Living instinctively

A book I’ve been reading, re-reading and dipping into for years, is “Women Who Run With The Wolves”, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I’ve blogged about it before.

I received my first copy as a gift from a high school friend, round about the late 1990s, or early in the year 2000. I know I was married at the time. I read it and was fascinated. A few years later, I read it again, and a few years later, again. I realised that it was a work of literature that not only spoke to me, but that spoke to me in a different way everytime I turned to it, depending on what was happening in my life. I think I’ve read the complete book about four or five times, and have been dipping into it, reading particular chapters, or sections, for at least 10 years.  

  

The book started out as the doctoral thesis of the writer. It’s a book about the natural woman, and how modern society has stripped her of her natural (wild) essence, intuition, and power. Estes blends Jungian psychology with her knowledge gained from living in and studying many cultures, all of which prize living naturally, as well as the role of storytelling. In this seminal book, she analyses various fairy tales, using this blended approach.

More than all of that, she writes in a way that, once I start reading, I can’t stop. And I read her work with a pencil, underlining passages that speak to me. Besides her very down-to-earth approach, she also has a poetic style of writing, rich in metaphor. Can you imagine her analyisis of a story like The Red Shoes, about not giving up your natural vibrancy, and of recognizing people who come into your life, seemingly to help you, but whose first task is to remove your red shoes? Yes – and she does this in a whole chapter! It’s one of my favourites, along with Bluebeard. One of the things that fascinate me about her book is that most of the fairy tales are stories I encountered in my childhood, and understood as a child would. Reading her analyses as an adult, as a woman, as a woman who’s had many life experiences, as a mother, as a divorced woman, as an artist, as an artist who has to practise her art in her free time, as a person who has opened her life to many new beginnings, is more profound than I can express.

When I re-read the book - or parts of it – now, I can see how I’ve allowed it to shape my way of looking at life, and of living. Having just made a huge change in my life – leaving teaching, re-entering the private sector, and doing a job I’ve never done before – I’ve felt the urge to go back to the book, to immerse myself in her magnetic writing, and to experience the wonderful sense of calm, of coming home, that I get whenever I read it.

And what did I find, precisely where my bookmark was? An analysis of the story “Sealskin, Soulskin”, about returning home after having spent some time trying really hard to be who you’re not.

I’d like to quote a section that resonates with me, as I continue to process the emotional tidal wave of my recent changes. It’s about being deeply restless for change, not necessarily knowing what you want, but trusting your instincts, and going where life leads you. I wasn’t raised to live like this – I found, over many years, that this was who I was, and how I liked to live my life. Over time, I have steadily begun to be more instinctual (natural, ‘wild’), and less invested in what others think is right for me.

“These images of going about in and through the dark carry an age-old message that says. ‘Do not fear ‘not knowing’. In various phases and periods of our lives, this is as it should be. This feature of tales and myths encourages us to follow the call, even when we’ve no idea of where to go, in what direction, or for how long. All we know is that, like the child in the tale, we must sit up, get up, and go see. So maybe we stumble around in the dark for a while trying to find what calls us, but because we have managed to not talk ourselves out of being summoned by the wild one, we invariably stumble over the sealskin. When we breathe up that soul-state, we automatically enter the feeling state of ‘This is right. I know what I need.’

For many modern women, it is not the driving about in the dark looking for the soulskin that is most fearsome. Rather it is the diving into the water, the actual return to home, and especially the actual leave taking, that are far more formidable. Though women come back into themselves, draw on the sealskin, pat it closed, and are all ready to go, it is hard to go; really, really hard to cede, to hand over whatever we’ve been so busy with, and just leave.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As I’ve experienced way too often in my life, the fact that leaving is so very hard is exactly what makes us stay. In the past, I have stayed in situations that had ceased to feed my soul for many years after the realization that I should leave. It’s a pattern I’m consciously breaking, as I get older.