Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The quintessential feminine Self stands at the center of the psyche and it is wild, meaning natural and free, and utterly wise.…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Some say that sudden knowledge of mystical matters is accomplished only in complete quietude, or that Creator, in one of God's many…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums,…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing criatura, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“We fervently point out how other creatures’ natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

When women hear those words, an old, old memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute,…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“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

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“How does Wild Woman affect women? With her as ally, as leader, model, teacher, we see, not through two eyes, but through…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary,…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“The one who re-creates from that which has died is always a double-sided archetype. The Creation Mother is always also the Death…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“We all begin as a bundle of bones lost somewhere in a desert, a dismantled skeleton that lies under the sand. It…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“We dismantle the predator by countering its diatribes with our own nurturant truths. Predator: You never finish anything you start. Yourself: I…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“Whether you are possessed of a simple heart or the ambitions of an Amazon, whether you are trying to make it to…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“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

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times…For years we have been learning, practicing, been in training for...and just waiting…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Tell the truth about your wound, and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don't…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If women were in charge of everything, there would be women tyrants. If black people were in charge, there would be black…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows…

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes