Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes & Sayings

The word pneuma (breath) shares its origins with the word psyche; they are both considered words for soul. So when there is song in a tale or mythos, we know that the gods are being called upon to breathe their wisdom and power into the matter at hand. We know then that the forces are at work in the spirit world, busy crafting soul. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Like night dreams, stores often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul who listen for the ancient and universal instructions embedded there. Because of this process, stories can teach, correct errors, lighten the heart and the darkness, provide psychic shelter, assist transformation and heal wounds. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The one who re-creates from that which has died is always a double-sided archetype. The Creation Mother is always also the Death Mother and vice versa. Because of this dual nature, or double-tasking, the great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I am amazed how little women cry nowadays, and then apologetically. I worry when shame or disuse begins to steal away such a natural function. To be a flowering tree and to be moist is essential, otherwise you will break. Crying is good, it is right. It does not cure dilemma, but it enables the process to continue instead of collapsing. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Predator: You never finish anything you start. Yourself: I finish many things. We dismantle the assaults of the natural predator by taking to heart and working with what is truthful in what the predator says and then discarding the rest. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman,
don't worry, there is still time — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Story cannot be "studied." It is learned through assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it - more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times. The — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

And then there are the cravings.. Oh, la! A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn't dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, or birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

El duende is literally the goblin wind or force behind a person's actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger. It is a term used in flamenco dance, and is also used to describe the ability to "think" in poetic images. Among Latina curanderas who recollect story, it is understood as the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one's own spirit. Whether one is the artist or whether one is the watcher, listener, or reader, when el duende is present, one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art; one knows it is there. When el duende is not present, one knows that too. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, an inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Over and over we lose this sense of feeling we are wholly in our skins by means already named as well as through extended duress. Those who toil too long without respite are also at risk. The soulskin vanishes when we are not paying attention to what we are really doing and particularly the cost to us."
"We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic, or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied - about self, family, community, culture, world - and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an ending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soul skin as there are women in the world."
"The only way to hold on to this sensual soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Go. Go right now, and as soon, and as often as you can. Keep going. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Night is when we are closer to ourselves, closer to essential ideas and feelings that do not register so much during daylight hours. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Some say that sudden knowledge of mystical matters is accomplished only in complete quietude, or that Creator, in one of God's many forms, appears only in orderly ways that are beauteous and picturesque, or that the mystical appears only in completely silent ways. All are true. Except for the 'only' part. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look 'cleaned up and combed' on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It is good to have many personae, to make collections, sew up several, collect them as we go along in life. As we become older, with such a collection at our behest, we find we can portray any aspect of self most anytime we wish. However, at some point, most particularly as one grows into past mid-life and on into old age, one's personas shift and meld in mysterious ways. Eventually, there is a kind of 'meltdown', a loss of personae complete, thereby revealing what would, in its greatest light, be called 'the true self. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

While I do not in any way mean to say that a woman should throw herself into a torturous or abusive situation, I do mean she must set for herself something in life that she is willing to reach for and therefore take risks for. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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 — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman, Even the more repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When a women speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Sometimes there are no words to help one's courage. Sometimes you just have to jump. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The deepest work is usually the darkest. A brave woman, a wisening woman, will developing the poorest psychic land, for if she builds only on the best land of her psyche, she will have for a view the least of what she is. So do not be afraid of the worst. It only guarantees increase of soul power through fresh insights and opportunities for re-visioning one's life and self anew. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I'll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is the door; if you have an old, old story, that is the door. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

That sort of overintellectualization obscures the patterns of the Wild Woman and the instinctual nature of women. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Like all other lonely or hungry things, ego loves the light. It sees light, and the possibility of being close to the soul, and it creeps up to it and steals one of its essential camouflages. In a hunger for soul, our own ego-self steals the pelt — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us. As — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

