The Wolves

I had a dream once.

I stood in a beautiful neighbourhood and looked to a dark haunted house on a hill. Something within me compelled me to enter, so I did. The house was filled with shadows and vicious, rabid wolves. It was “open season” and I was fresh succulent meat. And, trust me, my wolves were genuinely gunning for me.

Snarling, uncontrollable beasts, seeking to kill just because I’d entered this house, which was, in fact, their cage. They had been hidden and starved for too long. In my dream I ran desperately, frantically scaling a wall and escaping. Once I was “safe” my run eventually slowed to purposeful, confident walk along the path that I was originally following. It was the walk of a woman who has faced the reality of her own darkness, her shadow self and let it transform her.

Like all great dreams, this scenario manifested in my waking life. I would experience perceived “attacks” from all sides, beyond my control, which plummeted me into complete helplessness and survival mode. Wolf snarls became human, shame and judgement, their teeth, cutting me to my core. In reality, leaving “the dark house” was a shift in perception to one of self-love and understanding. A deep knowing that I simply could not continue as I once was. In my dream, I escaped, but in reality, I did not.

My wolves killed a part of me, the part of me that had caged them in the first place. A part of me, that was not authentic, a deep-rooted program that taught me silence and conformity. A key component in my inauthenticity, which stifled the most innate aspect of the female psyche – the Wild Woman archetype.

Knowing our truest essence is the path to experiencing the female soul in its purest form. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her seminal work, Women Who Run with the Wolves, describes the “comprehension of this Wild Woman nature” as a “practice” and “psychology in its truest sense… a knowing of the soul”.

Pinkola Estes describes the Wild Woman archetype as “[a] powerful psychological nature the instinctive nature, but [the] Wild Woman is the force which lies behind that. You can call it the natural psyche… you can call it the innate, the essential nature of women.” This is my journey, my road to self-love and innate confidence… to experience the aspect of myself that is eternal and resonates deeply with the Natural World, the mother of us all. She, the Wild Woman archetype, is the child of Mother Earth and if I am to connect and commune with our collective Mother, I must remember and realise Her.

It is no coincidence that Pinkola Estes likens the most primal aspect of the female psyche, the Wild Woman, to the wolf. Both often misunderstood and too easily vilified. As Pinkola Estes so succinctly notes, “both [women and wolves] have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value of those who are their detractors”. And it is easy to place blame and hate when our perspectives are “black and white”, bi-partisan and closed. The bi-product of such perspectives is a “lessened” value of the person or in the case of animals, the sentient Being. My dream showed me that I had caged my wolves for too long. I “tightly muzzled” myself and portrayed a “nice” image to be accepted and receive love from my environment. True freedom is knowing that your primary source of love, should come from God, through the heart.

However, my nightmare became a reality and I was exiled, cut off from external, co-dependent sources of love. I was then to receive the greatest blessing, which only comes to those that are stripped totally bare. The blessings reserved for the outcast! True, unconditional love from Source. A “singing over the bones” experience…