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It is useful to make sure that we understand how the word wild or Wild Woman is used by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Wild is not used in negative sense, meaning out of control, but “in original sense of living a natural life, one in which a creature has innate integrity and healthy boundaries.” Wild is defined as: Occurring in a natural state, not cultivated; Uninhabited or uncultivated region, not inhabited; Extravagant; fantastic.
Though we are born with our wildish nature, we women have been “civilized” into rigid roles and that has “muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.” We are repressed, captured, pushed down, forbidden, cut back, diluted, tortured, weakened, sanitized, unnatural, consumed by others.
Estes tells us: “Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman but she is an endangered species.”
“The Wild Woman,” says Estes, “is the female soul… the source of the feminine…all that is of instinct, of the worlds both seen and hidden… all the instincts and knowings needed for our lives.”
Dr. Estes contends that when we women lose touch with the instinctive soul, we live in a state where we are cut away from our basic source. The purpose of her book of stories is to help women find a way to live their instinctive lives.
She says:
“This is a book of women’s stories, held out as markers along the path. The stories were chosen to embolden you. They are for you to read, contemplate, and follow toward your own natural-won freedom, your caring for self, animals, earth, children sisters, lovers, and men. …the doors to the world of Wild Woman are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”
You might ask: What fruit, what flowers, what life nourishment—spiritual, emotional, physical, mental—for body and soul is there in these stories?
One answer is in this quotation from Estes. “If a story is seed, then we [the listeners] are its soil,” says Estes. The stories in the book are “seeds” and women or the listeners are the “soil.” Living things are born in and from the soil. Living things are nourished and nurtured there. Living things are protected and given strength and sustenance there. Hopefully, the fruit or flower that will bloom from the listener’s “soil” is a woman's inner life being set in motion which leads a woman back to her own real life as "knowing wildish women.”
Estes believes that “stories are medicine… with such power that we need only listen” to find remedy, restoration, repair of any lost psychic, soul or spirit drive. Such is her goal in this book of intriguing tales, myths, stories. I urge you to listen to these stories to find your way to healing paths. Listen to them and find your way to the Wild Woman within you.
Wild women live their instinctive lives...their true lives.
Do you?
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. Publisher-Ballantine Books, 1992.
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