One evening 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 everyone of us.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, conceit, sorrow, hatred, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride, lust, 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 Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

Perhaps the thing that makes this work of consciousness so profound is that it has very real effects in one’s life, far beyond just interesting concepts. It’s one thing to mentally understand all these new energy ideas; it is quite another to experience them on a deep, heart-feeling-soul level.

During the recent France tour I had the audacity to tell Adamus that I was fulfilled, complete, in need of nothing, and so “now what?” It was true. When Tobias left in July I experienced an inner completion on a scale I didn’t imagine possible. However, life goes on and Adamus kindly told me that as soon as I declare something like that there will be aspects coming up to challenge me, to see if I’m really for real. In fact, he saw a challenge already on its way, and sure enough, it hit just a few days ago.

Now the thing about this journey is that we have to walk the talk, or we may as well stop talking. We either take full responsibility for our experiences or we still play the victim. So, even though it seemed like NONE of what happened by way of this challenge was my fault, I decided to dig in anyway to see why “I” had created this experience.

What ensued was me getting in touch with a very old, very strong and very dark aspect of myself. It was one I had discovered a couple years ago and wanted nothing to do with. She was horrible in every way I could imagine, and I rejected her completely. Of course this meant I also rejected me, no matter what mental contortions I went through trying to get around that. So, in the interest of finally getting through this issue once and for all, I gave her some space and let her in.

However, integration means that you also get to deal with the opposite of what you’re inviting in. So one evening I was spending lots of time breathing, feeling some huge emotions, and allowing this rejected part to get used to the idea of coming home, when suddenly a very righteous warrior aspect popped up. Her entire existence had been dedicated to keeping away the evilness of the other one. “How dare you let her back? She is completely evil; do you have any idea what she is capable of? How can you do this?” And of course the dark one shot back, “See? I knew it. You didn’t REALLY want me back, you don’t have the guts to deal with me.”

There it was, raging right in the middle of me – the battle of light and dark. So who wins? Which one will I feed, which one will I starve?

The truth is, a starving animal gets even more vicious and more determined to do anything it can to survive. And the same is true for any part of self that is rejected.

Because of who we are as Shaumbra, always on the “bleeding edge” of consciousness evolution, we’ve done it all. We’ve embodied the saintliest qualities and lived out the most heinous lifetimes, and all of these have left their mark inside. A lot of us want to live forever in love and light, having had enough of darkness and aghast at any shred of it left inside us. Others of us want nothing to do with airy-fairy goody-two-shoes stuff, and tend to bust the system at every opportunity, determined to never be taken in again.

But it’s all still a reaction to something we don’t want in our reality and reject within ourselves. To the extent that you starve the light or the dark, it will push back and distort your reality. It will bring in circumstances that seem caused by others because you can’t own it within yourself.

So as I sat there breathing, listening to and feeling the raging argument inside me, I remembered they were both just aspects; parts of me that had gotten stuck in their experiences of extreme polarity. I was at war with myself – but not really, because the real Me was the one observing. It was only a battle if I identified with one and rejected the other. But when I remembered I simply am that I am, and turned my attention toward loving and accepting ME in that moment, the battle became irrelevant. Like tired quarreling children, they could just put down their toy swords and come back home, pouting and cranky perhaps, but done fighting.

The result is that I feel something new inside, something I can’t define yet. I feel a lot of “definable” stuff too, for sure – sadness for the lifetimes lost to this battle, weariness for the energy it has taken to keep the struggle under control, mourning for parts of me that, in a way, no longer exist. I had gotten used to their presence, imbalanced though it was. Now there is a part of my life that needs to be completely rediscovered and recreated because so much of it was unconsciously defined by my resistance to a part of me.

I have a deeper understanding now of what they’ve been talking about with integrating light and dark. Oh, I was happy enough to “integrate my darkness” as long as it meant I was still a nice person. But when a “not nice” part jumps out and creates havoc, even through someone else, it becomes obvious I haven’t brought it home yet. When I’m no longer resisting “that which I am not” (which really doesn’t exist), then I am free to be ALL that I am, and choose in each moment how to express it. And the rejected parts no longer need to cause chaos (even through other people) in my Now.

In Rome, Kuthumi had this to say:

“When the light and dark join together within you, it’s no longer just the elements of light and dark, but the merging creates a whole New Energy and different consciousness, because it contains the wisdom of everything that you’ve done that was dark, and everything that you’ve done that was light. So it’s no longer the combination of light and dark; it takes a quantum leap.”

Those quantum leaps are scary and sometimes pretty painful, but they can really change your life. Happy leaping!