Wolves, Wild Women, and Awakening: A Personal and Archetypal Story

Over twenty years ago, and after many months of a friend prodding me, I walked into a book store and picked up a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. After being on a path of healing and awakening for several years, wolves had begun to organically appear in my life -- in photos and paintings on my walls, in my clothing and jewelry, in statues on my altar and elsewhere in my home. I did not know why. I was simply allowing to emerge what was in some mysterious way speaking to me. Then, as I held Women Who Run With the Wolves in my hands and read the first few pages, a light of awareness grew as I glimpsed a soulful and heartfelt remembrance of things long forgotten. I was allowing the teachings of this totem animal and a wild wisdom to inform me and awaken something deep within. 

The below is some of what I found in these first pages of what has been for me a great gift for my soul and my journey in this lifetime. May we all discover that which feeds our hearts, minds, souls. May we each root more and more deeply into our wild and true nature. May we share our stories of healing and awakening, our courage and caring, our passion and compassion for ourselves and for all of life. May remember what we have forgotten and be the fierce tenderness and peace our world yearns for. 

Blessings ~ Molly

Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.

Over time we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.

It is not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own wild nature fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous.

My life and work as a Jungian analyst and cantadora, storyteller, have taught me that women's flagging vitality can be restored by extensive "psychic-archeological" digs into the ruins of the female underworld. By these methods we are able to recover the ways of the natural instinctive psyche, and through its personification in the Wild Woman Archetype we are able to discern the ways and means of woman's deepest nature. The modern woman is a blur of activity. She is pressured to be all things to all people. The old knowing is long overdue.

The title of this book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, came from my study of wildlife biology, wolves in particular. The studies of the wolves, Canis lupus and Canis rufus are like the history of women, regarding both their spiritedness and their travails.

Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.

Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar....

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds. When women are with the Wild Woman, the fact of that relationship glows through them. This wild teacher, wild mother, wild mentor supports their inner and outer lives, no matter what.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés, excerpted from Women Who Run With the Wolves