Clarissa Pinkola Estes is an American poet, post-trauma specialist, and cantadora storyteller of Mexican heritage. She is best known for her best-selling book Women Who Run with the Wolves, which explores the instinctual nature of women. Estes has written numerous other books, including The Faithful Gardener and The Creative Fire, and has published collections of her poetry.
What is the most famous quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estes ?
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, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
What can you learn from Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Life Lessons)
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes teaches us to embrace our wildness and to trust our intuition as a source of wisdom and strength.
- She encourages us to be brave and to explore our inner depths, to find our own unique voice and to use it to share our stories with the world.
- She reminds us that we are all connected and that we have the power to create a more compassionate, understanding, and just world.
The most revealing Clarissa Pinkola Estes quotes that will activate your inner potential
Following is a list of the best Clarissa Pinkola Estes quotes, including various Clarissa Pinkola Estes inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.
With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.
Three things differentiate living from the soul verses living from the ego only: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time.
If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.
When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt.
But that is not what great ships are built for.
Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.
Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion...Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.
Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.....For years we have been learning, practicing, been in training for...and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
Mystic quotes by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.
Be proud of your scars. They have everything to do with your strength, and what you've endured. They're a treasure map to the deep self.
The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.
How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all.
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 is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker.
The quintessential feminine Self stands at the center of the psyche and it is wild, meaning natural and free, and utterly wise. It is not 'something' we must strive to create. This Self is already fully present, burning strong and waiting for us to come into its presence.
All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below.
My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain.
That's why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what's in my heart I seem thoughtless.
Quotations by Clarissa Pinkola Estes that are inspiring and empowering
To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex.
It means meeting one's own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one's own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.
Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength.
Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God.
If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, rebellious, you're on the right track.
Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back.
Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered.
Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.
The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.
Be wild; that is how to clear the river.
we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.
It's not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.
Friends who love you and have warmth for your creative life are the very best suns in the world.
It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.
Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one.
To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.
I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.
The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. . . . It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirits, the pit at the center, and rising hope.
Asking the proper questions is the central action of transformation.
Questions are the key that causes the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear.
The one who says, 'Nothing good came of this' is not yet listening.
A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look 'cleaned up and combed' on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths.
To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.
It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires
Like all other lonely or hungry things, ego loves the light. It sees light, and the possibility of being close to the soul, and it creeps up to it and steals one of its essential camouflages. In a hunger for soul, our own ego-self steals the pelt
This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.
Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you.
A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before ou will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.
When seeking guidance, don't ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.
Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.
Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.
Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.
To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.