Clarissa Pinkola Estes Wild Woman 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

The rainbow is the pot of gold to those who observe. — Thomas F. Shubnell

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

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

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

I hope to goodness I would not still be working in the corporate world - the money is OK but it is no life at all. — Nigel Dennis

Even in the best of worlds the soul needs refurbishing from time to time. — 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

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

All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naivete, inexperience, or foolishness. — 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

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow. — Horace

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

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

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

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

When the personal soul life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to get dry boned as Death. In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods, and eventually staggers to its feet and takes over, ferocious and famished. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Wild Woman teaches women when not to act "nice" about protecting their soulful lives. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered ... — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A woman must choose her friends and lovers wisely, for both can become like a bad stepmother and rotten stepsisters.
In the case of our lovers, we often invest them with the power of a great Mage - a great magician. This is easy to do , for if we become truly intimate, it dislike unlocking a lead crystal atelier, a magic one, or so it feels to us. A lover can engender and/or destroy even our most durable connections to our own cycle and ideas. The destructive lover must be avoided.
A better sort of lover is one finely wrought of strong psychic muscle and tender flesh. For Wild Woman it also helps if the lover is just a bit psychic too, a person who can "see into" her heart. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

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. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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

A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us. — Christopher Bram

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

Women's curiosity was given a negative connotation, whereas men were called investigative. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring. In reality, the trivialization of women's curiosity so that it seems like nothing more than irksome snooping denies women's insight, hunches, and intuitions. It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her fundamental power. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition — Anthony Stevens

The genuinely spiritual person is one who has lost all desire to be anyone but exactly who he is, without labels and without apologies. He is what he is and that's all there's is to it. Such a man is undivided, uncomplicated and contented. — Vernon Howard

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 reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character. — Arthur Helps

Khadi work without the mastery of the science of khadi will be love's labour lost in terms of Swaraj. — Mahatma Gandhi

Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted. — Eric Hoffer

England is the country where I learned my profession. They are the ones that trained me, they are the ones that believed in me. — Mario Testino

What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world. — 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

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