5 Life Lessons Learned — From Cats

It is possible to reach mindfulness by simply observing the greatest creatures on Earth, cats.

A recurring meta-theme of the human species is that every other species aside from us effortlessly offers us lessons in the psyche.

Carl Jung saw part of psyche as a kind of ‘balancer’, libra-esque forces known as the Anima and the Animus: an inner life, based on instincts-as-senses — a type of intelligence in and of itself, he believed, derived from a genetic collective subconscious. Nonetheless, Jun still grappled and struggled with the idea of gender, and ends up circling inside archaic binary ideas of gender within his Archetypes and polytheistic tropes.

Obviously, cats don’t have these sorts of simpleton problems.

Instead, it seemed more efficient to hang out with some housecats instead of go wild in trying to unravel the Archetypes / lose myself inside Jung’s multiverse. Cat’s inner lives seems as mysterious and equal as any.

These days, we seem to have lost an understanding of what an instinct truly is — I would venture a pledge that if you ask someone what their human instinct is, the closest definition would be by analogy. They might say, for example, that an instinct is a gut feeling — which people often speak of…