My first memory of the book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” is to see it on my mother’s nightstand in the 90s when I was still a child. The book cover intrigued me, with its light colors and intriguing title. I remember taking it in my hands more than once and leafing through it, even if it was an "adult" book. My mother had already told me that inside there were fairy tales, but that I was still too young to understand the rest. But because it was about fairy tales, it attracted me even more, since from an early age the vocation to listen and tell stories was already emerging in me.

My first reading was almost ten years ago, at the age of 22. It was a beautiful, powerful first encounter. I understood much of what Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés meant, but still not as deep as I would a few years later. At that time, the book seemed to address some fundamental issues in my life, especially with regard to emotional and family concerns. As a young woman, I had not yet experienced much of what the author calls the primordial archetype: the Wild Woman.

The Wild Woman revealed herself in my life after an unexpected loss when my first pregnancy ended abruptly. The book's images returned with all their strength in the most difficult moments of miscarriage, and from that moment on the book became a spiritual and practical guide, for personal overcoming and self-knowledge. I never imagined that a book could have so much power and keep revealing itself with each reading. The dynamics and strength of the wolves described so beautifully by the author became my way of life. From these readings and my self-realizations through them, the project of life's work was born.

A Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr. Estés delves deeply into fairy tales as a symbol for understanding the female soul and the paths of individuation. And it was with the help of the words of this great teacher that I understood that my mission was to take my discoveries to other women.

I already participated in women's self-help groups, activism groups for women's rights and well-being, and I had been on the path of storytelling for many years. After much study, preparation and a long gestation with the support of the NGO Casa de Lua in São Paulo, in 2015 the project “Healing Stories” was officially born.

Since then, I have been promoting Women Circles, mixing storytelling and my therapeutic experiences to help women access their inner worlds, pain and to elaborate their own obstacles, fears and poisonous actions. The common themes of the circles are inspired by the book, but each time with new content and different experiences - from the search for Creativity to the fight against Inner Predators and Emotional Dependence. The Healing Stories are part of something important, which necessarily goes through collaboration and mutual support between women: one listens to the other and sharing knowledge to reach powerful results of real change. I always end up “prescribing” a chapter or story from the book, as a true psychic remedy.

The book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” represents exactly this for me and other women: a balm for the soul.

I hear from many women that the book has promoted many changes in their lives. It is not for nothing that more workshops and reading groups appear around this book and its themes every day: the rescue it proposes is urgent.

This book and the sharing of the female experience from it allows us to understand the real meaning of what the Wild Woman is, both individually and collectively.

Over time, I realized that this is not a book that a woman finds: it finds her. Whether by a recommendation, by the hands of another woman, as an unexpected gift, reading a post that refers to it, or entering a bookstore at the right time and coming across it - perhaps not for the first time, but at the right one. And this is because it is not a book that needs to be understood only with our rational resources (despite its sometimes academic, sometimes poetic language), but with our emotional resources. These resources have the right moment in each person's life - men should also allow this book to come into their lives.

It is a book that, as my mother already knew, must be kept on the nightstand, for repeated consultation, almost like an oracle. It's amazing how we can open it in any passage and find the advice necessary for the moment in which we are living. It is impressive to read a story and let it work in our lives little by little, but in a certain and profound way. It is a book for a woman's lifetime.

*Text was written by Marianna Portela in 2017 at the request of Editora Rocco, the publishing house for the book “Women Who Run With The Wolves” in Brazil.