Many months ago, never mind how long precisely, I had a powerfully resonant dream. I was camping in a converted van on a Native American reservation on the edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Parked on a clear outcropping of wild land that overlooked a small valley and more mountains beyond, there were no other humans around for miles in any direction. I woke up in the early morning, determined to climb out of the van completely naked at sunrise. I was alone and I wanted to feel the brisk, free air on every part of my skin and watch the sun be born again into the sky. When I opened the door, there was a grey wolf sitting maybe 20 feet from the van. She was just looking at me as if she had been waiting. I wasn’t surprised or scared, I just opened the door wide, stepped out towards her, and then kneeled in the dirt and grass in front of her.
At the time, I thought this was a powerful image of fearlessness in the face of vulnerability. I thought it was a moment of wild recognizing wild and finding communion there. Or possibly validation that the path I’m on in my exterior life matches the one my interior self resonates with.
It was because of this dream that I was drawn to this book on a display on the top floor of a Waterstones in London. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a Jungian Psychoanalyst and folklore expert who uses ancestral stories from all over the world as medicinal guides that help women to better understand who they are and what they need to do (and NOT do) in order to heal, process, and honor the psychological twists and turns that befall all women throughout their lives.
I immediately felt a pull towards this book but had limited funds and had to prioritize my school books. So, I added it to my “to read” list and left it on the stack. Several months later, I went to the library searching for this title but after three fruitless visits and months of religiously checking the online catalog, it was always checked out by someone else. Finally, I just decided to buy the book online.
Remember: there are no coincidences in this life and this was no exception. I was unequivocally meant to own this book. I have underlined passages on nearly every page and dog-eared those that spoke loudest to my soul. I can’t imagine journeying through these pages without being able to do that. So it goes without saying that this is a book I will keep close by and refer to often in my life.
Estés would tell me that my dream was showing me my own homecoming with my wild, instinctual self: La que sabe or “she who knows”. This is the part of a woman’s psyche that can smell danger a mile away, that knows how to hold an infant just so, that sees through tough exteriors into the pain and insecurity nestled in a person’s heart, that is fiercely loyal, that knows when to let something die and when to breathe life into the bones of that which has deteriorated. It was my wildish nature calling to me and my surrendering to her, trusting her completely, meeting her on even ground.
We lose our illusions when we take the risk to meet the aspect of our nature that is truly wild; a mentor of life, rage, patience, suspicion, wariness, secretiveness, remoteness, and resourcefulness…
Estés, p. 356
Estés believes that dreams are often compensatory. They are a communicative mechanism of the psyche designed to help us realize what it is we’re missing in our conscious, exterior lives. She says, “they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images” (Estés, p. 458). If this is true, then all characters and components of a dream actually represent different aspects of the psyche itself, no matter how much they resemble things or people exterior to ourselves. My guess is that our brain needs images to populate the stories our psyche is trying to tell us, so it pulls from memory – from what it has seen and heard in the outside world in order to tell the emotional story that needs to be told.
While I don’t believe that ALL dreams are meaningful and worth listening to, I do recognize that not all dreams are created equally. We have all experienced dreams that are utter nonsense and also those that clearly carry weight and power; those that stick with you well into your morning and maybe even the rest of your life. Those are the dreams that Estés is talking about here. The ones where the unconscious mind successfully made contact with the conscious mind and the exchange cannot be unseen or easily forgotten. These are the dreams that provide instructions for a healthier, happier, more whole self. As Estés says, “we are never without the map” (p.458). We just have to learn how to read it.
In my dream, the images that manifested don’t seem to be so arbitrary.
The landscape was that of a Native American reservation in northern New Mexico that I have never physically been to or seen before. I don’t know if that vista really exists, but I know about it because the community that lives there is in danger of losing their language and I’m hoping to be able to help them document and preserve it. This place, then, seems to be symbolic of the path I’ve chosen in my exterior life.
The man I was seeing at the time of this dream was converting a sprinter van into a home that he planned to live out of while traveling across North America. So the van in the dream was his. At the time, I thought this detail was showing me the merging of our paths; the building of a great journey together. But I could never quite reconcile the fact that he wasn’t there with me. It was this man’s van that carried me to this place of psychic reckoning, but I stepped out of it alone.
I see now that this relationship was significant in that it led me straight to the place where I am now. I may have gotten into that van thinking or wanting one thing but I’m stepping out of it as Estés’ “initiated woman.” She who has descended into worlds beneath worlds to dig deep, cull and clean the river that feeds all creativity, restore the animus to healthy, working condition, and begin life renewed, whole, vulnerable, open.
My kneeling down to the wolf could even be considered representative of this descent. Archetypal journeys like these have been described in literature and story-telling throughout time; from Dante’s descent through the seven rings of hell to Alice falling through the rabbit hole. The instruction from the psyche here was: “Go down. Descend willingly, vulnerably, and without fear, and you’ll find communion with your wild self. This is what you need.”
It may not have turned out to be a ‘happily ever after,’ but most certainly there is now a fresh ‘Once upon a time‘ waiting for you from this day forward.
Estés, p. 373
And of course, there is the she-wolf. In archetypal mythology, according to Estés, the wolf appears in folklore to symbolize the wild, instinctual self that lies beneath the skin of all women. She represents one half of a dual nature that, when tended to, listened to, given the resources to thrive, brings balance and wholeness to the female psyche. Even without knowing this, there was no fear or surprise when I met the wolf in my dream because some part of me must have known that she was actually a part of myself; something that had always been there.
A friend and mentor of mine once said, “nothing in this world has meaning until we assign it meaning.” So why bother to reading into a dream like this? Why assign meaning to things which may be nothing more than the physiological result of a bit of undigested beef? Estés knows why:
It is to go for the jugular, to get right down to the seed and to the bones of everything and anything in your life because that’s where your pleasure is, that’s where your joy is, that’s where a woman’s Eden lies, that place where there is time and freedom to be, wander, wonder, write, sing, create and not be afraid.
Estés, p. 332-333
It is because of this underlying motive that Women Who Run With The Wolves is not so much a life-changing book as it is a life-affirming one. More importantly, this is a book that will find you when you’re ready to be found by it. Stories like those in this book can be very powerful, but as Estés says, “this … power can animate and enlighten, but in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong amount, wrong teller, … like any medicine, it will not have the desired effect, or else a deleterious one” (p. 470).
I am so grateful that this book found me when and how it did because it has shown me the key to reading the map that leads home.
Books & References
Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992)
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)*
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (written between 1308-1320)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll (1865)
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)*
*Stylistic/thematic references
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