Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Generally, a thing cannot freeze if it is moving. So move. Keep moving.

and if she cannot find the culture that encourages her, then she usually decides to construct it herself. And that is good, for if she builds it, others who have been looking for a long time will mysteriously arrive one day enthusiastically proclaiming that they have been looking for this all along.

let us just say that here the duckling has the same experience that thousands of exiled women have—that of a basic incompatibility with dissimilar persons, which is no one’s fault, even though most women are too obliging and take it on as though it is their fault personally.

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When this happens, we see women who are ready to apologize for taking up space. We see women who are afraid to just say “No, thank you,” and leave. We see women who listen to someone telling them they are wrongheaded over and over again without understanding that cats don’t swim and hens don’t dive under water.

Women will draw doors where there are none, and open them and pass through into new ways and new lives. Because the wild nature persists and prevails, women persist and prevail.

thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter, spring always comes.

Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away

When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective, and we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings?

act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty.

A long time must pass before such a soul will trust enough to return, but it can be accomplished. The retrieval requires several ingredients: naked honesty, stamina, tenderness, sweetness, ventilation of rage, and humor.

Being able to say that one is a survivor is an accomplishment. For many, the power is in the name itself.

Sometimes people are afraid to continue beyond survivor status, for it is just that—a status, a distinguishing mark, a “damn-straight, bet your buttons, better believe it” accomplishment.

Instead of making survivorship the centerpiece of one’s life, it is better to use it as one of many badges, but not the only one.

Once the threat is past, there is a potential trap in calling ourselves by names taken on during the most terrible time of our lives. It creates a mind-set that is potentially limiting. It is not good to base the soul identity solely on the feats and losses and victories of the bad times. While survivorship can make a woman tough as beef jerky, at some point, allying with it exclusively begins to inhibit new development.

Ofrendas are tributes, memorials, and expressions of deepest regard for the loved ones no longer on this earth. I find it helps many women to make an ofrenda to the child they once were, rather like a testament to the heroic child.

It is the admiring of it, rather than the being of it, that releases the person.

They live and play according to what and who and how they are. They do not try to be what they are not.

To support only one kind of beauty is to be somehow unobservant of nature. There cannot be only one kind of songbird, only one kind of pine tree, only one kind of wolf. There cannot be one kind of baby, one kind of man, or one kind of woman. There cannot be one kind of breast, one kind of waist, one kind of skin.

It pressures her to use up her energy worrying about how much food she consumes or the readings on the scale and tape measure.

The “hungry” one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted,8 and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping. If there really is a woman “screaming to get out” she is screaming for cessation of the disrespectful projections of others onto her body, her face, her age.

Yet, suffice it to say that various practitioners of psychology continue to hand down this bias against the natural body, encouraging women to turn their attentions to a constant monitoring of body, thereby robbing them of deeper and finer relationships with their given form.

Angst about the body robs a woman in some large share of her creative life and her attention to other things.

Although a woman may not be able to stop the dissection of culture and lands overnight, she can stop doing so to her own body.

A woman cannot make the culture more aware by saying “Change.” But she can change her own attitude toward herself, thereby causing devaluing projections to glance off. She does this by taking back her body. By not forsaking the joy of her natural body, by not purchasing the popular illusion that happiness is only bestowed on those of a certain configuration or age, by not waiting or holding back to do anything, and by taking back her real life, and living it full bore, all stops out.

The body is no dumb thing from which we struggle to free ourselves. In proper perspective, it is a rocket ship, a series of atomic cloverleafs, a tangle of neurological umbilici to other worlds and experiences.

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose it to protect, contain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling—that is the supreme psychic nourishment.

It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit.

I saw what I had been taught to ignore, the power of a woman’s body when it is animated from the inside.

The cultural power of the body is its beauty, but power in the body is rare, for most have chased it away with

their torture of or embarrassment by the flesh.

It is in this light that the wildish woman can inquire into the numinosity of her own body and understand it not as a dumbbell that we are sentenced to carry for life, not as a beast of burden, pampered or otherwise, who carries us around for life, but a series of doors and dreams and poems through which we can learn and know all manner of things. In the wild psyche, body is understood as a being in its own rig...

Her back is the curve of the planet Earth with all its crops and foods and animals. The back of her neck carries the sunrise and the sunset. Her left thigh holds all the lodgepoles, her right thigh all the she-wolves of the world. Her belly holds all the babies that will ever be born.

Butterfly Maiden is the female fertilizing force. Carrying the pollen from one place to another, she cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes mind with nightdreams, just as archetypes fertilize the mundane world. She is the center. She brings the opposites together by taking a little from here and

putting it there. Transformation is no more complicated than that. This is what she teaches. This is how the butterfly doe...

The wilder woman will not be easily swayed by redevelopment schemes. For her, the questions are not how to form but how to feel.

A woman’s hips are outriggers for the body above and below; they are portals, they are a lush cushion, the handholds for love, a place for children to hide behind.

But the wild issue is, does this body feel, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in its own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters.

here is what i have ... poems big thighs lil tits & so much love

Without a firm participation with the wild nature, a woman starves and falls into an obsession of “feel betters,” “leave me alones” and “love me—please.” When she is starved, a woman will take any substitutes offered, including those that, like dead placebos, do absolutely nothing for her, as well as destructive and life-threatening ones that hideously waste her time and talents or expose her life to physical danger.

It is the kind of feeling a woman has when she finds she is pregnant and wants to be.

It is the kind of joy a woman feels when she has done something that she feels dogged about, that she feels intense about, something that took risk, something that made her stretch, best herself, and succeed—maybe gracefully, maybe not, but she did it, created the something, the someone, the art, the battle, the moment; her life.

There are two instances in which a wolf kills excessively. In both, the wolf is not well. A wolf may kill indiscriminately when it is ill with rabies or distemper. A wolf may kill excessively after a period of famine. The idea that famine can alter the behavior of creatures is quite a significant metaphor for the soul-starved woman. Nine times out of ten a woman with a spiritual/psychological problem that causes her to fall into traps and be badly hurt is a woman who is currently being starved or who has been critically soul-starved in the past.

Although we could say that the child in the tale has been swept into a new environment, one in which her roughness is smoothed down and her difficult life is removed, in reality her individuation ceases, her striving to develop stops.

In the view of analytical psychology, the repression of both negative and positive instincts, urges, and feelings into the unconscious causes them to inhabit a shadow realm.

When wolves are badgered, they don’t say, “Oh, no! Not again!” They bound, pounce, run, dive, scramble, play dead, go for the throat, whatever needs to be done.

When the instincts are injured, humans will “normalize” assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their Gods.

it’s either something amiss out there or something awry with us—it is more useful to use an and/and model. Here is the internal issue and here is the external issue.

If we could realize that the work is to keep doing the work, we would be much more fierce and much more peaceful.

We can go without most things for long periods of time, anything almost, but not our joy, not those handmade red shoes.

“He who cannot howl, will not find his pack.”