women who run with the wolves
IL Book Club Wrapped
For our first Indigo Luna Book Club, we sat down with @camilazenu to explore Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ "Women Who Run With the Wolves."
Through myth and the archetype of the Wild Woman, Estés invites us to reconnect with the instinctual parts of ourselves ~ our intuition, creativity and inner knowing. For Camila, who first read the book at seventeen or eighteen, it became a kind of rite of passage in discovering what womanhood meant on her own terms.
While the conversation began with the book, it quickly became about so much more: intuition, creativity, people-pleasing, family, womanhood, and what it actually looks like to choose a life that feels like your own.
These are a few of the ideas that will be staying with us ♡
MAYBE WE ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER
We spoke a lot about intuition and the feeling of knowing something before the mind has had a chance to explain it away. For Camila, strengthening that instinct has meant creating more silence ~ stepping away from other people’s opinions and paying attention to what her body is telling her.
Her reminder was that intuition isn’t something we lose. The practice is simply learning to listen to it again.
"Our bodies tell us first when something is off, when something is wrong. We feel it first within the body."
CHOOSING AUTHENTICITY OVER THE FEAR OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD
A topic that stayed with us was the idea of the “good girl” ~ and the ways women can learn to be agreeable, palatable and shaped by what others expect of them.
Camila shared that choosing her own path meant accepting that the people closest to her wouldn’t always understand it. She reminded us that becoming "more ourselves" doesn’t always feel comfortable. Sometimes it means questioning what we’ve inherited, standing behind what we believe, and allowing ourselves to choose differently.
CREATIVITY NEEDS SPACE TO BREATHE
Camila spoke about creativity as an essential part of being human. Yet when expression becomes dependent on being liked or validated, we can lose sight of why we wanted to create in the first place.
Instead, she encouraged us to consider the conditions we're creating around our creativity. Are we making space to play? Can we make something without knowing where it will lead? Do we feel safe enough to fail?
"We're all artists. We're all here to express something."
Perhaps this is the invitation at the heart of Women Who Run With the Wolves: not to become someone new, but to create enough space to remember who we already are ♡
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO HERE: