Conscious Choice: Swallowing the Wolf

April 2003

Swallowing the Wolf

An intimate look at the spiritual struggles of a scientist steeped in a desire to be at the top of her career. The author found getting there meant NOT following the rules.

by Julia Mossbridge

For some, claiming one’s personal power comes naturally. For me, it took work — even before I knew what I was working on. When I was a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at University of California — San Francisco, I was among six other female graduate students invited to a professor’s house for a "women in science" tea. Our professor asked us each to explain what brought us to the academically rigorous program we had entered. As the other women spoke, I remembered mentally dividing them into two groups: the real scientists and the schoolgirls. The real scientists knew exactly what they were after, including the experiments they wanted to do and the papers they were planning to write. Self-motivated and ready to go about the work of discovery, these were inspiring women. The schoolgirls, on the other hand, appeared nervous, and although they were smart, creative, and enthusiastic, they hadn’t yet come to believe that they could make a profound scientific contribution.

I was last to speak. Sitting around that coffee table, watching and listening to the others, I was ready to include myself among the real scientists. But when it was my turn, I fingered the staple on my teabag, ripping the little end paper to shreds. I blurted out something smart, creative, enthusiastic. Probably some of it was even true. I looked at the professor to see if she had caught me being a schoolgirl. Dr LaVail smiled kindly and said, "You have yet to swallow the wolf."

In a vain attempt to please her, I nodded, agreeing. I thought I knew what she meant. I thought she was encouraging me to become more competitive, domineering. I needed to be more like a real scientist — and I knew what that meant too; we all did. I imagined that "swallowing the wolf" meant becoming like a wolf: the alpha male.

Ten years later I am only beginning to understand what "swallowing the wolf" really means. To me it means claiming your personal power by replacing the standards and guidance of the external world with your own internal standards and guidance. When you’ve "swallowed the wolf," you listen to yourself and stay true to that internal voice as you choose the steps on your path.

Of course we need to live by meeting our own standards, to follow our own guidance, to act authentically. This is old, possibly passé, news. At the same time, in our daily lives we see very few people who are bursting with the personal power that comes from using authentic experience to guide everyday actions. I believe what is needed is not just to understand what "swallowing the wolf" means, but to understand how we might do it. I now work as a cognitive neuroscientist, but it took me a long time to discover how to become a "real" authentically driven scientist. This is the story of how I swallowed my wolf.

Listening to Dreams

A few weeks after the coffee table lesson at Dr. LaVail’s house, I remember speaking with another new student about our future plans. I told her about my interest in whale and dolphin psychology and language and that I hoped to study underwater communication as a postdoctoral fellow. Ten minutes into our discussion, she looked at me with little compassion and said, "I guess you want to trash your career." Suddenly, my hopes of being the alpha wolf were dashed. Her negative comment haunted me, and I became more and more afraid that I would perpetually remain an idealistic schoolgirl with no real career aspirations.

I had a dream during that painful time. I dreamt I was in the kitchen of my childhood home, unpacking some groceries. A man approached me. At first I thought "This is a wise man — I need to listen to what he says." As I unpacked a melon from my shopping bag, he spoke urgently: "That’s the spirit cake. Don’t eat it!" I looked him in the eyes and couldn’t see his wisdom anymore. This was clearly not a cake, and certainly not dangerous. In fact, it looked good. So I took a bite. Somehow, eating the melon led me to see visions of myself in the future. These visions were lined up like beads on a necklace, connected to one another through the heart.

I often paid attention to my dreams, believing they might hold important messages, but when I told a friend about the interesting dream I’d had the night before, he interrupted me. "Why should dreams mean anything at all?" he said, his eyes flashing aggressively, "Why can’t they just be random neuronal firings?" I wasn’t prepared for his switch to the alpha-posturing mode. I quickly made up some defensible and scientifically sound argument about the usefulness of dreams. I held my ground, but as soon as he was out of sight, I quietly cried. Would I never become a wolf?

One half of me spent the next year trying to develop what I believed to be my "alpha qualities." I learned to harshly criticize my fellow graduate students for any minor logical slip, discouraged younger students from pursuing exciting (but difficult) projects, and continually re-asserted the superiority of my field. But that was only half of me. The other half learned to hide out, waiting patiently until I could discover a wiser side. This wise part knew the real meaning of "swallowing the wolf," and I knew if I listened, it would let me in on its secrets.

My next year at school took on an entirely different character. I founded a group for women graduate students in biochemistry and neuroscience, I gave controversial and engaging presentations about consciousness and the brain, and I wrote a master’s thesis about the relationship between pain-sensitive neurons and stressful states. I started to question everything about science, including the basic paradigms. I even started to question why I was drawn to science. I wondered what would happen if I were in a different environment; I craved more tolerance for the unknown, more kindness. At this point I still didn’t know what it meant to swallow the wolf, but I had discovered what it didn’t mean: It didn’t mean becoming someone I didn’t want to be. It was at this point that I chose to leave academic science and see what I would find if I left the most exacting external structure I had known.