(Young girls) are taught to not see, and instead to "make pretty" all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This training is why the youngest sister can say, "Hmmm, his beard isn't really that blue." This early training to "be nice" causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to "be nice" in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We say it is the nature of the thing.Yet we find this destructive process exacerbated when the culture surrounding a women touts , nourishes, and protects destructive attitudes towards the deep instinctual and soulful nature. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write ... and you know it's a funny thing about house cleaning ... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When the wildish woman has an idea, the friend or lover will never say, "Well, I don't know ... sounds really dumb [grandiose, undoable, expensive, etc.] to me." A right friend will never say that. They might say instead ... "I don't know if I understand. Tell me how you see it. Tell me how it will work. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort.If you take out of the closet and put in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Whether you are possessed of a simple heart or the ambitions of an Amazon, whether you are trying to make it to the top or just make it through tomorrow, whether you be spicy or somber, regal or roughshod - the Wild Woman belongs to you. She belongs to all women. To — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Holy Mother is not meant to be a fence: Holy Mother is a Gate. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A runner is real when she takes the first step. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. 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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I once dreamt I was telling stories and felt someone patting my foot in encouragement. I looked down and saw that I was standing on the shoulders of an older woman who was steadying my ankles and smiling up at me.
I said to her, "no no come stand on my shoulders, For you are old and I am Young."
"No no" she insisted, "this is the way it is supposed to be." I saw that she stood on the shoulders of a woman far older than she, who stood on the shoulders of a woman even older, who stood on the shoulders of a woman in robes, who stood on the shoulders of another soul, who stood on the shoulders... — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A woman's issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. — 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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman ... have faith. There is yet time. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This wolf-woman Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Dogs are the magicians of the universe. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To take the world into one's arms and act towards it in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner is a powerful act of wildish spirit. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This explosive psychological 'sneaking' occurs when a woman suppresses large parts of self into the shadows of the psyche. In the view of analytical psychology, the repression of both negative and positive instincts, urges, and feelings into the unconscious causes them to inhabit a shadow realm. While the ego and superego attempt to continue to censor the shadow impulses, the very pressure that repression causes is rather like a bubble in the sidewall of a tire. Eventually, as the tire revolves and heats up, the pressure behind the bubble intensifies, causing it to explode outward, releasing all the inner content.
The shadow acts similarlyY We find that by opening the door to the shadow realm a little, and letting out various elements a few at a time, relating to them, finding use for them, negotiating, we can reduce being surprised by shadow sneak attacks and unexpected explosions. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Any time I find medicine that's helpful, I share it with everyone I know. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

For a wild child born into a rigid community, the usual outcome is to experience the ignominy of being shunned. Shunning treats the victim as if she does not exist. It withdraws spiritual concern, love, and other psychic necessities from that person. The idea is to force her to conform, or else kill her spirituality and/or to drive her from the village to languish and die in the outback — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Stories are medicine. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Even if one has friends, those friends may not be suns. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When you focus with soul eyes, / You will see home in many, many places. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The quintessential feminine Self stands at the center of the psyche and it is wild, meaning natural and free, and utterly wise. It is not 'something' we must strive to create. This Self is already fully present, burning strong and waiting for us to come into its presence. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

There is no one a wildish woman loves better than a mate who can be her equal. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one's mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Women find that as they vanquish the predator, taking from it what is useful and leaving the rest, they are filled with intensity, vitality, and drive.
The predator's rage can be rendered into a soul-fire for accomplishing a great task in the world. The predator's craftiness can be used to inspect and understand things from a distance. The predator's killing nature can be used to kill off that must properly die in a woman's life,or what she must die to in her outer life, these being different things at different times. Usually, she knows exactly what they are. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It's not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

So, the word wild here is not used in its modern pejorative sense, meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means to live a natural life, one in which the criatura, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries. These words, wild and woman, cause women to remember who they are and what they are about. They create a metaphor to describe the force which funds all females. They personify a force that women cannot live without. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

While archetypes may emanate through us for short periods of time, in what we call numinous experience, no woman can emanate an archetype continuously. Only the archetype itself can withstand such projections such as ever-able, all giving, eternally energetic. We may try to emulate these, but they are ideals, not achievable by humans, and not meant to be. Yet the trap requires that women exhaust themselves trying to achieve these unrealistic levels. To avoid the trap, one has to learn to say 'Halt' and 'Stop the music,' and of course mean it. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Our own sorrows seem heavy enough, even when lifted by certain long-term joys. But watching others hurt is the breaker of most any heart. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

She must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest. Sometimes — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of filling and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be reconceived again in full glory. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes