Dancing with the Wild: The Forgotten Language of Soul

In the space between heartbeats, where ancient stories meet embodied wisdom, lies a forgotten truth: we are not what civilization has taught us to be.

This collection invites you into a remembrance—of the wild soul that howls within, the lunar rhythms that pulse through our bodies, and the sacred creative force that flows through all existence.

Through the wolf tales of our ancestors, the patient teaching of the moon, and the tantric understanding of creative energy, we find not separate traditions but a unified invitation to wholeness.

What follows is not merely philosophy but a practical path of return—to our instinctual wisdom, our cyclical nature, and our divine creative essence.

This is not about becoming something new but remembering what we have always been: wild, rhythmic, creative beings with the power to transform ourselves and our world through the courage to live authentically in harmony with the forces that animate life itself.

Awakening the Wild Soul

In the luminous darkness where consciousness first stirred, stories were our primary vessel for truth. “Women Who Run With the Wolves” speaks not just to women but to the wild soul in all of us—that primal essence we’ve banished to the edges of our manicured existence. The Wild Woman archetype lives within the psychological forests and emotional deserts of our interior landscapes, whispering secrets about what it means to be fully human.

Consider La Loba, the bone collector. She roams the desert gathering the bones of wolves until she can assemble a complete skeleton. When she sings over these bones, they flesh themselves out and the wolf comes alive, transforming into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon. This is not merely a tale but a profound metaphor for our fractured modern consciousness. We are all bone collectors, gathering fragments of our authentic selves that society has deemed too dangerous, too inconvenient, too wild to acknowledge. The singing—our creative acts of meaning-making—resurrects what culture has attempted to bury.

Our contemporary world has constructed elaborate systems to separate us from our instinctual knowledge. We’ve built gleaming towers of rationality while neglecting the wisdom that pulses through our bodies. The result is a civilization advanced in technology but regressing in soul-knowledge, rich in information but impoverished in meaning. The story of Bluebeard illustrates this peril—we’ve handed the keys to our inner chambers to forces that do not have our wholeness at heart, whether they be market economies, technological imperatives, or social expectations that demand we remain small and palatable.

The tale of the Ugly Duckling reveals another dimension of our collective wound. We’ve created cultures that convince the swan it is an inadequate duck rather than celebrating its true nature. This misidentification creates profound suffering, as we contort ourselves to fit expectations that were never designed for our particular shape of being. How many potential artists, healers, visionaries, and change-makers have abandoned their gifts because they were told they were simply failing at being “normal”?

Vasalisa’s journey to Baba Yaga teaches us about the intuitive lamp that illuminates what rational thought cannot. In our data-saturated world, we’ve grown suspicious of knowing that comes through channels other than empirical evidence or logical deduction. Yet the deepest human truths—about love, meaning, purpose, and connection—rarely reveal themselves through spreadsheets or algorithms. When we dismiss intuition as irrational, we blind ourselves to an entire spectrum of understanding about what it means to be human.

The story of Sealskin, Soulskin speaks to how we’ve severed ourselves from the rhythms of nature and our bodies. Like the seal-woman who loses her skin and cannot return to the sea, we’ve forgotten how to move between the worlds of doing and being, production and restoration, social engagement and solitude. We remain trapped in a single mode of existence—productive, visible, and constantly available—while our souls wither from lack of time in the rejuvenating waters of rest, creativity, and wildness.

These stories collectively challenge our culture’s foundational assumptions about progress, success, and fulfillment. They suggest that true advancement isn’t measured in technological capability or material accumulation but in our capacity to live in alignment with our deepest nature while in relationship with all living things. They question whether endless economic growth can coexist with psychological wholeness and ecological sustainability.

For women, these stories offer validation of experiences and ways of knowing that have been systematically devalued. They affirm that the wild feminine is not something to be tamed but a source of vitality, creativity, and wisdom essential for navigating complex times. They provide language for articulating the subtle violence of having one’s perceptions constantly questioned, one’s boundaries repeatedly violated, and one’s voice systematically silenced.

For men, these tales offer liberation from the confines of a masculinity defined by dominance, emotional restraint, and disconnection from nature. They invite men to reclaim their own emotional wildness, to honor the feminine wisdom within themselves, and to recognize that partnership with the wild feminine—both internally and in relationship—offers wholeness that control can never provide.

