7 phrases from the book Women Who Run with the Wolves

Seven extracts of wisdom that you can find in this book by Clarissa Pinkola.

The phrases from the book The women who run with the wolves They bring us the keys to that primordial feminine instinct that many fear forgotten or relegated. We are facing a fabulous essay that invites us to reinterpret the experience of women through popular stories, art and nature to make contact with that transforming “she-wolf” that encourages us to mature, to be free.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian analyst, doctor in ethnoclinical psychology and author of this book, took more than twenty years to shape her best-known creature. We are facing a vast, dense and fascinating essay. Its pages are nourished with wonderful knowledge where the oral tradition of stories is combined with a very specific type of psychology. A symbolic, pedagogical one that seeks to promote female personal growth.

It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the phrases in the book The women who run with the wolves be an authentic bible for those people interested in getting to know each other, in working on their identity, their values… As the author explains to us, women are conditioned by infinite patriarchal schemes. Because of predators that have generated emotional wounds in us that we sometimes even inherit from our ancestors.

This work is a true route map to find all those more or less known “traps.” The same ones that prevent us from finding the way back home, the return to our essences, our instincts… Towards that wild woman connected to perception, to her playful spirit and to her wonderful capacity for affection…

Phrases from the book Women Who Run with the Wolves

The phrases from the book The women who run with the wolves They remind us of several ideas. The first, that despite all our apparent sophistication, we are still nature, wild creatures. We are those women who, in some way, daily yearn to recover that ancestral freedom to feel vital, to find their position in the world.

The second aspect that we cannot leave aside is that, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés explains to us, Within every woman lives a powerful force. In our most intimate being resides a whirlwind of good instincts, creativity, passion and timeless knowledge that, at times, society itself has made us forget in its attempt to “tame” us. It is undoubtedly a deep reflection to take into account. This idea appears repeatedly in many of those phrases from the book “the women who run with the wolves.”

1. Be yourself

“Being ourselves causes us to end up exiled by many others. However, complying with what others want causes us to exile ourselves from ourselves.”

This phrase is a principle of personal growth and undeniable self-realization. The courage to be yourself in any scenario, in any context and regardless of who we are in front of, will allow us to safeguard our own identity.. In this way, we will return once again to our essences, to that wild woman who flees from domestication, from traps, from the fences that try to veto her freedom.

2. Be strong

“Being strong does not mean exercising muscles or bending. It means encountering one’s luminous self without running away, actively living with wild nature in one’s own way. It implies being able to learn, being able to sustain what we know. It means to sustain and live.”

This is one of the most valuable phrases from the book “women who run with the wolves.” Let’s take an example, To this day the RAE continues to define women as “the weaker sex”. Weakness and fragility are the adjectives that have always accompanied the female figure. Now, our culture, still terribly immature, does not understand what the true meaning of strength is.

Strong is not the one who can lift the most weight with his arms, the one who supports the most kilos on his back or the one who resists the most in a race. Strong is the one who faces, the one who does not flee, the one who shows his identity without fear, does not give up and is capable of living with joy and courage.

3. Moving away allows us to meet again

“Although exile is not something to be desired for fun, there is an unexpected gain in it: the gifts of exile are many. It beats out weakness, makes whining disappear, enables acute internal perception, increases intuition, grants the power of penetrating observation…”

Exile, also understood as the act of leaving behind what is known to us to face one’s own loneliness, uncertainty and even the strange, also enables us in new capacities. Likewise, this act implies above all being able to let go of what is daily to us. It involves breaking with old schemes, with the conditioning of our education to work on our identity in an authentic way.

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Exile is putting distance from our imprisoned and chained self to allow the wild woman to emerge. This is undoubtedly an exceptional idea contained in one of the sentences of the book The women who run with the wolves.

4. The effects of not loving yourself

“Our secret hunger to be loved is not beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is not beautiful. Our lack of loyalty and devotion is unloving, our state of soul separation is ugly, they are psychological warts, insufficiencies and infantile fantasies.”

In many of these phrases from the book The women who run with the wolves, seeks to compare female behavior with that of wolves. Thus, there is a fact that remains in constant evidence is the following: Today’s woman has separated herself from her wild version. In other words: we have silenced that instinctive essence where the wolf knows well who he is, recognizes himself and enjoys feeling strong, free and valuable.

On the other hand, we cannot leave aside one aspect. The effects of not loving ourselves are devastating. The act of living facing that exterior where trying to adjust to a model of a woman that is always artificial, homogeneous and subordinate to others, leads us to unhappiness. We must therefore observe nature as our predecessors did. We must be able to rediscover our value, our importance and that energy that nourishes us and makes us strong.

5. Authentic love

“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 phase. Passion dies and is brought back.”

Love is the only force that is never extinguished or extinguished forever. It is a transformative entity that extends, that allows us to mature, that dies and is reborn. Few forces can be so transformative. Let’s think about it: nothing is more important than cultivating self-love, we know that. However, later we learn to give the best of ourselves to others. We love to form a relationship.

In addition, love is also that force that nourishes during upbringing. We transform ourselves at each stage and in turn, we also transform others. We can go from passion, to intimacy, later to the most mature commitment, where sometimes, after a breakup, a renewed and more intense love emerges…

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6. Hit rock bottom

“The best soil to plant and grow something new again is at the bottom. In that sense, hitting rock bottom, although extremely painful, is also the planting ground.”

People have a terrible fear of hitting rock bottom. Could there be anything worse? It is reaching the limit of our strength, it is losing everything, even hope. However, what more can we lose when we have lost everything? At that moment, something new emerges, something magical even. We take off our skins, our artifices and dead weights to ascend, to grow much stronger… It is an instant where the wild woman can emerge in all her essence.

This is without a doubt one of the phrases in the book The women who run with the wolves more wonderful.

7. True growth

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

This phrase symbolizes neither more nor less than the cycle of life: take, learn, let go, accept, move forward… That path is the one we should take, something simple and in line with the flow of nature that we should all integrate into our daily lives.

On the other hand, it is worth remembering one aspect. Our existence is cyclical. Knowing how to adapt to changes is to survive, but we must do it with balance, flowing, without resistance.

To conclude, these phrases from the book The women who run with the wolves are a very small sample of that dense legacy of knowledge, reflections, stories and ancestral knowledge that we always want to return towhich always teaches us new and valuable things with which to continue growing, meeting our wild woman…

“The wolf, the old one, the One Who Knows, is within us. She blossoms in the deepest psyche of women’s souls, the ancient and vital Wild Woman. She describes her home as that place in time where the spirit of women and the spirit of wolves make contact. It is the point where the I and the You kiss, the place where women run with the wolves (…)”.

-Clarissa Pinkola-