Women Who Run With the Wolves is based on myths and stories of the Wild Woman archetype. It is a book that reaches deep into the feminine soul to teach women about their soul life and how to recover from the losses that, in particular, woman have lost in their lifetimes. It uses stories to teach us about our long suppressed beings; the Wild Woman. This quote from the back of the book tells it nicely: “Telling stories as a way of teaching, entertaining and healing is a universal and ancient art-form; it is what Dr. Pinkola Estes is doing in Women Who Run With the Wolves. She reawakens our memories of other places, other times, and other long-suppressed ways of being; she deepens and expands the stories,

fables, myths until they take on the power of a psychological force within us. Dr. Pinkola Estes challenges and inspires us to imaginatively recapture and invent that which is longed for.” I first discovered this book when a spiritual counselor that I was doing some Reiki treatments with recommended it. I bought the book and started to read it, but at the time I was going through a divorce and was unable to really get into it. This past spring a joined a women's group that was doing a book study with this book and I picked it up again and started reading it and participating in weekly meetings where we discussed the book, and what we were interpreting and learning from this book. In this group, I have participated in many activities to bring healing to my spirit and work with the myths and stories that are the basis of the book.

Reverend Annie Stephens leads the group and we each take turns facilitating the meeting. I have written and led the group through many meditations that I have written based on the chapters and their stories. This book came to me at a time in my life when I was trying to piece my life back together after years of self-abuse and abuse by others. It helped me to understand what I had been through in my life, what I was going through, why I was going through it, and helped me be a full participant in my own healing process. This is a paragraph from the book that kind of describes what I was going through. “ There is a time in our lives, usually in midlife, when a women has to make a decision—possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life—about whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel's back” and they're “pissed off and pooped out”. Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, and broken promises.”

She goes on to state that if a woman returns to the Wild Woman, she will come back to life. Now the Wild Woman is not someone who does as she pleases and disregards everyone else, the Wild Woman is the instinctual self. She is the one that knows that there will be many deaths and many births of the soul in one lifetime and she knows what she needs to do to recover her spirit and her soul from the deaths, the expectations, and the abuses that are put upon her. This is an incredibly healing book that is full of wisdom and healing for the soul. I don't think that I would have understood the full meaning of this book at an earlier time in my life. It is as if you need to experience a few years of adulthood, beyond high school and college to grasp the full worth of this book. I would recommend this book to anyone, including men. Men would do good to read this book and get a better understanding of the deep soul psyche of the Wild Woman.

 By Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D