Wildish Nature II
This essay moves deeper into what happens after we lose contact with our instinctual nature—the hunger, the shame, the pretence, the slow slide toward addiction and self-abandonment.
We have seen the harmful effects of entering the gilded carriage and the old woman’s lack of guidance. Let us investigate our protagonist’s response to losing her red shoes and the following consequences.
Estés calls the third trap “Burning the Treasure, hambre del alma, Soul Famine. Here, Estés clarifies the disastrous consequences of “devaluing our work” and the effects of living a soul-less life. When our protagonist gives up her red shoes, she unknowingly gives up her essential connection to her Soul-Fire and sense of agency. This creates a condition Estés terms ‘hambre del alma’ and ‘starved soul’ in which a woman is relentlessly hungry and willing to do anything to reconnect to her intuitive nature.
Unfortunately, a woman in a state of hambre del alma is common in our world. It is easier to see it when it is presented by behaviours, actions, and attitudes attributed to negative aspects of our social conditioning. For example, the excessive use of drugs, alcohol, or chasing addictive and self-deprecating romances is widely shunned and deemed negative.
When the behaviours of hambre del alma are socially encouraged, it becomes hard to detect them and understand their origin and function. Socially agreeable behaviors that denote a woman is in a hambre del alma state can include obsessive grooming of oneself and intense interest in physical fitness, hyper-fixation on a certain theme, cause, study, philosophy, etc, single-minded devotion, excessive focus on caring for others but being neglectful towards her own needs… anything that can make her feel alive again in a way reminiscent of her soul-fire.
“The devaluing of our soul-fire work and or inadequate reception of those endeavors leads women into the starved soul state. ”
The devaluing happens twofold, within ourselves and in our communities at large. When our work upon its debut to the world is undervalued, and questioned in a way that seeks to invalidate our expertise and or creativity, it teaches us to distrust our instinctual nature and soul-fire creations. Further, it affirms that there is no place nor value for it, and seeds of shame begin to root where our creativity, dreams, and intuitive urges come from.
Shame teaches us to undervalue ourselves and discourages our soul-fire urges from expression.
It leads many women to close their manuscripts, give up their dancing, put down their paintbrushes, or any other soul-fire endeavor. Without proper support and encouragement to strengthen and refine our soul-fire creations, many find it difficult to move beyond this point and, instead give up.
If shame enshrouds our ability to create and develop our soul-fire gifts, it is also a psychological tool to support and reinforce the status quo. When our ideas, visions, and dreams are not well supported, we seek mechanisms to assuage the pain that arises from feeling undervalued, not good enough, stupid… Our support system and community, in their silence, criticism, and lack of encouragement, reinforces the idea that we should set aside our soul-driven creations and conform to reality.
Shame is a powerful emotion without a face, clearly defined borders, or distinctive features, yet it cuts deeply. When one can describe and recognize it, the damage is usually already incurred. It is insidious and it pries on our deepest fears, wounds, and anxieties and does so in such a way that we have difficulty seeing it for what it is. Shame leads us to what Estés calls injured instinct in trap number four.
Injured-Instinct speaks to what I will refer to as the somnambulant state. It is a state of being awake but asleep, denying ourselves our wildish natures and soul-fire endeavours. It is the promise to be good and to act appropriately, to shun away the unacceptable. It is the half step, the descent of our Soul-Fires to the unconscious, the shadow aspect of self. In most cases, this is not a healthy alliance as the actions from this place are eruptive, momentarily powerful, but disruptive in the long run.
Injured Instinct means there is no play, no creativity, no movement…It also means we do not “recognize sensations of satiation, off-taste, suspicion, caution, and the drive to love fully and freely are inhibited or exaggerated.”
