To get in touch with the liberating and the transforming “wolf”!

The book Women who Run with the Wolves talks about the innate primordial feminine instinct, that many have quite forgotten over the eons!

This book is indeed a wonderful motivational, that inspires us to reinterpret the experience of women through folk tales, through art, and through nature!

To get in touch with the liberating and the transforming “wolf” that’s encouraging us to grow and be free!

Women who Run with the Wolves is for people who want to understand each other, work on their identity and self-worth, and heal emotional wounds.

Wounds we sometimes inherit from our ancestors or patriarchal institutions themselves.

In this respect, this book is a road map to find all the “traps” that keep us from finding the way back home to our true selves and our instincts.

It moves us towards that wild woman, perceptive with a playful spirit and wonderful capacity for affection.

Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.

from the blurb to the book...

She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women.

But then, she is an endangered species.

In Women who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature.

Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

In fact, Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche.

Paying rich accolades to this lovely read, Maya Angelou has this to say: "I am grateful to Women who Run with the Wolves and to Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The work shows the reader how glorious it is to be daring, to be caring, and to be women. Everyone who can read should read this book."

Let’s now take a look at seven excerpts from the book, worth reflecting on…!

1. Be Yourself

“To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

2. Be Strong

“To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own luminosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.”

3. Getting away allows us to discover ourselves

“While exile is not a thing to desire for the fun of it, there is an unexpected gain from it; the gifts of exile are many. It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight, heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation and perspective that the ‘insider’ can never achieve.”

4. What happens when you don’t love yourself

“Our secret hunger for being loved is not beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is not beautiful. Our lack of loyalty and devotion is unloving, our state of separation from the soul is ugly, based on psychological warts, inadequacies, and childhood fancies.”

5. Authentic love

“Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back.”

6. Hit rock bottom

“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.”

7. Authentic growth

“If we live as we breathe, taking and releasing, we cannot make mistakes.”

It’s the cycle of life: take, learn, let go, accept, move forward. It’s natural and we should accept it and integrate it into our daily lives.

To conclude, these quotes from Women who Run with the Wolves are just a tiny sample of the deep well of ancestral knowledge that it offers us. It teaches us new and very valuable things to grow and get in touch with the wild women, that women really are!

With lovely inputs from Dr. Estes’s website!