Medicine tale collected by Clarissa Pinkola in "Women Who Run With Wolves".
"We all feel the longing for the wild. And this longing has very few culturally accepted antidotes. We have been taught to be ashamed of this desire. We have grown our hair long to hide our feelings with it. But the shadow of the Wild Woman still looms behind us by day and by night. Wherever we are, the shadow that trots behind us has surely four legs."
Doctor Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
Medicine tale collected by Clarissa Pinkola in "Women Who Run With Wolves".
"We all feel the longing for the wild. And this longing has very few culturally accepted antidotes. We have been taught to be ashamed of this desire. We have grown our hair long to hide our feelings with it. But the shadow of the Wild Woman still looms behind us by day and by night. Wherever we are, the shadow that trots behind us has surely four legs."
Doctor Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
Clarissa Pinkola proposes us to treat the elements of shadows reminding us:
"In Jung's analytical psychology, the "shadow" is the set of modalities and possibilities of existence that the subject does not want to recognize as his own because they are negative with respect to the codified values of consciousness and that he pushes away from himself to defend his own identity, but with the risk of paralyzing the development of his personality".
Thus he invites us to perform the following psychic tasks:
-Learning in an even more conscious way to let go of the excessively taxing mother.
-Discover that the fact of being good, sweet and kind does not allow you to achieve happiness in life. (Vasalisa becomes a slave, so it is of no use to her.)
-Experience directly the darkness of one's own nature, and specifically the exclusive, envious and exploitative aspects of the self (the stepmother and stepsisters. Recognize it unequivocally.
-Establish the best possible relationships with the worst parts of yourself.
-Allow the tension to grow between what the woman is learning to be and what she really is.
-And, finally, gradually allowing the old self to die and the new intuitive self to be born.
For a better understanding, Clarissa tells us:
"The stepmother and stepsisters can be interpreted as creatures placed in the woman's psyche by the culture to which she belongs. The putative family of the The psyche is different from the "soul family", as it belongs to the superego, the aspect of the psyche that is structured according to the expectations - healthy or not - that each particular society has regarding women. (... )".
And Clarissa tells us:
"Here are the psychic tasks of this phase:
-Access to enter the place of deep initiation (enter the forest) and begin to experience the new numen of possession of intuitive capacity, perceived by women as dangerous.
-Learn to develop the perception of the mysterious unconscious and rely exclusively on one's own internal senses.
-Learn the way back to the house of the Wild Mother (following the instructions of the doll).
- Learn to feed the intuition (feed the doll).
-Let the frail ignorant maiden die some more.
-Move the power to the wrist, that is to say to the intuition".
"The doll is the symbolic homunculus, the symbol of the numinous that is hidden in human beings, a small and resplendent facsimile of the original Self. Outwardly, it is nothing more than a doll. But, in reality, it represents a tiny fragment of the soul that contains all the wisdom of the spiritual Self."
Clarissa Pinkola tells us about animal consciousness: "Some reject the concept of the animal psyche or distance themselves from the idea that human beings are spiritual and animal at the same time. A Part of the conflict lies in the belief that animals are spiritless and soulless, but the word "animal" itself derives from Latin and means a living creature, and even more properly "anything that lives", and "animalis" in particular. means "endowed with vital breath", from the word "anima" which means air, breath, life.
It is possible that in a future moment in history, perhaps not very distant, we will be surprised that anthropocentrism could ever take root, in the same way that many of us are now surprised that discrimination against human beings based on in the color of the skin has been in other times an acceptable value for many".
It also illuminates us about the matrilineal gift of intuition:
"If attention is not paid to her, she will continue to suffer damage to her female offspring. But the woman can remedy it, taking charge of repairing the damage suffered now. We are not talking about perfection but about building a certain strength."
That is why it is so essential to reconnect with the deep wisdom that reaches the bones of women:
"One of the fundamental problems of the oldest theories of female psychology is that the vision of female life is very limited. Nobody could imagine that woman could be as much as she is. Classical psychology is more the study of women completely cringing than of women trying to break free or reaching out and reaching for something. The instinctual nature demands a psychology to observe not only women who are struggling to do something but also those who are slowly straightening themselves up after many years of living bent over."
*Image: Venus of Laussel, the "Lady with the Horn". Prehistoric goddess of fertility with more than 25,000 years
Vasalisa, la Sabia. Cuarta tarea:
El enfrentamiento con la Bruja Salvaje.
"Familiarizarse con el arcano, lo extraño, la "otredad" de lo salvaje (vivir durante algún tiempo en la casa de Baba Yagá. Incorporar a nuestras vidas algunos de sus valores, convirtiéndolos con ello en unos seres un poco raros en el buen sentido (comiendo su comida). Aprender a enfrentarnos con un gran poder, con el de los demás y posteriormente con el nuestro.
Dejar que muera un poco más la frágil niña demasiado dulce. (...)
La entrega de la muñeca intuitiva por parte de la madre inicial queda incompleta sin las pruebas a que nos somete la Vieja Salvaje y sin las tareas que ésta nos encomienda. (...)
Y Vasalisa permanece allí y acepta a esta salvaje divinidad materna, con su sabiduría, sus verrugas y todo lo demás".
Relacionándonos, juntas, con la generosa naturaleza salvaje. Reconectando con el recuerdo de la sabiduría interior.
"Las tareas psíquicas de esta fase de aprendizaje son las siguientes: Quedarse con la bruja, aclimatarse a los grades poderes de la psique femenina, Comprender su poder (el propio poder) y el de las purificaciones interiores; limpiar, clasificar, dar de comer, construir energías e ideas (lavar la ropa de Baba Yagá, guisar para ella, limpiarle la casa y lclasidicar los elementos).
No hace mucho tiempo, las mujeres mantenían una estrecha relación con los rtimos de la vida y de la muerte".