There’s a lot of talk these days about being wild, untamed women (and people). I love these conversations and at the same time I think there is a common misunderstanding that “wild” means reckless, unhindered by relationships, off the grid. And at times it might mean just that. However, I prefer to think of wild as being free internally, out of psychological bondage, and trusting that everything is going to be ok while connected to my inner compass of truth.
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author and brilliant psychoanalyst) encourages us to be “Friendly, but not tame.” In the process of becoming un-tamed, we are asked to commit to fierce self-trust. No more self-abandonment or acquiescing to societal structures and beliefs that no longer fit or that deviate from our path of highest evolution. We have lived for centuries, generations, millennia as tamed people. Liberation is an inside job this time around.
Our blessed ancestors fought for our external liberation by running the world behind the scenes, burning their bras, and giving us equal rights. Now we are in a process of undoing the internal entrapment of beliefs, ideas, and concepts that we have inherited around how we should live our lives, what is possible, and what it should look like to be a woman today.
For me, these thoughts of entrapment resonate in my body as tension, tightness, and register as un-truth. They often sound like worry about the future, like self-doubt, shame, and “What if I can’t, what if I fail, what if I’m not enough.” These webs of thoughts are spun throughout our psyches if we look just below the surface of our conditioning and patterns of living.
Read our blog ‘Breaking the Bonds of Self-Improvement’
There’s a price to pay for being tamed and entrapped. For allowing ourselves to be handled by a culture and world that doesn’t understand our intuition and cosmology, doesn’t understand what feeds us, nourishes us, or turns us on. The price we pay is our own creativity, vitality, and pleasure.
What is truly liberating, and ultimately our source of true security, is our connection to our own internal compass. This source of inner knowing is always free. It is creative and vital. Living from this wild and free source within might mean that life looks different than what we expected, but it’s a small price to pay compared to the cost of allowing our vitality to be dimmed by resigning to what’s expected. Learning to trust the sensations of guidance in our body, of our own “yes”, “no” and “give me a second”, takes practice. And yet this level of self-trust and self-attunement is vital to our liberation and liberation is the antidote to being tamed for so long.
I look forward to seeing you on the other side, as free beings. Because my liberation is tied up in yours and yours, in mine. The idea that no one is free until we are all free is relevant here. So for the women in the world who still do not have the external liberation that we have, let’s feel our freedom for them.
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