Friday, January 07, 2011
Book Talk: Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I have had this book, in hard copy, since it came out in 1992. That's nineteen years ago. I was twenty eight years old.
At that time, I read it cover to cover, underlined like mad and then set it away. When my second marriage ended, I was forty years old and out the book came again. I focused all my attention on the story The Handless Maiden, as a metaphor for my self imposed and determined time without a husband or a man in my life (I was convinced from a deep soul place that men were wholly distracting me from a larger purpose). While I could barely understand why I was taking to the mountains to meditate and immerse in Tibetan Buddhism, I drew strength from Estes reminding me that there was a time for a man and a time to be without and I carried on being drawn, by a large wild instinct, to land and a practice that were called Tara. After several years of this immersion, man-less but maintaining my work as a mother, I discovered the hidden truth about my soul wounds. Tara, it turned out, was the name my first mother gave me when she gestated me.
Soon after I reunited with my beautiful mother and the rest--well, you'll just have to read Found, when it releases in the spring.
What is still stunning to me is that I had been so anestized by my culture that I had no idea my origianl mother was of the utmost importance to my sense of self, my identity and my understanding of a cloud of perpetual misery that rained whereever I stood. 
Estes writes of this wound as part of her conversation around the myth of The Ugly Duckling: One of the least-spoken about oppressions of women's soul lives concerns millions of unmarried mothers or never married mothers throughout the world, including the United States, who, in this century alone, were pressured by cultural mores to hide their condition or their children, or else kill or surrender their offspring...
And...When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about the culture. A culture that requires harm to one's soul in order to follow the culture's proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed. The "culture" can be the one a women live in, but more damning yet, it can be the one she carries around and complies with within her own mind.
Yes. Yes. Indeed yes! 
1992
1999
2010
I look back to the young woman in 1993, who held this book before bearing children. I look at the brave soul who left her husband and a very limiting marriage that was stunting all possible evolution due to a larger committment to soul deadening consistency and I look at myself now in 2011. As I read the book and take it in, I can say "My god, I've come a long way."
How have I done it?
How have any of us done it?
This week, I am reading this book very carefully, all over again, and underlining still more. I adore the depth and the storytelling and the examples. Reading Estes' writing is like getting a damn good talking to from the wisest woman you'll ever have to good fortune to speak to.
Last night, I read Chapter Seven titled Joyous Body. I almost skipped it because I wanted to revisit The Handless Maiden. But I didn't and faced a lifelong compulsion surrounding my own loathing of my body. I realized all this crazy Weight Watches crap I'm doing is just starving my beautiful body, bossing it into a kind of odd conformity and creating war out of discontent. What's the matter with me? Why do I buy into this odd culture and it's demand that I look like a twenty year old Olympic athlete or will have no worth?
Estes writes: Destroying a woman's instinctive affiliation with her natural body cheats her of her confidence. It cause her to perseverate about whether she is a good person or not, and bases her self worth on how she looks instead of who she is. It presses her to use up her precious energy worrying about how much food she consumes or the reading on the scale and the tape measure (let me add...the points she adds up via programs like Weight Watchers). It is unthinkable in the instinctive world that a woman should live preoccupied by her appearance in this way.
If she (a woman) is taught to hate her body, how can she love her mother's body that has the same configuration as hers? Her grandmother's body, the bodies of her daughters as well? How can she love the bodies of other women (and men) close to her who have inherited the bodies of their ancestors? To attack a woman thusly destroys her rightful price of affiliate with her own people and robs her of the natural life she feels in her body no matter what height, size, shape she is.
After reading these passages, I went down and made myself dinner (which I hadn't had as I had been busy and also busy dieting!). I ate two lovely beef tacos with cheese and arugala, soft shells drenched in olive oil, drank a glass of blood red wine and then slept the deep sleep of a woman well fed and at peace. I believe I will toss my WW book into the garbage, thank you very much. It's time to start loving my body (and my life) and the way it is shaped (and the mistakes I have made) and stop wasting my life following the culture (as well as my own limiting thoughts about my value). I'd rather follow the truth and the beat of my own heart as well as the call of my own appetites. I guess this book has helped me into the center of what we all crave--which is my own power and my own being.
Thank you, Dr. Estes for your timeless wisdom and your care for women. Women Who Run with the Wolves is an absolute essential.
7 Comments:
Jennifer, that was so inspiring. I believe I'll join you in this. I, too, have the hardcover first edition and the last time I read it was in 1992. I saw Dr. Estes around the same time in Monterey, in a packed auditorium where she was reading her poetry. She was big. She did not fit the cultural norm.
I bet that was amazing! Now, are you tossing your weight watchers too?? Or just reading? : )
I am wanting to start a movement...like burning bras...only we'll burn our points systems!! And then go out to eat!!!
It must be time for me to read this book. I heard about It decades ago, maybe thought about buying it or bought it then lost it. Now I'm hearing it pop up in conversations over the past year. Must be time.
Burn the damn WW book! It's not the boss of you!
Hi Jennifer,
I meant reading the book again. I have never done WW. (And it shows, ha ha!)
Kate
Don't you mean LOL??? : )
Now that you mention it... :o)
I started reading it last night. Amazing how these reminders come at exactly the right time. Thanks for this one!
Kate
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