The call to action these stories present is not simple or comfortable. It demands we question everything—our relationships, our work, our consumption patterns, our definitions of success. It requires breaking agreements we’ve made with a culture that promises security and status in exchange for our wildness. It asks us to risk being misunderstood, rejected, or labeled “too much” as we reconnect with the untamed aspects of our nature.

We must begin by acknowledging what we’ve lost—our connection to natural rhythms, our trust in bodily wisdom, our respect for the mysterious, our capacity for deep rest and play. We must reclaim the practice of attending to dreams, synchronicities, and the subtle language of the body. We must create spaces in our lives and communities where the wild self can speak without fear of banishment.

This is not merely a personal healing journey but a collective restoration project. As we reclaim our wildness, we become capable of new forms of leadership, creativity, and community that our fractured world desperately needs. We develop the capacity to stand at the threshold between worlds—the rational and intuitive, the technological and natural, the individual and collective—and weave them into a more integrated whole.

The ultimate wisdom of these wolf tales is that our humanity depends not on transcending our animal nature but on embracing it fully—acknowledging that we are creatures of both earth and imagination, instinct and choice, limitation and possibility. In this integration lies our salvation, not just as individuals but as a species attempting to find its way back to right relationship with the living world.

Let us then become bone collectors, singing life back into what has been dismembered. Let us reclaim our sealskins and return periodically to the rejuvenating waters of our wild nature. Let us carry the intuitive lamp into the dark forests of our time with courage and clarity. The world needs nothing less than humans who have remembered how to run with wolves, dance with bears, and speak the forgotten language of soul.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Moon’s Ancient Wisdom: Cycles of Becoming

The moon haunts our stories as persistently as it pulls our tides. In “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” she appears not as a distant celestial body but as an intimate companion in the journey of consciousness—a mirror reflecting our cyclical nature in a world obsessed with linear progress. The moon teaches us what our efficiency-driven culture has forgotten: that darkness and light, waxing and waning, visibility and hiddenness are not opposing forces but necessary partners in the dance of becoming.

Consider how the Wild Woman archetype is fundamentally lunar in her nature. She does not maintain a constant brightness like artificial light but moves through phases of expression and retreat, creation and gestation, outward manifestation and inward renewal. The moon reminds us that our natural state is not perpetual productivity but rhythmic pulsation—a truth our bodies understand even as our minds rebel against it.

The story of La Selkie, the seal woman, speaks directly to this lunar wisdom. Like the moon that disappears from sight but never ceases to exist, the selkie must return to her watery depths, becoming invisible to the human world that would keep her perpetually present and available. Her disappearance is not abandonment but sacred necessity—the soul’s requirement for immersion in its own element before it can return, renewed, to relationship.

Our modern consciousness has forgotten this lunar intelligence. We live in a solar-dominated paradigm that values constant visibility, linear achievement, and uninterrupted production. We have created a world of perpetual noon, banishing the mystery of midnight. Yet the moon continues her patient teaching, showing us through her own body that emptiness is not failure but preparation for fullness, that darkness is not absence but a different kind of presence.

The moon also teaches us about the relationship between illumination and reflection. Unlike the sun that generates its own light, the moon offers the profound wisdom of borrowed luminosity—showing us how to receive and reflect rather than always needing to originate. In a culture that worships originality and independence, the moon reminds us of our fundamental interconnectedness and our capacity to magnify beauty that comes from beyond ourselves.

In many indigenous cultures, women’s bodies were understood as embodiments of this lunar wisdom—not through romantic essentialism but through lived experience of cyclical change. The synchronization of menstrual cycles with lunar phases in pre-industrial societies offered a physical connection to cosmic rhythms that has been disrupted by artificial light and disconnection from natural environments. This separation has consequences beyond the physical—it represents a severing from an entire mode of consciousness that understands time as circular rather than linear, that recognizes endings as preludes to beginnings.

The story of Vasalisa carries lunar wisdom in its heart. When she journeys to the witch Baba Yaga, she travels at night, guided by the light of a skull lantern that illuminates only the next step of the path—never the entire journey. This is lunar knowledge: partial, immediate, changing with each phase rather than the solar certainty that claims to see everything at once. The skull lantern teaches us to trust incremental illumination, to value knowledge that reveals itself gradually rather than demanding complete understanding before we begin.

