moment to open.

It brings forward a central learning from my odyssey discovery: Nothing is good or bad. It just is. It is our relationship to the “is” that stimulates expansion or contraction.

So the question is what is our relationship to the fear within our shadow side?

In my experience, it’s not about hiding from, or killing, our dark wolf; it’s not even about suppressing it. It’s not about drowning it with light. Trust me, I tried that for 89% of my life by being a “light chaser”, running from the dark to the light.

I’ve learned from wise ones that there is no duality, harmony is singularity. What happens when we choose to make friends with the dark wolf? To recognize it? To use it? All of it? Our darkness gives us the perspective to see, and receive, our light. If we knew not our darkness, we wouldn’t understand our light.

I’ve learned when we recognize something, and give it a name, it decreases its power by 90%. Picture how long and big a shadow becomes when we allow it to “stretch.” When we go back to the source, we can realize it wasn’t so big after all. We can dissolve it by becoming an observer and it is then we can see the light emanating from within the dark.

Everyone has darkness in them and everyone has light. For all of us, this is a constant battle — but the one who wins is the one we choose we feed. We can feed our light, and embrace dark. Which leads us to tap back to the light within. Again again, and again.

It is up to each of us to choose whether we elevate, or detonate.

This is simply my experience in the company of you. Thank you for feeding my living wisdom.

I write to about the living wisdom encountered along my journey in the company of you. I see the gold in you, which inspires me to see mine more deeply. With gratitude and joy. Join us on the journey by receiving the Drops of Gold, 108 digitally shared, microdosed living wisdoms, which will then be physicalized in a book.