I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Jungian storyteller and writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés shares the tale of the red shoes. You may have heard it before. In it, a girl wants red shoes very very much. She gets them, and then they force her to dance until she almost dies.
I already wrote about being feral vs being wild in relation to this story. Today I want to share one of the traps identified by Estés that the girl with the red shoes falls into, the trap of sneaking the life she really wants versus living it out in the open, and thus being split in two.
In the story, the girl has lost her handmade red shoes after being taken in by an old woman who forces her to conform to social pressures and expectations. The old woman takes the girl to a posh shoemaker in town for more appropriate shoes than the old red shoes she loved so much. In her drive to be herself and express her passions, the girl finds a new pair of red shoes, a dangerous cursed pair of red shoes, and fools the old woman into buying them for her.
Estés describes what has happened: The child’s desire for soul drives her to sneak the red shoes past the old woman. She wants to express her soul life. But, controlled by the old woman—representing society and our own internalized controls which force us to bow down to what society wants—she can’t do it openly. And so part of herself becomes her shadow, her disowned parts, the parts she can’t accept or express openly.
Estés writes of the shadow:
The shadow… can contain the divine, the luscious, beautiful, and powerful aspects of personhood. For women especially, the shadow almost always contains very fine aspects of being that are forbidden or given little support by her culture. At the bottom of the well in the psyches of too many women lies the visionary creator, the astute truth-teller, the far-seer, the one who can speak well of herself without denigration, who can face herself without cringing, who works to perfect her craft. The positive impulses in shadow for women in our culture most often revolve around permission for the creation of a handmade life.
The longer you repress these parts of yourself, the stronger they get. If you do not go after what you want out in the open, eventually you will find yourself sneaking around to get it instead. But that is not a long term solution.
Estés writes:
You see, there is something in the wild soul that will not let us subsist forever on piecemeal intake. Because in actuality, it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then be content with no more….
Truly, we know that we cannot really subsist on sneaking little sips of life. The wild force in a woman’s soul demands that she have access to it all. We can stay alert and take in things that are right for us.
Do you find yourself sneaking anything you want? Or are you living openly as who you truly and most authentically and most beautifully are?