Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Women Who Run With the Wolves
560 pages
Paperback
To celebrate her solo exhibition, Green in the Grooves at Camden Art Centre, we offer Tamara Henderson's reading list exclusively selected by the artist.
Within every woman, there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society's attempt to "civilize" us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.
In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Dr. Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairytales and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.