Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman [Paperback]

This book offers a life-enhancing way to make contact with our deep feminine instincts: the wild woman within --Irish Times

All women should read this. In fact, mothers should pass the knowledge contained in these pages down to their daughters as they turn 16. It's insightful and inspirational and gets you back in touch with your authentic self

A wonderful book...for anybody who cares about their relationships and their lives

This bestseller now availabe from Rider B format paperback, to coincide with the celebration of Rider`s 90th birthday.

Women Who Run With The Wolves isn`t just another book. It is a gift of profound insight, wisdom and love. An oracle from one who knows. ` Alice Walker

The `wild woman' is the wise and ageless presence in the feminine psyche that gives women their creativity, energy and power. For centuries, the `wild woman` has been repressed by a male-orientated value system which trivializes women`s emotions. The author uses a combination of time-honoured stories and contemporary casework to explain that the `wild woman` in us all innately healthy, passionate and wise. Passionately written and compelling in its arguements, Women Who Run With The Wolves will give contemporary readers a new sense of direction, a self-confidence and purpose in their lives.

(19980421)

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., is an award-winning poet, senior Jungian psychoanalyst, and a cantadora (keeper of the old stories of the Latina tradition). She has been in private practice for twenty-eight years and is former executive director of the C.G. Jung Centre for Research and Education in the United States. Dr Estes founded and directs la Sociedad de Guadalupe, a human rights educational organisation that broadcasts, via audio, throughout the world. (19980421) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement, sadness, questions, longings and understandings that spontaneously bring the archetype, in this case Wild Woman, back to the surface.

Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life. Stories enable us to understand the need for and the ways to raise a submerged archetype. The stories on the following pages are the ones, out of hundreds that I've worked with and pored over for decades, that I believe most clearly express the bounty of the Wild Woman archetype.

Sometimes various cultural overlays disarray the bones of stories. For instance, in the case of the brothers Grimm (among other fairytale collectors of the past few centuries), there is strong suspicion that the informants (storytellers) of that time sometimes `purified' their stories for the religious brothers' sakes. Over the course of time, old pagan symbols were overlaid with Christian ones, so that an old healer in a tale became an evil witch, a spirit became an angel, an initiation veil or caul became a handkerchief, or a child named Beautiful (the customary name for a child born during the Solstice festival) was renamed Schmerzenreich, Sorrowful. Sexual elements were omitted. Helping creatures and animals were often changed into
demons and bogeys.

This is how many women's teaching tales about sex, love, money, marriage, birthing, death and transformation were lost. It is how fairy tales and myths that explicate ancient women's mysteries have been covered over too. Most old collections of fairy tales and mythos existent today have been scoured clean of the scatological, the sexual, the perverse (as in warnings against), the pre-Christian, the feminine, the Goddesses, the initiatory, the medicines for various psychological malaises, and the directions for spiritual raptures.

But they are not lost forever. I was given as a child many of what I know to be unvarnished and uncorrupted themes of the stories of eld, many of which I bring to this work. But even story fragments, as they exist today, can foreshadow the shape of the entire story. I've poked about in what I playfully call fairy-tale forensics and paleomythology, even though, at its heart, reconstruction is a long, intricate, and contemplative endeavour. When such would be effective, I use various forms of exegesis, comparing leitmotifs, taking anthropological and historical inferences into account, and forms both new and old. This method, in part, reconstructs from ancient archetypal patternings learning through my years of training in analytical and archetypal psychology, which preserve and study all the motifs and plots in fairy tales, legends, and mythos in order to apprehend the instinctual lives on humans. I gain an assist from templates that lie in the imaginal worlds, the collective images of the unconscious, and those drawn up through dreams and non-ordinary states of consciousness. A final polish might be gained by comparing the story matrices with archaeological evidence
from the ancient cultures themselves, such as ritual pottery, masks, and "gurines.
Simply put, in fairy-tale locution, I spend much time raking the ashes with my nose.

I have been studying archetypal patterns for some twenty-five years, and myths, fairy tales, and folklore from my familial cultures for twice as long. I have learnt a vast body of knowledge about the bones of stories, and know when and where the bones are missing in a story. Through the centuries, various conquests of nations by other nations, and both peaceful and forced religious conversions, have covered over or altered the original core of the old stories.

But there is good news. For all the structural tumble-down in existing versions of tales, there is a strong pattern that still shines forth. From the form and shape of the pieces and parts, it can be determined with good accuracy what has been lost from the story and those missing pieces can be redrawn accurately - often revealing amazing understructures which begin to heal women's sadness that so much of the old mysteries has been destroyed. It is not quite so. They have not been destroyed. All one might need, all that we might ever need, is still whispering from the bones of story. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.