Women Who Run With the wolves

 I am reading Women Who Run With the Wolves  for the third time. It’s not a book you read once and put away; it’s the kind that shifts with you. Every time I pick it up, it meets me exactly where I am. Maybe that’s why I love it , it’s alive, like the stories it tells.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks the language of the soul, the tongue of myth and wildness. She doesn’t explain the stories; she invokes them. They stir something primal, something forgotten but still humming underneath. The first time I read it, I was young, raw, and hungry for understanding. I devoured the words, desperate to reclaim pieces of myself I didn’t know I had lost. It was like having an elder sit me down, brush the hair from my face, and say, “Listen.”

The second time was different. I had lived more. There was heartbreak, motherhood, and the steady erosion of who I thought I was. Reading it then, I wasn’t just the girl searching for her wildness ,I was the woman dragging herself through the woods, clawing her way back. Estés didn’t offer easy answers. She offered stories. La Loba gathering bones. Bluebeard’s wives. The sealskin women. Each tale held a mirror to my own life, reflecting both the shadow and the light.

And now, on this third reading, I find myself lingering. I’m less urgent, less afraid of the dark corners. Maybe it’s because I’ve come to understand that the wild woman isn’t something we need to chase down. She’s not out there. She’s in the way we laugh too loud, the way we cry without apology. She’s in the tender strength of a body that has lived and loved and lost. She’s in the knowing glance we share with other women, the silent acknowledgment of all we’ve endured.

I think that’s why this book remains on my nightstand. It’s a guide for the long journey home. Not to some polished, perfected version of ourselves, but to the untamed spirit that never left. The one who knows how to grieve, how to howl, how to mend what is broken. Estés reminds me that healing is rarely neat , it’s a wild, messy, sacred thing. And it’s ours.

So, I’ll keep reading. I’ll keep gathering the stories, stitching them into the my own life. Because every time I return to Women Who Run With the Wolves, I find another bone. Another truth. Another piece of the wild woman.

~Shanti Freedom Das