There’s an old story about a man who found an eagle’s egg lying on the forest floor. He picked it up, carried it home, and placed it among the eggs of a brooding hen in his chicken coop.
In time, the egg hatched, and the young eaglet was raised among the chickens. He scratched at the dirt for worms, clucked and pecked as he was taught, and fluttered awkwardly from one low perch to another, never daring to soar. He never questioned his life—he had been raised as a chicken, and so a chicken he believed himself to be.
One day, while out in the yard with his chicken family, he looked up and saw a magnificent sight: a great eagle soaring high above, gliding effortlessly on the wind. He was awestruck.
“Oh, how wonderful!” he exclaimed. “What is that?”
His chicken-mother looked up and said, “That is an eagle. But we are chickens. Eagles are different from us. We don’t fly; we belong here on the ground.”
And so, believing himself to be a chicken, the eagle lived and died without ever spreading his wings.
What Keeps Us Grounded?
This story, told in various traditions, speaks to the reality of many of our lives. We accept the limitations placed upon us—by upbringing, by society, by self-doubt—and never question whether we are something more. We move through life constrained by beliefs that keep us small, believing we belong on the ground, even when everything about us was made for the sky.
We limit ourselves through:
• Conditioned Beliefs: The voices that tell us, “This is who you are,” shaping our identity before we even have the chance to explore it for ourselves.
• Fear of the Unknown: Staying in the familiar, even when it confines us, because the unknown feels too vast, too uncertain.
• Comparison and Conformity: Looking around and adjusting ourselves to fit in, rather than looking within to see what we truly are.
• Lack of Awareness: Never pausing to examine ourselves, never looking into the “mirror” of deep self-inquiry to ask: Who am I really?
Like the eagle raised among chickens, we often don’t even realize that the life we are living may not be our true nature. And yet, just as the eagle had wings, the potential to soar has always been within us. The question is: How do we wake up to it?
Discovering the Sky
The journey from limitation to liberation is not about acquiring something new, but about remembering—remembering what we have always been.
Two wings are essential for this:
1. Loving-kindness (Metta): A deep, unconditional acceptance of yourself and others, dissolving the self-judgment that keeps you small.
2. Wisdom (Prajna): Seeing clearly through the illusions that bind you, recognizing that you are not the sum of your conditioning, but something far greater.
These two wings must work together. Wisdom without love can become detached and cold; love without wisdom can remain naive and ungrounded. But together, they create the perfect conditions for flight.
The Mirror That Reflects Your True Nature
For the eagle, the truth was always visible—it was in every reflection, in every puddle of water he might have gazed into. But if he never looked, or never believed what he saw, he would remain trapped in his mistaken identity.
Similarly, we need ways to see ourselves beyond our limited self-image. Meditation is such a mirror. So is deep self-inquiry, community, and spiritual practice. When we sit in stillness, when we step outside our habitual thinking, we can glimpse the vastness of our true being.
And once we glimpse it, a question arises: What if I could spread my wings?
An Invitation to Fly
My courses and retreats are an invitation to step into this discovery—to turn inward and see, to open and expand, to remember and reclaim what has always been yours. In these spaces, you are not given new beliefs, but the tools to shed old ones. You are not taught to become something different, but to become what you already are.
You are not a chicken. You never were.
So the real question is:
Are you ready to fly?