Top 100 Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes
#1. When the personal soul life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to get dry boned as Death. In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods, and eventually staggers to its feet and takes over, ferocious and famished.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#2. The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands - all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#3. Unfurl the bandages, ready the medicine. Let us return now, wild women howling, laughing, singing up The One who loves us.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#5. We can see that for the deep work to continue, trying to prove one's worth to the chorus of jealous hags is pointless.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#6. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#7. When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#8. Since time out of mind, a considered act of heroism has been the cure for stultifying ambivalence.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#9. Wild Women: "They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#11. This wolf-woman Self must have freedom to move, to speak, to be angry, and to create.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#12. We all wish to be brave and strong in the face of disaster. We all wish to be looked up to for our endurance and efforts to help others.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#13. Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#15. Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people's lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#16. We say it is the nature of the thing.Yet we find this destructive process exacerbated when the culture surrounding a women touts , nourishes, and protects destructive attitudes towards the deep instinctual and soulful nature.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#17. Story cannot be "studied." It is learned through assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it - more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times. The
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#18. If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#19. 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
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#20. Our own sorrows seem heavy enough, even when lifted by certain long-term joys. But watching others hurt is the breaker of most any heart.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#21. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#22. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#23. 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
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#25. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#26. This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#27. Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer ... and on the reader.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#28. We know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is very nearly impossible to kill. You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it protected by La Loba...
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#29. The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#30. I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories ... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#32. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#33. While I do not in any way mean to say that a woman should throw herself into a torturous or abusive situation, I do mean she must set for herself something in life that she is willing to reach for and therefore take risks for.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#34. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#35. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#36. The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories. If we go for the deeper, and the darker, and the less known we will touch the bones.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#37. As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, or birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#38. She must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest. Sometimes
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#39. Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#40. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#41. Artfulness is not simple entertainment,
especially during upheaval,
unleashing creative life is sacred duty.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#43. There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#44. I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#45. When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#46. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#47. It's not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#49. Suppose ... the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? ... Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#50. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#51. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#52. When a women speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#53. Wild Woman teaches women when not to act "nice" about protecting their soulful lives.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#55. Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered ...
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#56. Sometimes there are no words to help one's courage. Sometimes you just have to jump.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#57. The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort.If you take out of the closet and put in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#58. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#61. If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman,
don't worry, there is still time
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#63. If women were in charge of everything, there would be women tyrants. If black people were in charge, there would be black tyrants. If Hispanics were in charge, then Hispanic tyrants.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#64. That sort of overintellectualization obscures the patterns of the Wild Woman and the instinctual nature of women.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#65. Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#66. I'll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is the door; if you have an old, old story, that is the door.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#67. For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#68. If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman ... have faith. There is yet time.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#69. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#70. The point of art is not simply to express ourselves, but to create an external, concrete form in which the soul of our lives can be evoked and contained.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#71. Art is important for it commemorates the seasons of the soul, or a special or tragic event in the soul's journey. Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one's own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us. As
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#72. Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#74. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#75. It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#76. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#77. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#78. All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naivete, inexperience, or foolishness.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#79. Stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#80. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#81. To love pleasure takes little. To love truly takes a hero who can manage his own fear.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#82. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#83. Women had to beg for the instruments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and closets.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#84. Mystery can be overwhelming. Touching Divinity can seem like all one's atoms composing mind and body have suddenly been rearranged.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#85. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#87. No Latina woman would be called 'Ms.' - that's an invention of middle-class Anglo women. Latina women are proud to be called 'Mrs.' That simply means that we have a family.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#88. The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#90. A woman must be able to stand in the face of power, because ultimately some part of that power will become hers.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#91. I became married at a young age and had two daughters and divorced at 26. I had to go on welfare to make ends meet. I had no way to support myself.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#92. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#93. We practice conscious forgetting by refusing to summon up the fiery material, we refuse to recollect. To forget is an active, not a passive endeavor. It means to not haul up certain materials, or turn them over and over, to not work oneself up by repetitive thought, picture, or emotion.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#95. Night is when we are closer to ourselves, closer to essential ideas and feelings that do not register so much during daylight hours.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#96. A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#97. 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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#98. The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#99. The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#100. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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