Internal Guidance

After leaving graduate school I spent the next three years adamantly ignoring all external influences, especially advice from other people. Yet, at the same time, it was still difficult to trust and follow my own internal standards and guidance. I was closed-off, fear-struck. If I didn’t have science to structure my life, what did I have? Who was I? I tried on professions like underwear, a new one every few months. It was a measured and persistent attempt to find out who I was and who I wasn’t.

I became interested in computers, and took a job as a technical support person at a trading company. Then I was a business analyst at a phone company. When I quit that job I took on the role of a personal coach and conducted workshops on how to follow your heart. I also worked as a radio talk-show host. Then I went back to the corporate world and became a validation engineer/software testing project leader at a pharmaceutical company.

As I moved from job to job, I would do sort of a subtraction analysis, asking such questions as: "I’m leaving one job now and going to another...am I still myself? Now what about when I leave this job?" In a sense, allowing myself to experiment with alternative external structures revealed the underlying structure that was inside me all along.

In time, my doggedness paid off. It was easier to hear my own guidance, and each time I took a step that came from my authentic self, I felt more comfortable with myself. It was as if I had tuned into a positive internal feedback loop: the more my internal voice guided me the happier I became, and the happier I became, the more easily I could hear my voice.

I can see now that two fears initially kept me from using my internal standards and guidance in place of the readily available external ones. First, there was the basic fear that I didn’t really have any internal guidance, and that if I moved way from the structure of academic science, my life wouldn’t be successful. I didn’t get over this fear as much as I refused to let it shape my path.

The second fear was that even if I did draw on an internal source of standards and guidance, these standards would be too low and my guidance would mislead me. It took constant observation to bring me through this fear. Each time I allowed myself to ignore external standards and live up to my internal ones, I noticed the result. Instead of consistently failing, I consistently succeeded. I learned that when I listened to my internal voice I made sound decisions at the highest level of integrity.

During my third year away from science, I faced a major test. A course in bioacoustics was being offered at the local aquarium, and my "voice" clearly told me to take it. But how could I tell this wasn’t the old structure, calling me back to a place where I would feel unwelcome and undervalued? How could I be myself and do science? I enrolled, reasoning that it was only a class and I wasn’t returning to research science.

However, once in the class, my voice spoke again. Now it really challenged me. It told me that I wanted to analyze the teacher’s 20-year old underwater whale recordings. This was getting serious: I wouldn’t just be taking a class anymore. I’d be back in Science. I had an overwhelming fear of losing myself to science, but at the same time I knew what would happen if I didn’t listen to this voice: I’d lose myself. I had learned to trust this voice, and I could feel that it was right. So I spent evenings and weekends in the aquarium’s basement, looking at spectrograms of whale and seal calls. Strangely, not once did I feel like the alpha wolf. I felt like myself — having fun, being curious, learning from a creative and experienced mentor.

Finding the Real Wolf

Two years later, I attended an International Marine Mammalogy Conference in Monaco to present the findings from the leopard seal and killer whale calls that my mentor and I had analyzed. I knew we had discovered something very interesting, and I knew I had communicated our findings quite well. By this time I was married, and as my husband and I walked the beautiful hills on the Mediterranean coast, I intimated that I wanted to win an award for our work, even though I thought I couldn’t.

Adam looked and me and said, "I don’t understand. You are a scientist — this is what scientists do. Discover things, go to conferences, publish papers. You’re doing that. You’re already there. What’s the big deal?" Just as I was admitting he had a valid point, another scientist approached us. She handed me her card, telling me she enjoyed my work — respected me.

That moment I had my epiphany: I discovered that I had swallowed my wolf. I felt even more powerful, radiant, and confident than later that evening when I walked on stage to receive the award I secretly desired.

When I was a student, I felt that I was never enough. Never good enough, never right enough, smart enough, real enough. I was a fake. What it finally felt like to be a real scientist was radically different. As a real scientist I could enjoy the feeling of my work, my thoughts — mine. I realized the only way to become successful, even success as measured by external standards, is to follow your internal guidance. And the only way to really enjoy receiving external validation is to already have received your own, internally.

Swallowing the wolf is an initiation, and in a sense it never takes place. It is either yet to happen or has already happened, but there is not a single moment in which we turn things inside out and find this power working inside us. There are plenty of moments in which we do not feel that power, and if we work at it there can be plenty in which we do. As I look back, I can see that my professor, Dr LaVail, was wrong — it wasn’t that I had yet to swallow the wolf. It was that I had yet to realize it was inside me all along.

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a 34-year-old mother, cognitive neuroscientist, and author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library, www.unfolding.org).

"Swallowing the Wolf" was originally published in the Institute of Noetic Sciences Review, Issue 60.

Rules of the Wolf

* Swallowing the wolf means claiming your personal power by following your own guidance and standards, not those of the external world.

* Two fears keep us from claiming this power: fear that we have no internal guidance or standards, and fear that we have them but they will mislead us.

* Noticing the impact of acting authentically can help lessen these fears.

* At the point you realize that you use your internal guides more often than external ones, you have swallowed your wolf.

* Ignore these rules and discover your own.

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