For contemporary humans, reclaiming lunar consciousness means challenging fundamental assumptions about progress, success, and even selfhood. It means recognizing that our creative and spiritual lives have winters and summers, times of visible production and invisible germination. It means honoring the necessary deaths and rebirths in our development rather than expecting constant growth. It means creating spaces in our communities and economies for fallow periods, for incubation, for the sacred dark.

For women, reconciliation with lunar wisdom often means healing the shame associated with natural cycles and fluctuations—learning to honor rather than override the body’s rhythms, finding strength in receptivity as well as action, valuing intuitive knowledge alongside rational thought. It means recognizing that vulnerability and strength, like the waxing and waning moon, are not opposites but phases of the same wholeness.

For men, lunar consciousness offers liberation from the exhausting demand for constant performance and unwavering certainty. It invites reconnection with emotional tides, with cycles of energy and rest, with the wisdom of periodically retreating from action to reflection. It challenges the notion that masculine worth is measured by unceasing productivity and emotional consistency.

The moon’s appearance in our dreams and creative work often signals an invitation to this deeper cyclical awareness. When the Wild Woman howls at the moon in stories, she is acknowledging her kinship with this celestial teacher, recognizing herself in its perpetual transformation. She understands what our ancestors knew: that the moon is not just something we see but something we are—changing, dying, renewing, and reborn, again and again.

Our collective healing depends on restoring this lunar wisdom alongside solar consciousness. We need both the clarity of midday and the mystery of midnight, both the courage to stand in full illumination and the willingness to navigate by starlight when the moon is dark. We need economic and social systems that honor cycles of activity and rest, spaces that welcome both articulate knowledge and wordless knowing.

The moon teaches us patience above all—patience with ourselves as we move through necessary phases, patience with others as they navigate their own cycles, patience with the unfolding of insight and understanding that cannot be rushed. In a world of immediate gratification and constant urgency, this patience may be the moon’s most radical teaching.

Let us then look to the night sky with new eyes, recognizing in that shifting silver light our own nature—impermanent, cyclical, mysterious, and whole. Let us remember what it means to be creatures of tide and cycle, of darkness and light. Let us become like the moon—fully ourselves in each phase of becoming, reflecting light without apology, embracing change as our constancy, and finding in our very mutability the secret of our endurance.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Sacred Union: Shakti’s Dance with Creation

In the luminous space where East meets West, where primal stories converge across cultures, we find profound resonance between the Wild Woman archetype and the concept of Shakti—the primordial feminine energy that pulses through all existence. Where the wolf-woman of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ tales embodies the untamed wisdom of the natural world, Shakti represents the cosmic creative force that brings universes into being. Both speak to a power that has been systematically suppressed yet remains inextinguishable—a power that flows through bodies, ecosystems, and dimensions.

Shakti is not merely a theological concept but a lived experience of the dynamic, generative principle that animates matter itself. She is the rippling undercurrent beneath the apparent solidity of things, the quickening impulse that transforms potential into manifestation. In tantric understanding, this creative energy is not separate from consciousness but intimately intertwined with it. Shiva (consciousness) without Shakti (energy) remains in dreamless stillness; Shakti without Shiva would be raw power without direction. It is their eternal dance, their sacred union, that generates the ten thousand things of existence.

This tantric vision challenges our Western dualism that has severed mind from body, spirit from matter, masculine from feminine. It suggests that creation emerges not from dominance of one principle over another but from their mutual recognition and harmonious engagement. The wild soul stories echo this wisdom when they show us that true power comes not from controlling nature but from aligning with its intelligence, not from subjugating the body but from listening deeply to its knowing.

The tantric paths recognize what our industrial civilization has forgotten—that the body itself is a temple of transformative wisdom, that sensation is not the enemy of spiritual development but potentially its vehicle. The yogic traditions that grew from tantric soil understood that energy moves through specific channels in the body, that consciousness can be cultivated through attention to breath and subtle perception. This mirrors the Wild Woman’s teaching that our physical form carries ancestral memory, that our instincts connect us to a lineage of wisdom predating written language.

