Free Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive by T. D. Jakes Page A

but also learning to harness the wilderness within.
    What is natural may not feel normal, because your experiences don’t match your inclinations. Just because something is natural doesn’t means it feels normal when you have never had an opportunity to explore the true essence of your instincts.
Cages and Stages
    Imagine how important it is that we wean the lion from the cycles of the cage and gradually reintroduce him to the primal sensation of freedom. That alluring gaze at freedom from a structured job or career may tantalize you with the notion of being your own boss. But I must warn you that the sensual notion of freedom can be a seductive trap if you don’t understand that you are stepping into a world that isn’t as carefree as it looks.
    New predators, new diets, and new abodes await you. You will have to learn to hunt your own prey and avoid being someone else’s. Though many of us aren’t happy in cages and feel drawn to the wild, we must never underestimate the fierceness of freedom and the danger of the new world of self-fulfillment.
    Instinctively successful individuals almost always have had to go through a metamorphosis in order to free themselves from their cagelike habits. And more important, they need time and training to adapt and to develop the instincts that are critical to survive inthe new environment. If the lion needs that adaption space to develop a more natural instinct, we, too, have to be prepared to be mentored and tutored even when we possess the instinct to increase.
    The unborn baby lies in a cage we call a womb. He has eyes but cannot use them, and a mouth that he has never eaten with. He has been innately equipped for a world he has not been exposed to. His innate instincts like sucking, seeing, walking, and sitting have never been utilized because no opportunity exists in his present safe and warm cocoon of development. He must be born and enter the world to discover the instincts imbued by his Creator.
    Cages and wombs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. It doesn’t have to be a dead-end job to be a cage. It can be renting as opposed to owning a home. For some it is the desperate clinging to singleness for fear of the heart-racing perils of intimate partnership. Many would rather sit at a table for one than risk the awkwardness of bolting into the uncertainty of coupling. In that new cycle of circumstances the cost of admission is the risk of rejection and abandonment. We all have cages of comfort that protect us but also isolate us from discovering not only what lies outside but also what lies within.
    The baby cannot grow and mature into a healthy child until he leaves the womb. He is finally birthed into something bigger, and it is only after the cord is cut that he discovers within himself unused instrumentsthat have only just become activated. I fully believe that many people never really leave the wombs of simple survival to the bigger world beyond. Now, you must understand that birthing is traumatic.
    Over and over we repeat the process. We go from the womb to the family, which is also a controlled environment that feeds and sustains us. By the time we adapt to our family, we are birthed into the world around us, and we have to activate instincts of survival or return to the cage of living at home again!
    Could it be that the social constructs of Mommy and Daddy only lead to the jungle of high school? The baby becomes the toddler becomes the child becomes the tween becomes the teenager. Each stage includes its own weaning into the next phase. Often the adolescent leaves the family bruised by the assault of rebellion as he tries to escape the identity of “Who am I to the family?” and into the wild of “Who am I to myself?”
    The rebellion so prevalent at that age is the flailing cry of an emerging adult struggling to go where his instincts demand but mortified at the same time by the wilderness of the second womb vacated. The diploma is awarded, the cord is cut, and