Do you remember the inquisitive and maybe cheeky, little girl you once were? Your lack of concern, naturalness and candour? Your courage, boldness and impetuosity, your urge to discover? Your uncomplicated way, your laughter, your curiosity, your wonder and thirst for knowledge?
Maybe, on the way from girl to woman, you have suppressed your very feminine characteristics, or you might have even lost them in the course of your life. Maybe because you have had bad experiences with them? Perhaps because you have subordinated or adapted yourself to others too much? Or maybe because you have lost contact with your ‘inner femininity’?
THE WILD WOMAN INSIDE US
The psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés had collected stories, myths and fairy tales about the primordial nature of women for decades, before she published the world bestseller ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype’. The first story is about ‘La Loba’, the she-wolf, the wild woman inside us. Due to our life experiences, at some point, there is not much left of her, unless she is woken up.
THE STORY
La Loba (Spanish: she-wolf) is an old, fat and hairy woman, living in a cave in the desert. She keeps looking for bones, snakeskins and carrion to create the skeletons of wolves. Then she holds her wrinkly hands above them and starts to sing. Immediately the skeleton starts to put on meat and skin, turning into a she-wolf and leaping away through the canyon. Now the animal turns into a woman who bursts out laughing, shakes herself, and disappears beyond the horizon.
THE DEEPER MEANING
In the figurative sense the collecting of the bones and the singing over the bones means to breathe new life into the emotionally dead or injured feminine parts of the soul, and the feminine, emotional remains. Therefore, every single woman should work on her emotional depths, which enables her to find her own strength and heal the wounds of her soul.
WHAT DO YOU RESPOND TO?
Read my questions and consider the feelings they arouse. Maybe you feel like writing down your thoughts:
- How strongly did you feel the feminine primordial nature inside you when you were a girl? And how strongly do you still feel it?
- How much of your ‘wild inner woman’ has been buried, or lost, in the course of your life, through injuries, disappointments, or other difficult circumstances?
- Which emotions, that particularly identify you as a woman, have you cut yourself off from, in order not to feel them any more?
- Do you feel your spiritual feminine power and strength, or have you handed it over to others?
WITH THE POWER AND WISDOM OF OUR FEMININE PRIMORDIAL NATURE
We women bear a strong feminine primordial nature which keeps straightening us up, no matter what happens to us. This inner wild woman helps to find the way back to our feminine basic instincts. This requires honest inspecting and checking of our soul from time to time. How much are we already neglecting or burying our feminine basic nature?
We women bear a great potential which will always enable us to find a new access to our feminine primordial nature. If we follow our basic feminine instincts, allowing them enough room in our lives, we will always survive as smiling she-wolves. And new horizons will open up, no matter what we have already encountered in our lives!
Ingrid Auer for Women 