“Like night dreams, stores often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share
In this tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine," she told Radiance magazine. "The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love,… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
“We know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is very nearly impossible to kill. You can dent the soul… — Clarissa Pinkola Estés Copy Share Image
Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't pack whatever… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
“Whether you are possessed of a simple heart or the ambitions of an Amazon, whether you are trying to make it to the top… — Clarissa Pinkola Estés Copy Share Image
The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life,… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, it's fed. That is why beholding someone else's creative word, images, idea, fills us up, and inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share
A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us… — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share
“Being real doesn't mean being reckless, it means allowing La Voz Mitologica, The Mythological Voice, to speak. One does that by shutting off the… — Clarissa Pinkola Estés Copy Share Image
Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes Copy Share Image
“Some psychological thinkers, including Freud and Bettelheim, have interpreted episodes such as those found in the Bluebeard tale as psychological punishments for women’s sexual curiosity.4 Early in the formulation of classical psychology women’s curiosity was given quite a negative connotation, whereas men with the same attribute were called investigative. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring. In reality,… — Clarissa Pinkola Estés Copy Share
