I've heard of this book for a long time, but had never connected with it until a friend recently offered me her copy. In it, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Ph.D and "senior Jungian analyst", tackles the wild woman archetype by way of repeating myths and stories from various cultures, and dissecting their bizarre episodes. The variety of stories includes ones from Hispanic, Hungarian, European, and Inuit cultures.

Most of the stories are sad, wherein the prominent female suffers brutality or death, and usually represents some abusive possibilities than can befall females in the human condition. The author bemoans "the confiscated life". For some reason, this point got me thinking of Tom Cruise's wife, poor Katie Holmes!  

The author tells us that she has a mixed heritage that includes Hungarian and Hispanic lineage, and therefore frequently uses phrases from these respective languages as though that were the norm. Her essential point throughout is that a wild and free undercurrent runs beneath all starved souls, be they repressed by their cultural milieu, or brutally suppressed by tyrannical relationships, or stifled by fear, and that this wildness erupts if not in the individual then in the mythos of the culture's stories to present itself as the vital force and the liberating factor. At least, that seems to be her thesis.

In one story, La Loba, an old crone searches constantly for wolf bones, and sings him deeply back to life. In another story, Bluebeard, versions are claimed to be of French, Slavic or Hungarian origin, in which a predatory husband fools his naïve wife, and is a serial killer of his previous wives, where blood does not stop flowing in his secret chamber. In one of the happier stories, a young girl is given a doll by her dying mother and becomes dependent on an old hag who lives in a forest, who forces her to do dreadful tasks and yet helps her to triumph over her evil stepmother and step-sisters. Still other stories with names like Skeleton Woman, The Ugly Duckling, The Red Shoes, The Sealskin, The Withered Trees, and The Handless Maiden, mostly portray dreadful situations of cruelty, suffering, obsession, loss, and so forth. It kind of reminded me of Grimm's fairytales which also were very difficult to encounter as an innocent young child, as most kids find when their parents hand them the lovely leather-bound set of Grimm's and Anderson's fairytales.

Fairytales in and of themselves are often quite frightening. In this case, Dr. Estes seeks to analyze the subtext, and does so in a psychoanalytical way, with 80 percent of her 500 page book devoted to such analysis rather than the very small portion to the stories themselves. In dissecting these stories, she frames the predators or brutal situations as aspects of the psyche, such as The Natural Predator, the Dark Man In Women's Dreams, Facing the Wild Hag, The Tenacious Dog Nature, The Ambivalent Mother, the Unmothered Mother, Exile as Boon, Brutal Loss, The Secret Life, Injured Instinct and Rage, Hearing the Old Ones' Call, The Dismemberment, and The Harrowing of the Soul - to name but a few of many, many chapters. Very few take a positive spin. Some do, such as Renewing the Creative Fire, Righteous Rage, the Practice of Intentional Solitude, Forgiveness, and Standing on All Fours.

All in all, I did not find this book to be uplifting. I looked at the picture of the author on the book cover, and I see intelligence, wisdom, and deep world-weariness, and rightly or wrongly feel that she has just heard too many painful stories of her clients or of people who have been in her life, and dealt too long with numbing reports of horrible karma with no true balm in sight. I did not feel at any point the optimism of the spiritual quest, or even the light at the end of the tunnel. Her writing is beautifully poetic ("the medial woman", "still glinting", "cackled"), and excellently eloquent; it does not surprise me that this book was and is a bestseller, for it does explore secret and hidden aspects of deep pain in women's lives that can only be expressed - at least in past ages, and maybe in the current era in certain societies - with the insightful but evasive techniques of storytelling.

I wish I could say that I recommend the book for its power, but it's just not to my taste in terms of overall message.

***

 

At first, the notion of being calmed and settled with oneself is derived from the phrase "being at one", and this is thought of as an interlude in which a person gets very comfortable with the serenity within and lets go of the daily surroundings and also the mental chatter. It's a phrase that conjures up the quiet moment in a calming space. Everyone at some time or another in life has the sense of separating from their crazy world and feeling quite peaceful, and in that way also very rejuvenated.

So this is not a new idea, but here we introduce a fresh concept that is gradually gaining ground in at least some of humanity's awareness. And that is that it is possible to move one's sense of self to a place within very deliberately, and to linger longer and longer in a state that is realized as the truer self, the self that is always there when thoughts subside and focus is shifted. Then the concept of "being at one with myself" changes. It begins to mean that I recognize a deeper, more whole self inside of the chatter, clutter and whirlwind that often constitutes my life; that I see as though from a different pair of eyes an inner me that is bound to and comforted by the knowing of an eternal identity, not a fluctuating one, which can be said lives in a place or space or position that I can reach within, at will, by shifting attention, reducing thoughts, and experiencing a sense of just being.

This process, then, greatly redefines the phrase "being at one". That "one" is the core of you. It can be said to be your god-self, your eternal self, your self that exists behind thoughts, in eternity, and not requiring even your physical vehicle.  

How wonderful to recognize that this is a state that is always available, separate from the hustle and bustle. It has always been attainable through meditation and new awareness. The difference is that society is recognizing the route to it, and the validity of it. Rather than a few disciplined monks with special techniques, now everyone can explore this sense of abiding self residing in peaceful bliss, and always waiting to be accessed as soon as the understanding is there, as soon as the knowing how is mastered.  

In the midst of crisis, of maelstrom, of whatever life is currently "throwing at you" (i.e., what you are designing), you can go there. You can go to this height of serenity at a moment's notice and with the greatest of ease. You can go into it, even if only for a few seconds, and recognize that you are not the outside world, but are the one who persists, who is your greater aspect.

Even more will be shown about this in the coming evolutionary period but it suffices to know that at-one-ment is yours to pluck as the most delicious fruit in paradise.