I recommend this book — Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
Recently I received a letter from a friend who wrote to me with great enthusiasm about this book and encouraged me to read it as well. She wrote that once she began reading it, she did not stop all night, and that the book made her “look in a new way at those old stories I thought I knew, stirred emotions, and awakened an intention to change something in my life, and many other things besides…”
I understood her enthusiasm very well, because this book had a powerful impact on me too when I first read it. And a few years later I read it again. It is one of those books I recommend without any hesitation, because it contains everything I value — wisdom, love, depth, and truthfulness. The author, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, is a Jungian analyst with an extraordinary gift for discerning the hidden wisdom in fairy tales — for telling it in a deeply moving way — and through her storytelling, for healing the deeply wounded part of the female psyche: the most oppressed, the most rejected. This is a book — essential reading for every woman who has lost contact with her primal nature, with the “Wild Woman,” and who carries a deep longing for a more profound and meaningful life in the present.
“Wild animals and the Wild Woman are endangered species. In former times, women’s nature was plundered, suppressed, and forcibly reshaped. For several thousand years it has been devastated like the wilderness, banished to the most remote corners of the female psyche. The spiritual realms of the Wild Woman were plundered and burned, her habitats violated, and her natural cycles forced into rhythms foreign to her, for the pleasure of others.”¹
— C. P. Estés
This book encourages the impulse to reconnect with the wild within us and to find the strength to express it in our lives, but it also warns that without maturity and wisdom, the wild may manifest outwardly in destructive ways. That is why this book is a wise book.
If this reading suggestion is reaching you now, if you have not yet read the book, if what you read above stirred something in you — perhaps it is time to awaken the Wild Woman within yourself and to find the door through which to invite her into your life.
“This is a book of instructive women’s stories, placed like milestones along the road. Read them and reflect on them, so that you may free yourself, give rein to love for yourself, for animals, the earth, children, sisters, and beloved ones. I must tell you at once that the doors to the world of the wild self are few, but they are priceless. If you bear a deep scar, that is a door. If you deeply love the sky and the water, that too is a door. If you long for a deeper, fuller, more natural life, that too is a door.”¹
— C. P. Estés
From me — the idea of a book that opens doors; from you — the choice of whether you will step through that door. 🙂
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Footnote: Direct translation of the quote(s) from the Bulgarian edition.
