What is it like to be a fish, swimming around in the day-to-day, looking for some food, when all of a sudden, there’s a big, delectable worm floating right there in your face? Maybe it seems like the food is chasing you around. An irresistible feast is dangling right there before your eyes. So, you take a bite, and now the worm is dragging you around by a hook, and things don’t end well for you.

We humans can fall for bait, too. Maybe we meet someone, and the feelings of attraction are so strong that we overlook certain important, not-so-good details about that person. Maybe we believe that this person will make everything in our lives better, so we ignore ourselves and chase after the illusion. The thing about bait is that once you get hooked, you are no longer in control- you are now being dragged around by something that isn’t real.

It takes some work to find out where in our lives we might fall for the hooks. Usually, a hook fits into a place in ourselves that feels powerless. It could be about money, and not knowing our way around it- and a get-rich-quick-scheme is the hook. It could be about feeling unattractive, and we may ignore all the details in a potential partner, except that this person makes us feel attractive. As in the case of the fish, there’s always a price to pay for getting hooked.

So, after we identify where we fall for the hooks, then we can strengthen those parts, so that “real food” becomes much more attractive to us than the bait on the hook. No matter what the weakness, the process is to learn to take the focus from the promise of the bait, and bring it into ourselves. We can learn a lot from just what it is that baits us, and that will point us to what it is we are needing to grow and strengthen in ourselves.