which wolf are you gonna feed?

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.” - Carl Jung

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Whenever I read that quote from Jung I’m gobsmacked with this truth: sometimes I can try way too fucking hard. Last year I was on a plane and I was scrolling through all my old photos and cringed. Man, it hurt to see me so desperate for approval. But then I realized the fact I could see my ego in action was a very good thing.

My eog is my special brand of Shadow. As someone said to me recently, ‘needy is creepy’ and boy, was I super needy. But until we (meaning, I) see why we’re needy, and heal that aspect of our Shadow, then we’re never free. Until we realize we’re truly complete as we are, then we never change. It’s all bandage shit, and I hate bandaging up wounds in this work. Let Dr. Bryan get in there and go to the place where the wound is the most raw and blast it with insight and love and massive awareness so it heals at the source.

It often comes back to the same thing. To know who we are, we have to not know ourselves. #DeepThoughts

I’m obsessed with working with our darkest natures. It thrills me.

What is our Dark Side?

It’s the stuff we hide. Our neediness. Our fears. Our dirty fucking thoughts. Our shame. Guilt. Messed up emotional shit. The more messed up emotions you have, the more fun we’ll have. Guaranteed.

My dad was a therapist. He devoured Carl Jung (above quote). Jung is/was a famed shrink who became stranger and more interested in the darker aspects of life as he aged. He freaked people out. My kinda guy.

As we move along in life, we have to decide if we want to leverage the dark sides of ourselves and embrace our individuality, or not. We won’t be loved by everyone. Hell, we’ll scare people. But we’ll be who we are, and when we are who we are, we naturally draw in amazing and unreal people who are soaring in life.

Here’s a crazy non sequitur.

My mother killed herself! Fun fact, huh? No. It’s fucked up, and it made me who I am today. You can throw anything at me and I’ll say, “What else ya got?” Because the thing I’ve learned is I’m spectacular because I grew up in chaos and I found control in the chaos. Most successful and rich people have OCD. It’s true. They see it as a deficient. I prove to them it’s a fucking gift to be celebrated. Society wants to control the wild and mad geniuses of the world.

Don’t you dare let them tell you how to live.

My mother died in the grip of madness. My sister became a Ph.D. in psychology. My other sister is simply smart as fuck and salty. She embodies more Jung than much of my family. My entire family lived for Jung. My father practiced Jung’s teachings in his work as a family therapist.

The Bryans embrace our dark sides with abandon.

Integration of our Dark Side into our waking life makes for a truly empowered life. It frees us. We end up taking life way less seriously because we know we’re in charge of how it all goes down….to a point. The whole ‘surrender’ discussion is a whole other discussion.

But it takes work. Dedication. Focus. Most of us don’t feel we have the time. We run away from it.

Sooner or later it will bite us in the ass if we don’t integrate it into your life. It’s what haunts us. Why we don’t feel well, why we struggle. Why we suspect things are harder than they need to be.

I want you to imagine something.  Read this then close your eyes and do it.

I want you to see a dark wood before you, meaning, a collection of trees, a forest if you will. Big, thick, dark. Full. Lush.

No light penetrates this wood. On the other side you can see an opening. A clearing. Light shines down on this clearing. It’s on the far side of the dark wood.

Do you see it? The light? Do you see it? The wood? Dark, lush, tangled, full?

We’re going to go into that dark wood together naked.

See the dark wood. See the sparse light on the other side of it.

Take a breath. Sit in silence. Turn off music, turn off people, turn off phones.

Close your eyes and see all of this. Your naked body. The dark wood.

I want you to imagine walking fully naked into that dark wood and I want you see how you feel.

Listen. What comes up?

Fear? Anxiety? Anger at me telling you what to do? Annoyance that you have better things to do? Frustration that this blog post is so long? What?

What comes up – right now – as I say “Let’s walk naked into the dark wood together”?

Hands to yourself.

Whatever your feeling is the touchstone into your Dark Side.  

Open your eyes. Look around. If you did what I just suggested you’ll see the room differently. It will look brighter. Sharper.

More alive.

It’s what happens when we welcome the journey of walking into our Dark Side.

The reason this work matters is because most of us operate from a tiny sense of Self. We don’t know what it’s like to go to work, talk to people, have sex, eat, sleep as our full selves.

We don’t know what that feels like because we haven’t walked naked and willing into our Dark Side.

The fuel to live from our Large Self IS our Dark Side, the very thing we avoid.

SURPRISE.

Be “friendly” with your Dark Side. Welcome it so you can tame it. You. Naked. Wolves by your side. Side-by-side

And before we go, I was told to put this back in by my colleague Veronica. She’s an unreal connector. She’s in the DNA of MCBHappier, LLC.

Read this famous Native American parable:

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.”

Here’s the deal - we only want to feed the ‘good’ wolf by embracing and taming the ‘dark’ one inside of us. They feed one another and are the same. Do you see?

So next time you wanna ignore the darker emotional shit in your life, email me and I’ll know you right into your good wolf by reminding you the evil one is the true source of your good.

Let’s all howl at the moon, shall we?