Women Who Run with the Wolves
Ratings32
Average rating3.9
Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Though the gifts of wildish nature come to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has plundered this treasure, and muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls. Without Wild Woman, we become over-domesticated, fearful, uncreative, trapped. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora storyteller, shows how woman's vitality can be restored through what she calls "psychic archeological digs" into the ruins of the female unconscious. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes uses multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories chosen from over twenty years of research that help women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype. Dr. Estes collects the bones of many stories, looking for the archetypal motifs that set a woman's inner life into motion. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Estes has created a lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it s a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.
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I think giving this a star rating is highly personal, more so than with fiction. I read this on my own because I'd always heard about it, not for a class/etc. I loved the way each chapter took a myth or two (from many different cultures) and analyzed it. Some of the analyses about being wounded & finding yourself were things I needed to hear when I was a bit younger, and at this point in my journey, they echoed things I'd already thought. So that's what I mean about the rating being personal: had I come across this book when I was, say, 20, I might have given it 5 stars. For me now, it wasn't quite as revelatory, and so I found the intricate and sometimes repetitive writing style a little slow. It's gorgeous, but also heavy (which I think it's meant to be).
Bottom line: I would recommend this to anyone – yes, not just women – with an interest in self-discovery and healing, as well as the power of myth. But my recommendation would come with the grain of salt that you can't expect all of it to be super-relevant: there's so much there that you'll have to pick and choose what speaks to you at this moment.
Love the history of where these tales came, and how they reveal the strength of women, and how that strength has been ripped from us throughout the years. Very enlightening.
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