Consider the story of the Red Shoes, where a young woman is severed from her authentic desire and creative expression, leading to a compulsive dancing that nearly destroys her. This tale speaks to what happens when Shakti energy is repressed, denied, or channeled through artificial means—it does not disappear but becomes distorted, potentially destructive. The creative force that could give birth to art, insight, or authentic relationship instead manifests as addiction, obsession, or self-sabotage. Both tantric wisdom and the wolf tales recognize that creative energy must be acknowledged and consciously engaged rather than suppressed.

The tantric approach to sexuality—often misunderstood and commodified in Western contexts—originally represented a radical recognition that the same energy that creates new life can, when consciously channeled, create new consciousness. This is not about technique or pleasure seeking but about recognizing that desire itself is a sacred force that can be transformed and redirected toward liberation. The wolf stories similarly show us characters who must reclaim their instinctual nature, including their sexuality, not as a capitulation to animal impulse but as integration of a power that, when honored, leads to greater wholeness.

Creativity in the tantric understanding is not the privilege of a specialized class of “creatives” but the birthright of all conscious beings. We do not need to generate creative energy but rather to remove the blockages that prevent its natural flow. This parallels the Wild Woman teaching that we must “un-tame” ourselves—not to become chaotic but to return to an original state of authentic being before domestication limited our expression. The tantric practices of mantra, yantra, and ritual movement serve to dissolve these blockages, creating channels through which creative energy can flow unimpeded.

The tantric practitioner learns to recognize that seemingly opposing qualities—pleasure and pain, creation and destruction, emptiness and form—are not antithetical but complementary aspects of a unified experience. This wisdom appears in wolf tales through characters who must embrace both joy and sorrow, both birth and death, to claim their full humanity. The skeleton woman who must be embraced despite her fearsome appearance, the Baba Yaga who is both terrifying and essential to the hero’s development—these figures teach us that wholeness comes not from pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain but from developing the capacity to hold both.

For contemporary women, reconnecting with Shakti through tantric principles offers a pathway to reclaiming creative and sexual energy from systems that have commodified, weaponized, or shamed these forces. It means recognizing that creativity doesn’t belong only in designated artistic activities but flows through cooking, relationship, problem-solving, and the creation of meaning itself. It means honoring the body not as an object to be perfected for external approval but as a vessel of wisdom and power deserving reverence.

For men, tantric understanding offers liberation from the isolating myth of self-sufficiency and the pressure to pursue achievement at the expense of embodiment. It invites recognition of the feminine principle within themselves, not as weakness but as essential to wholeness. It challenges the notion that desire must be either indulged mindlessly or repressed completely, offering instead pathways to transform and elevate creative and sexual energy toward higher purposes.

Our collective healing requires this reintegration of Shakti wisdom—recognizing that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of relationship with the creative feminine principle that sustains life. When we see nature as resource rather than source, when we extract without reciprocity, when we prioritize production over regeneration, we enact the same suppression of Shakti that manifests in individual lives as depression, addiction, and spiritual emptiness.

The tantric practices offer practical pathways for this reintegration—conscious breathing that dissolves the boundary between inner and outer, meditation that reveals the dance of energy within apparent stillness, ritual that transforms ordinary action into sacred engagement with life force. These practices don’t require rejection of the modern world but rather bringing new awareness to how we inhabit it, infusing our technologies, relationships, and creative acts with conscious intention.

The ultimate teaching of both tantric wisdom and wolf stories is that transformative power lies not outside us but within the very fabric of our embodied experience. We need not seek salvation elsewhere but rather remove the veils that prevent us from recognizing the sacredness already permeating our existence. The creative force that brings worlds into being flows through our most ordinary acts when we bring awareness to them, when we recognize that consciousness and energy, witness and expression, stillness and movement are not opposites but lovers in an eternal embrace.

Let us then approach our creativity—whether expressed through art, relationship, thought, or the creation of our lives themselves—as sacred practice. Let us recognize in our desires not distractions to overcome but divine energy seeking conscious expression. Let us move through the world not as disconnected minds dragging reluctant bodies but as embodiments of that original creative impulse that continues to unfold the cosmos in its infinite play of form and emptiness, darkness and light.