I think I lost my intuition.

I remember uttering this desperate cry to a newly met woman at a random rooftop part in LA.

It was Fall 2019 and I just finished a 7-year old relationship, dealing with waves of emotions I have not experienced before.

I felt lost.

Not like we sometimes do in the middle of a busy street in a new city looking for directions.

I felt like I lost some integral part of myself – some deep knowing, discernment and a sense of who I am.

I just realised I did not know what intuition was anymore and my sense of worthiness that was so defined by my ex-partner.

I think you would enjoy reading women who run with the wolves – she said with a spark in her eye as I hastily noted down the title.

She emanated something I wanted – some warmth, but also playfulness. Unabashed passion and flow in her movement.

I felt as if I was let in on a secret that travelled in whispers.

That Fall I went back home to cold and grey Poland to spend two months couped up at a rented airbnb to give myself s p a c e.

I remember the night when I first opened the book and learned about the Wild Woman – the female soul, the source of the feminine.

You can call this powerful psychological nature the instinctive nature, but Wild Woman is the force which lies behind that.

(…)

You can call it the innate, the basic nature of women. You can call it the indigenous, the intrinsic nature of women. In poetry, it might be called the “Other” or the “seven oceans of the universe”, or “the far woods”, or “The Friend”.

But because it is tacit, prescient, and visceral, among cantandoras it is called the wise knowing or nature.

(…)

Without her, women are without ears to hear her soul talk or to register the chiming of their own inner rhythms.

Without her, women’s inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand, and large parts of their days are spent in a semi-paralysing ennui or else wishful thinking. Without her, women lose the sureness of their soulfooting.

Without her, they forget why they are here, they hold on when they would best hold out. Without her, they take too little, or nothing at all. Without her, they are silent when they are in fact on fire.

(…)

When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized, and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego – one’s own or those belonging to her.

(…)

Wild Woman is the health of all women.

(…)

Her cycles change, her symbolic representations change, but in essence, she does not change. She is what she is and she is whole. She canalizes through women. If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If they are free, she is free.

Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again.

Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural.

Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.

– Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Esther Pinkola

———

That night I cried as I read about archetypal women who, just like me, lost connection with their intuitions and the vibrant energy of creation that forms the basis of life on Earth.

I grieved the parts of me who once so vital were now dimmed and conditioned to hide themselves to keep others happy and receive love and connection I did not know how to offer myself from within.

I felt reassured connecting with the pain of women around the world, those in the past and in the future, who will make the same mistakes and lose themselves in the name of loyalty and care.

I found a women’s bible that I wish I had as I was growing up and learning to hide my period, ignore my cyclical nature and repress my emotions in the name of reason.

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control.

(…)

It means to establish territory, to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and to act on one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.

I was called to come back home – home to myself.