One day an eagle egg fell into a chicken coop.

The chickens raised it as one of their own.

So the eagle learned to peck at the dirt.
Learned to stay close to the ground.
Learned to fear the sky.

One day it looked up and saw another eagle soaring overhead.

“What is that?” it asked.

“That’s an eagle,” the chickens said. “King of the birds. But we are chickens. We belong down here.”

And so the eagle lived and died believing it was something smaller than it was.

That story hit me hard recently because I think a lot of therapy — and honestly a lot of self-improvement — accidentally teaches people how to become better chickens.

People come to me wanting:

And those things matter.

But sometimes I wonder if we stop too early.

Because maybe the deeper issue is not that people are failing at modern life.

Maybe modern life is profoundly mismatched with the nervous system we inherited.

We were shaped for movement.
For tribe.
For nature.
For direct experience.
For building tangible things.
For singing, storytelling, ritual, challenge, touch, and shared purpose.

Instead many people live:

Then they blame themselves for being exhausted.

At some point we have to ask:
Are we healing people?
Or are we helping them adapt to environments making them sick?

I still believe in skill-building.
I still believe in discipline.
I still believe in learning to regulate attention and emotion.

But I also think some people don’t need to become better chickens.

They need permission to remember they were built for sky.

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