the phrases of the book ‘Women who run with the wolves’ They bring us the keys to that primordial feminine instinct that many of us fear we have forgotten or relegated, to make contact with that transformative “wolf” that encourages us to mature, to be free.
Clarissa Pinkola EstesJungian analyst, PhD in ethnoclinical psychology and author of this book, took more than twenty years to shape her best-known creature.
These phrases are a true inspiration for those people interested in getting to know each other, in working on their identity, their worth, in healing many of those emotional wounds that we sometimes inherit from our ancestors or from our own patriarchal education.
1. Be yourself
Being ourselves makes us end up exiled by many others. However, complying with what others want causes us to exile ourselves.
The courage to be yourself in any scenario, in any context and regardless of who we are with, will allow us to safeguard our own identity.
2. Be strong
Being strong does not mean exercising muscles or flexing. It means meeting the luminous in oneself without running away, actively living with wild nature in its own way. It means being able to learn, being able to sustain what we know. It means holding on and living
Strong is the one who faces, who does not run away, who shows his identity without fear, who does not give up, who lives with joy and courage.
3. Moving away allows us to meet again
Although exile is not something to be desired for fun, there is a windfall in it: the gifts of exile are many. Beats out weakness, banishes wailing, enables keen insight, heightens intuition, bestows the power of penetrating observation
Exile, also understood as the act of leaving behind what is known to us in order to face our own loneliness, uncertainty and even the strange, also empowers us with new capacities, abilities such as introspection, personal security, observation, receptivity.
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 separation from the soul is ugly, they are psychological warts, inadequacies and childish fantasies
We must therefore observe nature as our predecessors did to rediscover our value, our importance and that energy that nourishes us and makes us strong.
5. True love
Love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and we enter another phase. Passion dies and is brought back
Love is the only force that is never extinguished or turned off forever. It is a transforming entity that extends, that allows us to mature, that dies and is reborn, that sometimes takes our life and later returns it to us.
6. Hit Bottom
The best soil to sow and grow something new again is at the bottom. In this sense, hitting rock bottom, although extremely painful, is also the sowing ground
To hit bottom is to reach the limit of our strength, it is to lose everything. However, what else can we lose when we have lost everything? At that moment, something new emerges, something magical even. We shed our skins, our artifice and dead weights to move up, to grow much stronger.
7. True growth
If we live like we breathe, taking and letting go, we can’t go wrong
This phrase symbolizes neither more nor less than the cycle of life: take, learn, let go, accept, move forward.