Women Who Run with Wolves (excerpt) - Clarissa

To demolish barriers and walls, to recover the unconscious and reactivate it in everyday life — these are metaphors for a process which bewilderness can help to facilitate. Bewilderness is an extreme condition, an encounter with transcendence, possession by elemental energies. But it allows the possibility of more measured and integrated lifeways. After such experiences, individuals and communities can accept convivial coexistence because they wittingly live within and amidst the oceanic consciousness. And such a state characterizes the condition of total anarchy.

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By Clarissa Pinkola Estes (excerpt)

Over-intellectualization can obscure the patterns of the instinctual nature of women...

She [the archetype of the Wild Woman] resides in the guts, not in the head. She can track and run and summon and repel. She can sense, camouflage, and love deeply. She is intuitive, typical, and normative. She is utterly essential to women's mental and soul health.

This is why women are knowing creatures; they are made, in essence, of the skin of the sole, which feels everything. This idea that the skin of the foot is sentient had the ring of a truth, for an acculturated Kiche tribeswoman once told me that she'd worn her first pair of shoes when she was twenty years old and was still not used to walking 'con los ojos vendados,' with blindfolds on her feet.