An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
At times our mind and heart can have this battle. The mind is rationalistic, reductionistic and tends to put things from a place of fear and certainty. Truth be told, the mind is a 2 million year old defense mechanism system designed to protect us from intruders and harsh climates the world has shown us through time whereas the heart tends to offer us a brighter perspective on life.
Tony Robbins, a well renowned motivational speaker, describes the mind to be designed to protect us from patterns of danger in our environment. He says that the human brain is not designed to make us happy but it's designed to make us survive. It does this through fear. The brain looks for what it needs to fight or flee from. So it's ALWAYS looking for what's wrong. Our mind can take us over unless our heart is what's running us. Just imagine how many people there are currently who only operate from a place of fear rather than love.
Just imagine how many people are feeding their wolf of fear over their wolf of compassion. Perhaps one too many because the West in current day has placed far more importance on rationalism over mysticism and spirituality. When the Spaniards came to the Americas, they saw the indigenous as savages and wiped them out through a genocide. Claiming their superiority over them because they were “far more civilized”. Even though the intuitive knowledge that the indigenous held were of connection to Earth, plants and animals. Theirs was an innate awareness which was far more advanced in knowledge than that of the colonizers who were far more egocentric and individualistic in their mind-based approach filled with greed and thirst for power. What was evident was that the Spaniards could not understand nor fathom how the indigenous had such a strong connection to the divine and led theirs with such a strong connection to nature. So they began a psychological attack on their community by parading them with gifts of alcohol and cigarettes in order to decay their soul. One thing is for certain, the mind is a tool never to be worshipped. Whereas the heart is our angelic vessel that connects us to the divine. Make the mind the servant of the heart and your reality will begin to manifest things beyond imaginable.
This is where intuition comes into play.
Out of all the organs, the heart is the first to develop in the human body. It is no coincidence that it forms before the human brain. It pumps about 2000 liters of blood everyday for us and even beats automatically for us while we’re sleeping. The heart math institute reports that the heart has an energetic field 100 times stronger than that of the brain! Can we just take a moment to step back and appreciate just how much of a bad ass this organ truly is?
Prayer & Mediation Activity
There’s a prayer whom Mindfulness expert Shauna Shapiro advises us to practice. She says that every morning after she gets out of bed she goes in front of the bathroom mirror and says “I love you Shauna” with her hands placed on her heart. She says the practice may sound a little cheesy but by the third day she felt like she was saying “I love you” to not only her but all those who came before her such as her mother and her grandma. She could feel healing occurring in her heart and giving herself permission to cultivate self-compassion.