Last year, an awesome woman recommended a book to me that would forever change the way that I looked at myself and at the feminine spirit. I remember putting off picking it up – until everywhere I turned, this book kept popping up. It was a sign and I had to listen. As soon as I read the first few lines, I took a deep dive into the pages of “Women Who Run with the Wolves” by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes and still I have never looked back. The archetype of the wild woman that is illustrated through the stories and tales in this book has shaped me and made me a better me. As my 27th birthday is coming up at the end of this month, I want to celebrate the wild women. The women who are instinctual by nature and unafraid to let life to flow for her. The wild woman is my archetype and she is who I remind myself I am whenever I separate from my own wild nature.
“The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish one’s territory , to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s own behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.” – Singing Over the Bones, Page 10
Women Who Run With the Wolves is a seminal work to understanding women as we naturally are. It reminds us to reprogram ourselves from the conditioning environments we experience through familial and societal upbringings. You know, the ones that have told women in the past that we have to be this way or that way – leaving little room for our true selves to bloom. Instead, through the ideas in WWRWTW, we are invited to break free from the domestication of the feminine spirit. When we listen to the intuition and the sensing, we are encouraging the creative life that lives in us to heal us. To lift from our shoulders all things we are not and urging us to step into everything we are.
“Nature does not ask permission. Blossom and birth whenever you feel like.” – Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I created this post and these self portraits as a labor of love – out of passion and personal pain and desire to uplift myself and any other wild women I can. A visual reminder to myself to remain firm in my wild nature. There are times when I feel stuck, captive, motionless. But those are the times that I have to surrender and look to myself to find that we are not powerless. We are wild. We are free. When we can reach that level of profound awareness, the only thing stopping us is us.
“Go. Go right now, and as soon, and as often as you can. Keep going.” – Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes