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New Ag Sociolog Women's Studie Nonfictio HTML: First published three years before the print edition of Women Who Run With the Wolves made publishing history, this original audio edition quickly became an underground bestseller. For its insights into the inner life of women, it established Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés as one of the most important voices of our time in the fields of Jungian psychology, myth, and women's mysteries. Drawing from her work as a psychoanalyst and cantadora ("keeper of the old stories"), Dr. Estés uses myths and folktales to illustrate how societies systematically strip away the feminine spirit. Through an exploration into the nature of the wild woman archetype, Dr. Estés helps listeners rediscover and free their own wild nature. The magical storytelling, myths, and commentary on Women Who Run With the Wolves continue to inspire a new level of self-knowledge among listeners young and old. Note: These CD-ROM-format enhanced CDs contain audio, music, and video clips and are meant to be played on your computer, using an Internet connection, speakers, and Real Player programs, which are free for download. Enhanced content is exclusive to CD vers… (more)
User reviews
The Wolf Rules for Life
1 Eat
2 Rest
3 Rove in between
4 Render loyalty
5 Love the children
6 Cavil in moonlight
7 Tune your ears
8 Attend to the bones
9 Make love
10 Howl often
The author is a Jungian analyst and also a storyteller. What this means for this book and its readers is that she tells the story of many myths -- just a few that I was familiar with, such as "Bluebeard" and "The Ugly Duckling" -- and re-interprets these stories in how it applies to the inner lives of women. The Wild Woman is her way of describing the soul of a woman.
While I question whether these old stories were actually meant as Pinkola Estes interprets them, I found them fascinating analogies of how women, from birth, are constantly told by others in words and/or actions that they should be "this way" or "not that way". This is a never-ending message to women that they cannot simply be themselves. It is not just men, but also other women, who can negatively influence the female soul. The author often uses the behavior of wolves to show how we can learn from them.
There's a lot to think about here and process, so much so that I feel that it deserves a re-read by me. It is not a quick read and it is the type of book that would need to be read at the right time. I would recommend it to others only if I thought they were ready for it -- if not, it would just be something that would be set aside because this book is far more than just re-telling of ancient myths from all over the world.
I have many folded-over pages in this book -- I am averse to folding pages as book-marking, but don't mind doing it (tiny corners!!) when I want to be able to refer back to something. Here are a few excerpts from those folded-over pages.
(note: for the first quote below, the [...] is the author's, and not an indication that I left out part of the quote. The "work" she refers to is helping with psychic development).
"The 'craft of making' is an important part of the work, I work to empower my clients by teaching them the age-old crafts of the hands...among them fetish and talisman making, these being anything from simple ribbon sticks to elaborate sculpture. Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us". (p. 15)
"At a very mundane level, it is important for a woman having dark man and Bluebeardian sorts of dreams to cleanse her life of as much negativity as she can. Sometimes it is necessary to limit or thin out certain relationships, for if a woman is outwardly surrounded by persons who are antagonistic to or careless about her deep life, her interior predator is fed by this and develops extra muscle within her psyche, and more aggression toward her." (p.71)
"Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world. When a woman, like the Little Match Girl, has no friends she also becomes frozen by anguish, and sometimes by anger as well. Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns. They may give comfort instead of informing the woman about her increasingly frozen circumstances. They comfort her -- but that is far different from nurture. Nurture moves you from one place to another. Nurture is like psychic Wheaties.
The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort. If you take the plant out of the closet and put it in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture." (p. 323)
About the content, I don't know. It's way too stereotypical feminist b-s for me, but it does resonate a little on a human level rather than a woman's. I'm not oppressed by a patriarchal society right now, really. But I do feel that all humans can relate to some of her ideas as "civilized" society certainly pressures us to contain our wild side, not just women. While most of it seems a bit dramatic, some ideas did strike a chord. However, I think the book has the ability to make people feel depressed, captive, oppressed, when they may have otherwise been happy.... I don't know.
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It is a book written by a women for other women. I am apprenticing to the feminine, and to myth, and thought it worth exploring. Also, many of the capacities
The book is full of so many surprises. Each chapter illustrates an element of healthy feminine development, illustrated by at least one myth. The book starts out by focusing on the attribute of wiliness, canniness, or as Mad Eye Moody might put it, "constant vigilance." This theme continues throughout; although Estés loves magic and mastery, she is very much against naïveté.
The second theme is about intuition. I was doing some writing last year about somatics, so this resonates with me. I've come around to the epistemology that we ultimately must rely on our intuition to determine what cosmologies to trust.
There are many other themes in the book: partnering, mothering, creativity, sexuality, agency.
The final myth in the book, and the longest, focuses on the myth of the Handless Maiden. I happen to have recently read Martin Shaw's "Smokehole," and he also focuses on this myth. I've also been reading other versions of it (the South African, the Italian, the Russian—both Shaw and Estés focus on the German).
This is a long book. At times, Estés' interpretations of the myths she shares can feel a little too exhaustive. She also rarely shares information about the provenance of the myths she tells (other than a few words on where she heard it, if that). That said, it is still a wonderful and lovely read—but out of the three people I've spoken with that have read some of it, none of them have read it all.
We need more books like this (feminine and mythic)!