The wild woman is not gone,
she is waiting to be brought back home

In an old story made famous by the author and analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her work on women's instinctive nature, there lives an old woman out in the desert. She gathers bones, wolf bones especially, and when she has assembled a full skeleton, she sings over it until it rises, grows fur, breathes, and runs toward the horizon. And somewhere out there, in the moment where moonlight and dawn meet, the running wolf transforms into a laughing, free woman.

The story is called La Loba, the wolf woman. And she is not a myth about something out there. She is a myth about something in here, inside you.

She is not lost, she is buried

Here is the best news I know: your wild woman is not gone. She is not dead. She is buried, beneath years of "be nice," "don't take up too much space," "pull yourself together," "be easy." She is still down there, with all her bones intact, waiting for someone to sing over her until she rises again.

What we call "wild" here is not about chaos, or throwing everything overboard and moving to a yurt. It is about something far simpler and far harder: being connected to your own instinctive knowing. Knowing what you want before you ask anyone's permission. Feeling what is true before you edit it into something more palatable for the room.

How she was silenced

None of us were born tame. We were tamed, slowly, lovingly, by people who had been tamed before us. Every time you learned that your anger was too much, your body too visible, your voice too loud, your boundaries too inconvenient, another layer was placed over her. Not out of cruelty. Out of survival, yours and theirs.

But what was learned can be unlearned.

How you begin to sing over her

You do not bring her home by reading more about her. You bring her home by reconnecting with the body, nature, the cycles, and the ancient practices women have used for millennia to be reminded of who they are.

It can be as simple as following the phases of the moon instead of only the calendar's dates. It can be holding a stone in your hand and feeling the earth it came from. It can be lighting a candle and speaking aloud a truth you would normally swallow. Each small act is a note in the song that slowly calls her back.

If you want to begin somewhere, the rhythms of the moon are a beautiful place to start, or let the rituals show you the way, one step, one phase, one stone at a time.