Women who Run with the Wolves Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman
Reviews
I was frustrated with her writing style but did not want this book to end.
A book every single woman should read at least twice in their lives.
Generally uplifting and served its purpose, yet -1 star for general TERF-iness/the general biological essentialism and -1 star for being weird about the birth stuff. I don't think giving birth is an experience necessary for all women to be considered true women.
That was a long read... but I enjoyed every bit of it ! It felt like a long therapy session ! Women Who Run With the Wolves is a guide to introspection. I wouldn't refer to it as exclusively a women's read, but I guess it will profit anyone who opens it. The book is about healing from any dogmas that were imposed on women, recovering the wildest nature of women, and igniting their creative power in order to live in harmony with Nature through the study of universal archetypes in folk stories or dreams from C.G Jung perspective... Healing through stories resonated deeply with me, since I come from a storytellers family as well. "For us, story is a medicine which strengthens ... the individual and the community." Although I have never tried to see it through a Jungian grid, but the archetypes present in our stories and hers are almost universal: I tried analysing "Hina" in the same fashion that "Vasalisa" was depicted... The analogy between Wolves and Wild Women was ultimately staggering: both sharing "The instinctual nature has the miraculous ability to live through all positive boon, all negative consequence, and still maintain relationship to self, to others". Being a wild woman also means being able to ask questions: "Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open." and then going down the corridors of psyche to find out what is it that we truly root for ? "What stands behind? What is not as it appears? ... What of me has been killed, or lays dying?" or in !wolfish words the only question to ask is : Where is the Soul ? I was particularly drawn to the creative feminine life, since its abundance is a good sign of a vital soul: "Often the creative life is slowed or stopped because something in the psyche has a very low opinion of us, and we are down there groveling at its feet instead of bopping it over the head and running for freedom. In many cases what is required to aright the situation is that we take ourselves, our ideas, our art, far more seriously than we have before. Due to wide breaks in matrilineal (and patrilineal) succour over many generations, this business of valuing one’s creative life—that is, valuing the utterly original, beauteous, and artful ideas and works which issue from the wildish soul—has become a perennial issue for women. Having experienced that blocus several times in my work, I had my own tricks to escape it and was surprised to find a few written in the book: " Consciousness is the way out of the box, the way out of the torture. It is the path away from the dark man." Another hack was to be willing to become vulnerable ( poke: Brené Brown) and embracing shame, if shame there will be (which is tbh really rare): "If you want to create, you have to sacrifice superficiality, some security, and often your desire to be liked, to draw up your most intense insights, your most far-reaching visions." A major "concept" in the book is recovering the senses of the injuried woman, and strengthening her intuition: "Another way to strengthen connection to intuition is to refuse to allow anyone to repress your vivid energies ... that means your opinions, your thoughts, your ideas, your values, your morals, your ideals. There is very little right/wrong or good/bad in this world. There is, however, useful and not useful. There are also things that are sometimes destructive, as well as things which are engendering." To take the world into one’s arms and to act toward it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit. Culturally Relatable Passages: "For instance, women who are raised in families that are not accepting of their gifts often set off on tremendously big quests— over and over, and they do not know why. They feel they must have three Ph.D,s or that they have to hang upside down from Mount Everest, or that they must execute all manner of dangerous, time-consuming, and money-eating endeavors to try to prove to their families that they have worth. “Now will you accept me? No? Okay (sigh), watch this.” " " A woman wants to be, go, do a big something, and stays home and counts paper clips instead. A woman wants to live life, but saves little shreds of life as though they are string. A woman flows with radiant creativity, and invites her vampirish friends to a group siphon." "What is this symbol of veiling? It marks the difference between hiding and disguising. This symbol is about keeping private, keeping to oneself, not giving one’s mysterious nature away. It is about preserving the eros and mysterium of the wild nature. Sometimes we have difficulty keeping our new life energy in the transformative pot long enough for something to accrue to us. We must keep it to ourselves without giving it all away to whomever asks, or to whichever stealthy inspiration suddenly happens upon us, telling us it would be good to tip the pot and empty our finest soulfulness out into the mouths of others or onto the ground. Putting a veil over something increases its action or feeling. This is known among women far and wide." Mantra Material: “I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own oppression."
