01c. 1945 ADSometimes 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 Estés / quote ↗
02c. 1945 ADI hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
03c. 1945 ADIt 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 requiresClarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
04c. 1945 ADGo 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 Estés / quote ↗
06c. 1945 ADTears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
07c. 1945 ADI'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 Estés / quote ↗
08c. 1945 ADDon't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
09c. 1945 ADWhen women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, and inspiratrice, and intuitive, a maker, a creator, and inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
10c. 1945 ADThis wolf-woman Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
11c. 1945 ADWhat 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 Estés / quote ↗
12c. 1945 ADWolves 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. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
13c. 1945 ADSo, 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 Estés / quote ↗
14c. 1945 ADWhile 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 Estés / quote ↗
15c. 1945 ADA 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 Estés / quote ↗
16c. 1945 ADEven in the best of worlds the soul needs refurbishing from time to time.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
17c. 1945 ADWe know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is very nearly impossible to kill. You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it protected by La Loba...Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
18c. 1945 ADTo love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings—all in the same relationship.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
19c. 1945 ADAs 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 Estés / quote ↗
20c. 1945 ADThe 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 Estés / quote ↗
21c. 1945 ADTalking is the voice of human, singing is the voice of soul.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
22c. 1945 ADStories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act, anything -- we need only listen.Clarissa Pinkola Estés / quote ↗
23c. 1945 ADFrom 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 Estés / quote ↗
24c. 1945 ADOver 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 Estés / quote ↗
