Leading with the Eyes or the Heart

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Isn't it lovely when you feel something deep and hard to explain, and then pick up a book only to find the author has already captured that very thing and put it on paper? 

I love this excerpt from Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Everyday we have so many choices. Will we eat this or that...work on that or this? If life is a smorgasbord, are you choosing with your eyes or with your heart? 

"One of the most important discriminations we can make is the difference between the things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls. 

This is how it works: imagine a smorgasbord laid out with whipped cream and salmon and bagels and roast beef, and fruit salad, and green enchiladas and rice and curry and yogurt and many, many things for table after table after table. Imagine that you survey it all and that you see certain things that appeal to you. You remark to yourself, "Oh! I would really like to have one of those, and one of that, and some of this other thing."

Some women and men make all their life decisions in this way. There is around and about us a constant beckoning world, one which insinuates itself into our lives, arousing and creating appetite where there was little or none before. In this sort of choice, we choose a thing because it just happened to be beneath our noses at that moment in time. It is not necessarily what we want, but it is interesting, and the longer we gaze at it, the more compelling it becomes. 

When we are connected to the instinctual self, to the soul of the feminine which is natural and wild, then instead of looking over whatever happens to be on display, we say to ourselves, "What am I hungry for?" Without looking at anything outwardly, we venture inward, and ask, "What do I long for? What do I wish for now?"

Is that on the smorgasbord? Maybe yes and maybe no. In most cases, probably not. We will have to quest for it a little bit--sometimes for a considerable time. But in the end we shall find it, and be glad we took soundings about our deeper longings."  

How might we reflect on what we're hungry for, before our eyes catch a glimpse of the table? 

How might we shift our days to look inward first, before we let anyone pull us out?