Instead, we find ourselves in repetitive patterns that either harm us, stultify us, or keep us plateaued. Shame and denial go hand in hand with each other. When we feel ashamed for what our essence-via what our Soul-Fire- creates, and when we are rejected and denied recognition and support for our Soul-Fire work, most of us choose to bury our Soul-Fire urges deep within us and or deny its existence entirely. To cope, we choose pretense, outwardly carrying on and staying within the fold of acceptance, and in turn, we become deadened and instinct-injured.
Pretense, however, does not work well for long. When we live in pretense, our Wildish nature and Soul-Fires descend into the realm of the unconscious and befriend that which lacks form, structure, maturity, and understanding. Our Wildish nature unable to reach us within the conscious, curves out a home deep within us pursuing a life of its own.
Estés calls this pretense life as the sneaking around life.
When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice tidy little package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital energy into shadow. “Fine, I am fine,” such a woman says… You can call it anything you like, but sneaking a life because the real one is not given room to thrive is hard on women’s vitality. Captured and starved women sneak all kinds of things; they sneak unsanctioned books and music, they sneak friendships, sexual feelings, religious affiliation. They sneak furtive thinking, dreams of revolution. They sneak away from their mates and families. They sneak a treasure into the house. They sneak their writing time, their thinking time, their soul-time. They sneak a spirit into the bedroom, a poem before work, and they sneak a skip or embrace when no one’s looking.
A sneak-around life can not sustain the vitality fire of our wildish nature. Instead, it motivates our unrefined within us to grow outside the confines of the unconscious, finding its way into our conscious waking life. Unlike the wildish nature that inspires our Soul-Fire creations, this version of it poisons us instead of blessing us. We call this addiction. There is a prolonged dance between the “I promise I will be good” and the “If I just sneak a little bit, no one will notice” stage, in which the wildish nature is slowly deadened and injured.
This dance between pretence and sneak-around-life suppresses our ability to sense danger, normalises the abnormal, and desensitises us to violence. It is here in this dance that women experience “learned helplessness,” in which women:
Quote from Estés
“not only stay with drunken mates, abusive employers, groups that exploit and harass them but causes them to feel unable to rise up to support the things they believe in with all their hearts… The normalizing of the abnormal even when there is clear evidence that it is to one’s detriment to do so applies to all battering to the physical, emotional, creative, spiritual, and instinctive natures.
When we live within the reality of pretense and sneak around life, we also invite the corresponding energetic equivalent into our consciousness. Every life reality has a vibrational frequency and, as such it attracts into its energetic resonance similar and compatible resonance.
In the pretence and sneak-around frequency, our wildish instinctive nature is injured, which disables our ability to properly differentiate and discern what is beneficial and harmful to us.
Part of our wildish nature is to act as a protector, to shield us from negative influences that weaken our connection to ourselves, our inner authority, and our knowing. In an injured state, our wildish nature cannot protect us, instead, it acts on its own accord, attempting to live fully within the confines we constrain it to.
The vulnerability of injured instinct is that it is blind to the true nature of things and fixates our attention on sneaking things, people, and activities that reawaken it. Our hunger for what Estés calls our hand-made life, a life in which our wildish nature is properly channelled and allows for our Soul-Fire creations to blossom, only grows when we live within the prison of pretence and sneak-around life. As the hunger grows, so does the need to satiate it.
This ravenous appetite for life, for more thrill, signals to similar resonances our openness and search for something to satiate us. This signalling attracts to our energetic body similarly injured wildish instincts rooted within a destructive shadow. This representation of the shadow is not friendly, rather it is obsessive, addictive, and detrimental.
When we entrain a similar frequency to ours, we reinforce the behaviours appropriate to that frequency and invite energetic frequencies that can exploit our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. When we are not in a position of authority within ourselves, and when our wildish nature is repressed into the confines of our shadow, we do not have the discernment or the ability to know when enough is enough. This leads to addiction.
“Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life and becomes fixated upon retrieving anything that resembles it in any way she can… Addiction and ferality are related. Most women have been captured at least for a brief time, and some for interminably long periods… All lost varying amounts of instinct for the duration. For some, the instinct which senses who is a good person and who is not is injured, and the woman is often led astray. For others, the ability to react to injustice is slowed way down and they often become reluctant martyrs poised to retaliate. For still others the instinct to flee or to fight is weakened and they are victimized. The list goes on. Conversely, a woman in her right wildish nature rejects convection when it is neither nurturing nor sensible. ”
Addiction is the experience of losing oneself to something or someone. It means that we have lost a healthy connection to our wildish nature. Instead of our wildish nature guiding us, protecting us, and inspiring creation, it poisons us, and whatever else is in its vicinity, it becomes rebellious in a way that is detrimental to us.
The descent to addiction takes time; it is a gradual experience of losing contact with ourselves, others, and life itself. Most of us have experienced the loss of contact with our wildish nature to varying degrees. What is important then, is to have the resources to withstand the onslaught of people, things, environments, cultures, and habits that encourage estrangement from our wildish nature.
As a Black woman, a healer, a nomad, an artist, and a visionary, I have had to keep my wildish nature intact largely without enough external support. The world I move through does not offer protection or encouragement for what lives inside me. There are narratives already in place based on race, gender, class, body, and intellect that dictate who I should be before I even arrive. These ascriptions refuse my full humanity while simultaneously defining and restricting me.
This is not only my experience. Many women across cultures, across histories, have had to guard their wildish nature alone, without mirrors, without elders, without community structures that recognize and tend to what they carry. We have been left to protect something sacred with almost no scaffolding.
And yet, wildish nature persists. It lives beyond what the world deems acceptable. It does not answer to the narratives assigned to us.
The purpose of shame, rejection, and denial of our Soul-Fire creations is to encourage disconnection from our wildish nature.
As mentioned, wildish nature protects, creates, supports, and guides our decisions, creations, actions, and choices. When severed from our instinctual nature, our connection to self, we usually find a substitute thing, person, or culture to instruct us on how to live.
It is akin to being in the driver’s seat as yourself, but someone else’s mind commands your body and your movements. Most of us are only present physically and absent emotionally, mentally, and spiritually while something else or someone else instructs and controls our lives.
The disconnect from our wildish nature facilitates this absenteeism in our lives, which is purposeful. Therefore our task is to remember, to call the wildish nature back into our lives, for us to remember who we are. To do so, we must slow down and rest for the cacophonous surroundings and the demands on our lives to fade into the background. The work of Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry encourages us to do just this.
“Our cultural habit of applying a sense of urgency to our every-day in ways that perpetuate power imbalance while disconnecting us from our power to breathe and pause and reflect… [we need] to investigate how these characteristics lead to disconnection ( from each other, ourselves and all living things) and how the antidotes can support us to reconnect.”
Found on the Nap Ministry Instagram Page under the Post titled “Sense of Urgency.”
In addition to resting, we must find those around us who are wildish enough to act as guides, mentors, and helpers to reacquaint ourselves with our wildish natures. We must make time and allow our wildish natures to rise within us, play, create, and inhabit our bodies, minds, and spirit in a way that rejuvenates and realigns us. Lastly, we must find community, people who encourage us, see us, and support us, especially when our dreams and ambitions are young, fragile, and blossoming.
I leave you with some wise words from Estés herself:
The wildish woman is, by nature, intense and talented… if you are striving to do something you value, it is so important to surround yourself with people who unequivocally support your work. A [wild] woman cannot afford to be naive. As she returns to her innate life, she must consider excess with a skeptical eye and be aware of their costs to soul, psyche and instinct… To hold to joy, we may sometimes have to fight for it, we may have to strengthen ourselves and go full-bore, doing battle in whichever ways we deem most shrewd. To prepare for siege, we may have to go without many comforts... We can go without most things for long periods of time, anything almost, but not our joy, not those handmade red shoes.
The Real miracle of individuation and reclamation of Wild Woman is that 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.
*Images sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*