Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people's lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest.Collection: Moon
Failure is a greater teacher than successCollection: Teacher
When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.Collection: Soul
Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.Collection: Woods
The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.Collection: Running
Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture.Collection: Mean
We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.Collection: Night
A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.Collection: Strong
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.Collection: Medicine
If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman, don't worry, there is still timeCollection: Time
My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That's why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what's in my heart I seem thoughtless.Collection: Heart
The way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.Collection: Differences
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength.Collection: Psychics
If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you're on the right track.Collection: Track
When you focus with soul eyes, / You will see home in many, many places.Collection: Home
To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.Collection: Hero
It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.Collection: Understanding
The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained.Collection: Art
Among wolves, no matter how sick, no matter how cornered, no matter how alone, afraid or weakened, the wolf will continue.She will lope even with a broken leg. She will strenuously outwait, outwit, outrun and outlast whatever is bedeviling her. She will put her all into taking breath after breath. The hallmark of the wild nature is that it goes on.Collection: Broken
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.Collection: Business
Suppose... the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? .... Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?Collection: Teacher
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.Collection: Inspiration
When seeking guidance, don't ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.Collection: Blessing
Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.Collection: Relationship
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.Collection: Love You
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.Collection: Attitude
Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.Collection: Tree
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.Collection: Keys
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.Collection: Despair
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 requiresCollection: Psychics
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.Collection: Solitude
we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.Collection: Strong
At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.Collection: Sowing
It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What's needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take 'everyone on Earth' to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.Collection: Giving Up
So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Children
Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.Collection: Long Ago
When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatural life- a life that is self-blinding.. . without innovation. The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized.Collection: Sleep
Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.Collection: Teacher
To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one's own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one's own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.Collection: Strength
I call her Wild Woman, for those very words, wild and woman, create llamar o tocar a la puerta, the fairy-tale knock at the door of the deep feminine psyche. Llamar o tocar a la puerta means literally to play upon the instrument of the name in order to open a door. It means using words that summon up the opening of a passageway. No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.Collection: Mean
When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her.Collection: Memories
It is that holy poetry and singing we are after. ... It is the wild singing we are after, our chance to use the wild language we are learning by heart under the sea. When a woman speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, staying tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul. To live this way is a cycle in itself, one meant to go on, go on, go on.Collection: Heart
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.Collection: Mean
Be wild; that is how to clear the river.Collection: Rivers
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.Collection: Blooming
Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered.Collection: Dream
To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of though, feeling, action, and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression or message that carries moment, passion and meaning. In this sense, loss of our creative milieu means finding ourselves limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or cendoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing, or being.Collection: Mean
The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. . . . It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirits, the pit at the center, and rising hope.Collection: Life