September 29, 2026

Trust Your Wild Nature

Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species.

This line opens Women Who Run With the Wolves, the book Clarissa Pinkola Estés spent over twenty years writing while working as a Jungian analyst and cantadora, a keeper of the old stories. She wrote it after watching women who had learned, generation after generation, to tame the very instincts that once kept them alive and whole. The wild woman she describes is not reckless; she is the instinctual self that knows what to eat, whom to trust, when to rest, and when to run. Naming her endangered means admitting how much energy modern life spends training that wildness out of us, and how much courage it takes to trust it enough to let it live again.