This book took me YEARS to read. I started it long before I knew what Goodreads was. It’s a heavy book with lots to mull over, digest and think upon. It’s good and difficult and soul searching and uplifting.
such an interesting read, with lots of stories interpreted
A book I will forever return to
Highlights
“Women have died a thousand deaths before they’re twenty years old.”
When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes.
There is something waiting for us at the edge of the woods, and it is our fate to meet it.
If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.
In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.
Initiation is the process by which we turn from our natural inclination to remain unconscious and decide that, whatever it takes — suffering, striving, enduring — we will pursue conscious union with the deeper mind, the wild Self.
In a tragedy the heroine is snatched, forced, or drives straight into hell and is subsequently overwhelmed. No one hears her cries, or else her pleas are ignored. She loses hope, loses touch with the preciousness of her life, and collapses. Instead of being able to savour her triumph over adversity, or her wisdom of choices and her endurance, she is degraded and deadened. The secrets a woman keeps are almost always heroic dramas that have been perverted into tragedies that go nowhere.
To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction that arise within us, and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning.
In the view of analytical psychology, the repression of both negative and positive instincts, urges, and feelings into the unconscious causes them to inhabit the shadow realm.
Overkill through excesses, or excessive behaviors, is acted out by women who are famished for a life that has meaning and makes sense for them. When a woman has gone without her cycles or creative needs for long periods of time, she begins a rampage of — you name it —alcohol, drugs, anger, spirituality, oppression of others, study, control, education, orderliness, to name a few areas of common excess. When women do this, they are compensating for the loss of regular cycles of self-expression, soul-expression, soul-satiation.
A culture that requires harm to one's soul in order to follow the culture's proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed.
In all Iivingkind, loss brings a full gain. Our work is to interpret this Life/Death/Life cycle, to live it as gracefully as we know how, to howl like a mad dog when we cannot— and to go on, for ahead lies the loving underworld family of the psyche that will embrace and assist us.
Deep in the wintry parts of our minds, we are hardy stock and know there is no such thing as a work-free transfomation. We know that we will have to bum to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there.
To possess good intuition, goodly power, causes work. It causes work firstly in the watching and comprehending of negative forces and imbalances both inward and outward. Secondly, it causes striving in the gathering up of will in order to do something about what one sees, be it for good, or balance, or to allow something to live or die.
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter, spring always comes.
It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires. It is never a mistake to search for what one requires.
Fear is a poor excuse for not doing the work. We are all afraid. It is nothing new. If you are alive, you are fearful.
To love means to stay with. It means to emerge from a fantasy world into a world where sustainable love is possible, face to face, bones to bones, a love of devotion. To love means to stay when every cell says "run!"
For the naive and wounded, the miracle of the psyche's ways is that even if you are halfhearted, irreverent, didn't mean to, didn't really hope to, don't want to, feel unworthy to, aren't ready for it, you will accidentally stumble upon treasure anyway. Then it is your soul's work to not overlook what has been brought up, to recognize treasure as treasure no matter how unusual its form, and to consider carefully what to do next.
If there is but one force which feeds the root of pain, it is the refusal to learn beyond this moment.
Sometimes, in order to bring a woman closer to this nature, I ask her to keep a garden. Let this be a psychic one or one with mud, dit, green, and all the things that surround and help and assail. Let it represent the Wild psyche. The garden is a concrete connection to life and death. You could even say there is a religion of garden, for it teaches profound psychological and spiritual lessons. Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche - too much water, too little water, infestations, heat, storm, flood, invasion, miracles, dying back, coming back, boon, healing, blossoming, bounty, beauty. During the life of the garden, women keep a diary, recording the signs of life-giving and life-taking. Each entry cooks up a psychic soup. In the garden we practice letting thoughts, ideas, preferences, desires, even loves, both live and die. We plant, we pull, we bury. We dry seed, sow it, moisten it, support it, harvest. The garden is a meditation practice, that of seeing when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhaations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature.
So, it is the cooking up of new and completely original things, of new directions, of commitments to one's art and work that continuously nourishes the wild soul. These same things nourish the Old Wild Mother and give her sustenance in our psyches. Without the fire, our great ideas, our original thoughts, our yearnings and longings remain uncooked, and everyone is unfulfilled. On the other hand, anything we do which has fire will please her and nourish us all.
That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.