Have you heard the story about the fight between the Black Wolf and the White Wolf?
It was told by an Elder when talking to his grandson, Running Wolf, who admitted that he was consumed by revenge against another tribal man. This person had 'stolen' Running Wolf's girlfriend and taken her to what he'd thought was a secret place and made love in exactly the same place as she and Running Wolf had done.
The Elder listened to Running Wolf's story, his frustration and feeling consumed by his intent on revenge and feeling his future guilt over the whole situation. He paused after the tale as he thought about the best reply.
He described the idea that in Running Wolf's mind there were 2 wolves fighting, a black wolf and a white wolf. They were both ferocious and powerful and were ready to fight to their death, if needed, over exactly this kind of problem.
"Whichever one you feed." was the wise reply.
So How Do We Feed the White Wolf?
This is that situation of familiarity, of acceptance, which past experience has set as the elements of risk and consequence, habits and desires, the status quo or unpredictable outcomes from change. It is the state that requires the least amount of energy, just enough to hold fast the position reinforced by habits and automatic responses.
We have a host of these homeostatic positions.
- What we (and our gut bugs) 'prefer' to eat is dependent on our existing diet
- How much or how little exercise do we get daily? After exercising and creating a routine, we het a dopamine hit which makes us want to keep up this important practice. Try it and listen to your body.
- Will a decision to exercise, lose weight, to get healthy or a host of other choices, introduce unpredictable risk and the alternative is to maintain our 'status quo'?
- Will our 'Fat Point' change or will our efforts to lose weight be bound by our current level of comfort to which we will rebound no matter what we do.
- Will our intention to get healthy be thwarted by the homeostatic influence that we have survived up until this point with very few symptoms of ill-health that we know about or we accept them as a normal part of ageing.
The good news is that we can feed the While Wolf. We can engage our Einstein mind and program it with the outcomes we want. We can win over the Black Wolf and set his homeostatic rules at a new level of our choice as determined by our Most Wanted Future (MWF).
The first step is something you can try right away.
Think of how you are feeling before you start. Are you anxious or overwhelmed or feeling grumpy and un-resourced? Are you feeling your years or living in the past or too far into an uncertain future? Are you leaving life changes to chance or are you planning, strategizing, designing.?
Do you feel more creative, more in the present, more resourced and capable?
If we are very specific and detailed. If we anchor in smells, sounds or scenes that are inspiring or stimulating in positive ways. We can design our future selves.
It occurred to me, why would I need to wait 5 years?
It adds confusion and creates cognitive dissonance or conflicting versions of self. The Black Wolf then wins the fight to return us to our current homeostatic position of no change, no risk and nothing new.
We can design our 'new' self but imagine it as now, not in 5 years. Remember that we can change our paradigms of thinking. All of what we receive as sensory inputs are manipulated by our brain. There is no such thing as objective reality, only relative reality.
However, if we design our new selves using our conscious mind and really do it in detail then we set up new new reality for our sunconscious mind. We create cognitive dissonance which makes our subconscious mind look for ways to re-create a new homeostatus in the light of the specific and clear plans you have laid out.
- Want to age more slowly? Create a new image of your younger self and embrace LIFEâ„¢ for its phytonutrients.
- How would it feel to be free of aches and pains, stiffness in the joints? Get clear about this pain-free situation.
- Effective anti-inflammatories are essential to address all signs of ageing as metaflammation affects more than just our joints - Karuah Activated Turmericâ„¢ does this and even addresses cognitive health and brain support
- How about getting back your stamina and vitality, your strength and agility, your sexual drive and performance? All possible as part of your reset attitude and aptitude.
- Remember our dietary intake of too much calcium and too little magnesium is contributing to most of the diseases of nutrition and as our tissues age, they calcify. Support the White Wolf with Karuah ChancaPlusâ„¢ and its partner, Karuah Active Magnesiumâ„¢.
- How about renewing senescent (worn-out) cells? This means mitochondrial support which is where LIFE does it's magic and turns on our endogenous anti-oxidant systems within cells as well as providing tens fo thousands of secondary metabolic products via our gut microbiome.
- We need healthy mitochondria for more than the ATP (the energy currency they make). They also determine where the energy goes and manage the delivery as most needed biochemically. They make neurotransmitters and hormones for us and they control their release and actions too. They determine which cells are due for recycling via a process called autophagy and even recycle themselves when they need to move on (mitophagy). This is all leading edge science and we need to keep these organelles healthy.
- Remember that we start ageing well before we turn 40 and so we need to repair, protect and improve our body, mind, mitochondria and our biochemistry. The wild foods in the Holy Grail to Healthâ„¢ are ideal for these tasks and they take aim at the Diseases of Nutrition.
- And how about your brain as a target to rewind back to your 20s? Even in your 60s and 70s we can reset our new image of ourselves and feel and think as we did at 18 but with better judgement. We can't change our chronological age but we can engineer a biological age that is 1, 2, 3 or more decades younger.
- Clarity, focus, concentration, memory retention and recall, learning speed and accuracy, ideal neurological response and brain plasticity should all be on your list.
- We can even plan our financial development and growth and even set say, monthly goals towards a yearly target. I set monthly targets for my business and if I don't make it one month, I recalculate future months' targets upwards to account for the slow month.
- I use measurable targets wherever possible eg resting heart rate down 15% from my starting rate or body fat where I set a target percentage. I then leave it to my Einstein mind to implement the behaviours to get there. I have a Qardio-Base body monitor which gives me a wide range of body stats to check my progress daily.
- I also focus on zero soreness in joints, the number of days that I feel predominantly happy irrespective of events, workload or stresses. I record the number of things for which I am grateful and so on. We get numbers as a measure of improvement in the economy, inflation, income stats etc, so why not use them to set the steps along the way to our MWF? At least this data will not be as rubbery as the numbers the politicians give us in their fake news.
Our new self image should include all of the above plus any other conditions as they appear.