Let me share a parable with you: 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 us. All 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 grandfather simply replied, “the one you feed.”

I love this parable and what it represents. It has surfaced a few times in my life recently, and I thought it was time to pay attention and dig a little deeper. Of course, I don’t know its origins or where it first came from, but it’s a powerful parable, nonetheless.

What are you feeding

If you listen to the first episode of this podcast (previously called Show Up with Gentry), I share a foundational time when I moved to Los Angeles at 19 years old. I had a dream to move to the gold coast and become a famous actor, director, and producer for many years. It was a singular focus around which everything in my life revolved. I fed that idea constantly.

So I packed up my car and drove from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, California. I remember feeling like this was it. I had finally found the reason I am on planet earth. And then things got real…real fast.

I was so unprepared for this experience, and it started to take its toll on me. I would sit in my studio apartment, feeling lonely and sad. Then I’d start to think about all the reasons I felt sad and alone, which only made it worse. I kept going deeper into self-pity, sorrow, anger, envy, sadness, and whatever emotion surfaced.

I kept feeding these intense and genuine emotions. I looked for all the evidence as to why they were real. And you know what happened? They got bigger. They grew over time. As they grew, they got stronger. Then, as they got stronger, they took over. In record time, I went from the big dreamer full of courage to the depressed kid buried under the weight of it all. The wolf had gotten so big and powerful, and I had to keep feeding it more and more.

What you feed wins.

Let’s play this out in real-time: Let’s say you’re struggling in a relationship. You can’t move past a situation. So, you start to tell other people about it, and those people reinforce your perspective. They give you food to feed your anger and frustration over this situation. Then you start to journal about it from that state of anger and frustration, and it intensifies and grows. Suddenly this relationship issue you could have addressed has become a vicious and ferocious beast. It starts to affect how you do everything else. You begin to feel anger and frustration in other situations and relationships. Before you know it, you become a fiercely angry person and think the world’s out to get you.

This happened to me during my wife and I’s infertility journey. More than anything, my go-to emotion was anger. Throw in a pandemic and the wildness that 2020 started, and my anger intensified. I kept finding reasons to feed the anger, and so it grew. Anger brought depression, so I fed that too. So, my depression got bigger. Depression brought sadness, so I fed that. Somewhere in this journey, I became a judgemental version of myself, so I fed the judgment wolf. So, as a result, I didn’t want to be around people anymore. I was feeding the depression, sadness, anger, and judgment, so of course, I didn’t want to be around people.

What you feed gets stronger. What you put your focus on expands. I had a choice in what I fed, and in this case, I fed all the wrong things. Here’s the real kicker – it was my choice all along. You are the one feeding the wolf, so you have to take responsibility for what happens.

As the wolf gets stronger, it gets harder to make the choices you need to make to stop feeding it. Eventually, your wolf may grow out of your control.

And what happens when the wolf turns on you? That’s what happened to me in California. I fed the beast, and it turned on me. It turned on me, and it convinced me that my dreams didn’t matter.

I didn’t catch what was happening early enough. Back in California as a 19-year-old kid, I wasn’t self-aware enough to understand. Even more recently, I didn’t catch on to what I was doing early enough.

I just let those wolves into my home, kept the feeder running, and ignored how big they were getting. Don’t feed the things in your life that aren’t helpful, don’t serve you, or aren’t in support of the greatest good.

Don’t focus on all the wrong things and wonder why things keep going wrong. You have to know that you’re doing this. Then you have to take responsibility for doing this. All of the negative emotions and states we experience will take care of themselves. They don’t need us to feed them. Instead, ask them what they want to teach you and listen. Let the emotions work themselves out in your body. And then when it’s time, and they’re no longer helping you or teaching you, they’ll get hungry enough, and they’ll look for food somewhere else.

So what wolves are you feeding?