The Two Wolves and the Wise Mind

Have you ever heard the tale of the two wolves? It’s told as a grandfather telling his grandson that there are two wolves in us all. One is white and represents all that is good, the other black and is nothing but bad. At the end of the story, the grandson asks which wolf wins, and the grandfather responds “whichever one you feed”.

At first, this story is encouraging for those of us who suffer from mental illness like depression. It seems as though the answer to getting out of the depths of depression is as simple as “feeding the one you want to win”. Okay, great, so start feeding the white wolf — aka overdosing yourself with nothing but positivity. And it works. At least for a while.

I’ve done this over and over and time and again throughout the years. I pump myself with so much positivity that it literally makes me physically ill. Sick to my stomach, I can’t take anymore sunshine and rainbows and happy, smiling faces with happy, upbeat voices. Once I reach that point of happiness overdose, I recede back into the darkness and make the black wolf my constant companion. I would go through this sickening circle constantly — I would spend a couple of weeks with the happy-go-lucky crowd, and then spend months feeling like a dark cloud followed me around and the grim reaper was at my back. It’s a bit ridiculous, to be honest.

How can you expect to feed only one wolf and expect the other to just disappear into the recesses of your mind, never to be heard from again? I mean, think about it — what happens when you shack up two wolves in the same space and only feed one of them? When you only truly pay attention to one, feeding it daily, playing with it, throwing it frisbees (that has got to be one tame wolf, by the way). What happens to the other neglected wolf?

Does that neglected wolf just sit in the corner and behave itself? Hell no! That wolf is going to start coming after you and the other wolf. It’s not going to just sit quietly and wither away. It’s going to fight to stay alive. That dark wolf is going to become even darker, meaner, nastier. And that’s what would happen if you ignore the darker side of yourself — the depression. The next time it sees a chink in your armor, it’s going to jump at the opportunity and be even worse than the last time it pounced on you.

This is why I spend a lot longer in the depression stage when I go through the overdose of happy. This week, I learned about a theory that’s similar to the two wolves story. I’m currently working on mindfulness in my counseling sessions.

Each time I hear about the 3 states of mind (emotion mind, reason mind and wise mind), I think about the two wolves. I think of the emotion mind as the black wolf, the reason mind as the white and the wise as a mix of the two. To me, the answer is not the “which one you feed”, but more of feeding them both and using that to your advantage.

Each time I try to ignore my “black wolf”, that wolf gets worse. It also feels a bit like walking on eggshells trying not to wake it, and like I’m lying to myself and everyone else. But the more I feed, or pay attention to both wolves, the better I feel and the less I stay in that dark, cloud-covered, reaper-stalking, nightmarish stage of my depression. The more I recognize that my depression won’t really ever go away, the better I start to feel about it.

So for me, it’s not about feeding one to starve the other, but more of keeping both fed and recognized. Yes, there is a lot of wisdom in that little tale, but there’s more for me in what’s not being said. Don’t just feed one and hope the other goes away, but feed both. Acknowledge both. In doing that, you’ll find the wise mind of mindfulness — and in life.