When I tell people the name of my book, Self-Care for the Wild Woman, something lights up in their eyes.
They always want to know more, and each time I am grateful once more that I was listening when the name dropped, fully-formed, into my consciousness, before I even knew what the book was about.
With curious and awake eyes, they ask me: “So… Who is the Wild Woman?
I’ll start with what she’s not.
She’s not the crazy drunken teenager raging at her parents and society and school and anything at all resembling a rule.
She’s not the too-much-too-fast reality TV star who finds that fame hasn’t taken away the hole inside.
She’s not the hag with matted hair and 17 cats, brewing potions in her forest hut with only her false eye for company.
Although she is in all of those women.
She is in each of us.
She’s in you.
And you.
And even you.
(Especially you.)
She is our inner wilderness.
She is beneath our shame, our fear, our doubt, our conditioning. Our judgements on judgements. She does not need everything or anything to make sense.
She does not need to understand or explain or justify or make excuses for existing.
She is the one we strangle when we do not speak our truth. It is she we betray when we silence ourselves to please another, or apologise before we speak.
It is she we drown when we dampen and disallow our desires, telling ourselves we are not worth that much.
She knows how healing it is to stomp and laugh and cry and let it all out and keep breathing, she knows how necessary it is to be held and touched, she knows how deeply we need to get out of our heads and into our bodies, and she knows how natural it is to howl at a full moon.
She loves to say no and mean it. She loves to say yes and feel it.
She is your free, wild nature, the nature in you, the you that is nature.
She loves daringly with her whole body, whole heart, whole being.
She trusts and falls and trusts again.
She knows the power of sitting in circle with her sisters, of tasting the truth, of being seen in her open vulnerability.
She devotes each day to opening a little more to life, to the life inside, to letting it in and letting her out.
She stands strong and wild and free and her emergence will shake and heal the Earth.
The writing of ‘Self-Care for the Wild Woman’ is taking me on journeys and adventures I never would have gone on without it. These adventures are teaching me the things I need to learn to be able to write the book. If you want to hear more about my journey, come and join me over in my private Facebook group, Unapologetically YOU. It’s a safe space where all of you is welcome, in all your ambitious and scared, brave and sensitive, spiritual and irreverent, wise and silly, perfectly imperfect, paradoxical truth. I look forward to getting to know you there.
Photo credit: Maria Schaefer Photography / Foter / CC BY-ND