Do you need an inspirational feminist book that will make you embrace your most wild nature? Read along, as we unfold the teachings of author and scholar Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Women Who Run with The Wolves: Myths and Stories Of The Wild Woman Archetype is a book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
Clarissa is a Native American/ Mexican Spanish, psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist. As a journalist, she covered many stories of human suffering and hope.
She was adopted into an immigrant and refugee family of majority Magyar and minority Danau Swabian tribal people and her biography tells us that her family could hardly read or write.
However illiterate they might have been, they were broadly wise and woke in terms of being in touch with nature, plants and animals. They made everything on their own from scratch, starting from shoes to songs.
This amazing tradition is filled with chants, stories, old mythos, ancient ways of healing our bodies and soul, as well as sacred dances – all of these reflect wonderfully in Women Who Run With The Wolves.
The book that was written and published in 1992, relates still to our days, as women still need to embrace their nature, along with sharing solidarity among one-another through life advices and rituals that are also present in this book.
A Wonderful Mixture
Women Who Run With The Wolves is a mixture of powerful narration, poetry, fairy tales, folk tales and stories.
All of them call out for the wildest nature of women, repeating just like a mantra that every women is a wild women holding a revolution within herself that has been repressed for so long from patriarchal values.
Clarissa points out how patriarchy managed for so long to suppress the passion and creativity of these wild women, minimising the importance of “emotional truth, instinctual self-confidence and intuitive wisdom”.
This is only a brief description of the deep horizons you can explore, if you manage to find this book and read it. Here are a few of the most powerful quotes that I doodled down and highlight through my reading.
Quotes To Live By
“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories… water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves.
“Women’s curiosity was given a negative connotation, whereas men were called investigative. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring.”
“There is no one a wildish woman loves better than a mate who can be her equal.”
“The best land to plant and grow something new again is rock bottom. In that sense, hitting rock bottom, although extremely painful, is also the ground to sow new life on. Stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.”
“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.”
“Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time.”
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