Thoughts this morning – continuing on the introduction to Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

How are you all with reading through the introduction? I am about halfway.

Please continue to post any thoughts or paragraphs that jump out at you from the Introduction.

These are oft repeated paragraphs from the Introduction:

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, possess of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.

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. They have been the target of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind. The predation of wolves and woman by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.

– WWRWTW Introduction

I went to bed and woke up thinking about what exactly drew me to this book? In my ‘Silent Awakening’ of the past couple of years, I have been drawn to different things …. but honestly none as strong as this concept and book. And I wondered why that was.

One of my other passions is the Power of Your Mind. Arna Baartz has a short and relatively easy (10-30 min a day perhaps) course called ‘I Am Change’. My children have a Berenstein Bears book which talks about habits and in it, Mama Bear compares a habit to the path made by her wheelbarrow. She says that the more times she travels this path and makes the rut in the ground deeper, the harder it becomes to stray from that path.

Obviously, this is a great analogy for not only habits but your thinking in general. I have let my mind get stuck in ruts of thinking, such as: ‘I messed up. No one loves me like they should. What is wrong with me? (physically and mentally).’

And her course I found was a great way to start making new pathways in my life of joy. To still an anxious and depressed mind is no easy feat. To relearn how to find joy and believe in yourself can be quite a struggle, but each time, you travel that pathway of joy, it gets a bit easier.

I have also done a lot of work on being an Empath as I think my personality and nature are such that I feel these different emotions from people easily, and it has been quite difficult to manage my own emotions amidst them.

But yet, there still seems to be some extra edge that draws me to WWRWTW, and I think I have figured it out.

STORIES.

This is how we should be brought up: being told these stories so that we could be forewarned and learn of some of these pitfalls in our psyche and life without having to experience them all firsthand.

As CPE mentions, a true Cantadora (storyteller) believes that the story comes through her. It settles within you meaning different things at different times.

Bluebeard – overlooking things so that you are taken care of and settling for the ‘but don’t open that door …’ or the Handless Maiden – the horror of having her hands cut off by her father and her travails to regrow them.

How much better would it have been to have grown up with these stories instead of Disney’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty!

I confess that I am a bit of a hippie at heart. On Facebook, I’m drawn to all the Dalai Lama, Jeff Brown and Victoria Erickson memes of peace, love and happiness.

But honestly, parts of my life have been very tragic and very sad, and I don’t intend to deny those parts any longer. And I most certainly do not want to repeat them. Nor do I want my children to repeat them.

Instead, I want to turn them into a story that both you and I can learn from … that is the wonder of the internet, no? That we can learn all these different perspectives and stories, that we can all become Cantadoras.

Tell your stories.

Two scenes from a classic movie Wings of Desire:

The first is the angel who desires to be a human talking to a ‘fallen’ angel who has come down to earth (Columbo) and can actually sense him.

The second at the end of the movie, you have probably at least seen the remake, but I don’t want to spoil it if not, when he ruminates on if it has been worth it to become a human…

I have a story, and I’ll continue to tell it.

Please check out our Facebook book study of WWRWTW here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/WomenWhoRunWithTheWolvesTheGroup/