BOOK NERD : Kickass Quotes from Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD (Part 4 of 4)...
One of many reasons this book is so valuable is the way it repeatedly says...
"See that pain you've got there? You can use that!"
You can use your pain to transform your life and the lives of others who come in contact with you or the products of your creative life.
It encourages you to have a creative life, to make things that make you and others come alive.
It removes the shame from your game, so that you can get down to the business of playing.
It asks that you play, because playing is good medicine.
That too is why it invites you to cry and laugh and tell wild stories.
The most important story it encourages you to tell is your own, placing you front & center in your own legend, a fairy tale of your own making, and the way you tell a story like that is in the living of it.
Of course, this is your birth right, but so many of us forget that and start behaving as though we are powerless victims of circumstance or other people.
We forget that we hold the power to shape our own lives.
So- it's good to remember that, and Women Who Run With The Wolves is an excellent reminder...
★ "If a story is a seed, then we are its soil." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "No sentient being in this world is allowed to remain innocent forever. In order for us to thrive, our own instinctive nature drives us to face the fact that things are not as they first seem. The wild creative function pushes us to learn about the many states of being, perception, and knowing." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "...the psyche is a grinder of ideas; it masticates concepts and breaks them down into usable nourishment. It takes in raw material, in the form of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, and breaks them open in a way that makes them usable for our nourishment." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "Secrets, like fairy tales and dreams, also follow the same energy patterns and structures as those found in drama. But secrets, instead of following the heroic structure, follow the tragic structure." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "The secrets a woman keeps are almost always heroic dramas that have been perverted into tragedies that go nowhere." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "The way to change a tragic drama back into a heroic one is to open the secret, speak of it to someone, write another ending, examine one's part in it and one's attributes in enduring it. These learnings are equal parts pain and wisdom. The having lived through it is a triumph of the deep and wild spirit." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "Everyone makes poor choices in words or deeds before they know any better and before they realize what the consequences will be. There is nothing on this planet or in this universe that is outside the bounds of forgiveness. Nothing." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "The Self is not a punitive force that rushes about punishing women, men, and children. The Self is a wildish God who understands the nature of creatures." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "Even raw and messy emotions can be understood as a form of light, crackling and bursting with energy. We can use the light of rage in a positive way, in order to see into places we cannot usually see." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "All emotion, even rage, carries knowledge, insight, what some call enlightenment. Our rage can, for a time, become teacher... a thing not to be rid of so fast, but rather something to climb the mountain for, something to personify via various images in order to learn from, deal with internally, then shape into something useful in the world as a result..." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "Allowing oneself to be taught by one's rage, thereby transforming it, disperses it. One's energy returns to use in other areas, especially the area of creativity." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "In physical post-trauma work, we know that the sooner injury is dealt with, the less its effects spread or worsen. Also the more quickly a trauma is contained and dealt with, the faster the recovery time. This is true for psychological trauma as well." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "...one can be generous and fierce at the same time. One can be reticent and valuable. One can protect one's territory, make one's boundaries clear, shake the sky if need be, yet be available, accessible, engendering all at the same time." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "The wild force of our soul-psyches is shadowing us for a reason. There is a saying from medieval times that if you are in descent, and pursued by a great power- and if this great power is about to snag your shadow, then you too shall become a power in your own right." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
★ "When we come out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD
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