A story of awakening the Soul

The specific relevant content for this request, if necessary, delimited with characters: Baby Elephant Personality Syndrome can remind us how we need to contemplatively re-examine our beliefs to unshackle the mind’s tendency towards keeping us trapped in our need for certainty.

It’s a story which reminds me of the story of something that we all have in a way. So if we’re looking at our personality, we can look at it like this. To understand it, there’s a baby elephant and its mom living in a village in India. The baby elephant is happy with the mom. They do their work, moving from town to town, lifting heavy materials. And one day, the baby elephant gets mature enough and the handler decides to separate him from his mom
for the first time. So he ties a metal chain around his leg, and on his ankle is a metal iron clasp tied to a wooden stake in the ground.

He’s nervous, he feels the separation, and wants, of course, to get back to Mom, which is not possible because of this chain. So he fights and kicks and screams, and of course, rubs the
wound on his ankle raw from this metal clasp. And after much kicking and screaming eventually he surrenders.

Eventually, he lets go. He understands that the iron chain is stronger than he is, so he lets go, and of course, he’s reunited with his mother, and they continue moving from town to town,
working on lifting these heavy materials.

What we realize from the story of the Baby Elephant Personality Syndrome is that it holds him down because when he was young, he fought and lost against his captor. His wound was rubbed raw, it bled, it was a wound that he will never forget. To not fight, the wound was painful, the scars remained to remind him of it. And it was really a life lesson for this elephant. But now, weighing hundreds of kilograms more as an adult, he is still not fighting against the chain. He could easily snap the chain, lift the wooden stake, and move along and be free, but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t because he’s trapped in a mindset that he had when he was a baby elephant, and he couldn’t break free. And this is how they keep the elephants captive. And so it is with us, with this baby elephant syndrome. When we’re young, we develop necessary skills to survive. We develop our need to control. We develop a victim position and play that position well. It protects us, and we need it when we can’t protect ourselves. We develop Baby Elephant Personality Syndrome traits like codependence and other traits of personality, but eventually these personality traits come back and haunt us.

They haunt us because we are not meant to be caged; we’re not meant to be limited; we’re meant to be unlimited, free, creative, and boundless. So at some point, and this is where the paradigm shift happens, you need to let go of the baby elephant mentality. When the time is right, suffering will come with depression, anxiety, feelings of burnout, stress, uneasiness, and these are a call to take massive, massive action because there is something new, something far, far grander and bigger waiting for you—your authentic self; we call it your sacred self. And this is how people become addicted, depressed, and stressed; they develop personality disorders that make them caged. Then, one day, they realize through a story like the baby elephant syndrome that they need to be free, and in order to do so, you need to drop the story, you need to drop the narrative, which brings us to the question: who are you really without your personality?