The Story of Two Wolves

A wile ago, I watched a short video which is a wonderful addition to my last post: A Different Voice.

It is about an old Cherokee and his grandson. The story goes as follows:

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, ”My son, the battle is between two “wolves” inside each of us.

One is Evil.

It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good.

It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

We are very good at feeding our evil wolf. One reason is because it is easy. It is easy because feeding the good wolf would need us to grow our understanding of ourselves by being honest, curious, brave, and by taking action. The evil wolf can be fed by remaining ignorant.

It is similar to what we do with our inner critic and our inner friend. Our inner critic is often so loud and dominant because we have fed it over years and years. We gave it everything it needed and sometimes more to be big and strong. Our inner friend, on the other hand, often only received the bare minimum. So, it is time to feed our inner friend and our good wolf a bit more often.

I spoke about ways in my last blog post but here is another method you can try out which can help you on your way. Take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line in the middle of the paper. Then, you draw a horizontal line on the top of the paper (maybe a few inches/cm from the top). This leaves you with four sections. In the top left section, you will draw your evil wolf. In the top right section, you will draw your good wolf. Now, whenever there is a situation during which you can either feed your good wolf or your evil wolf, you will make a dot in the corresponding bottom section. A dot in the bottom left section if you have fed the evil wolf, and a dot in the bottom right section if you have fed your good wolf. Those dots represent food. So with each dot you feed a wolf. This can be a nice reminder of which wolf you should feed more often.

And we should not try to kill our evil wolf. As stated in the last post, our inner critic and our evil wolf have important messages to tell us. But it is about finding a good balance and establishing a better relationship with them.

Which wolf do you want to feed? And how will you do that?

Have a wonderful day, Stephan

PS: Here is the story in a nice illustrated video…