I’d like to share this story with you. I first heard this story during a Yoga class and it has made a lasting impression on me, helping me through some of life’s hurdles.

The story is about a deer who lives in the forest. One day it catches a beautiful scent on the wind. It becomes obsessed with this scent, mesmerised and enchanted by this captivating aroma. The deer starts to become restless for it feels it cannot go on unless it finds where this perfume is coming from. It starts chasing after it, searching and searching. No matter where it goes, or how hard it looks, it can never seem to get any closer to the intoxicating scent. At the end of each day it collapses with exhaustion, until the morning when it awakens and catches the scent once more, beginning its frantic search again.
It eventually becomes crazy, getting more and more frustrated, feeling more and more depressed with each disappointing, unsuccessful day. As time goes by it becomes weary, and even though its search continues with increasing determination of mind, his body becomes weaker and weaker. Then, one day, it collapses with exhaustion – its mind feeling incomplete as the deer never finds the source of this perfume, the scent it has been so desparately searching for its life through.

What the deer didn’t realise is the very perfume that had driven it crazy, and sent it chasing all over the forest, was actually the musk that it produced from its own body.

The Moral of the story

We are all very much like the deer, ever searching, never seeming to get closer to what we consider is true happiness. We may think sometimes that we are close, we may even think we’ve found it for a moment, but it doesn’t last.

There is a feeling inside us that there is more to life, and if we keep changing and searching we will find what it is we so desparately need.

We look further and further, widening our search, which in fact takes us further and further from where it is.
If we look inside ourselves, believe in who we are, respect the person that is you we will realise that what we are looking for has been here all the time. We are everything we ever wanted to be, everything we could possibly want and need can be found if you look in the right place.

We can feel empty, worthless and disappointed by looking in the wrong direction, and finding nothing.
As hard as it is to believe, this is the Greatest Truth you will ever hear.

by Danielle Bryant BSYA
www.holisticdani.co.uk