The Young Woman that Ran with Wolves
A Siberian Story of Longing and Becoming Who you Really Are
LISTEN TO THE STORY BEFORE YOU PROCEED.
I told this story gathered on a rainy morning in Sicily in a room with 17 individuals from around the world and spanning generations. I was reminded once again of our shared humanity and how when it comes down to it everyone loves a story.
There is something so sweet to me about seeing a 50, 60, or even a 70 year old man get a little tear pooling in their eyes and a glint of glee as they sit like children and take in an old tale.
These stories are so much bigger than us and all at once they are totally and completely human sized.
Every time I tell or hear this story I think of my own mother. I think of the moment when I realized for the first time that she is a woman and simply “mother” with all the burdens, blessings, and tropes that come with that title. I remember the moment that I was struck open with the realization that she had unfulfilled dreams like we all do, that she had been wounded by time and loss and things that didn’t make sense. That like me she probably felt all at once ancient and 5 years old on a bicycle.
There is this term sonder that speaks to this gap in our young understanding. Sonder is the awareness that other people have their own complex inner reality, their own web of being and experiencing and feeling.
We sometimes forget don’t we? We are so absorbed in the “I” and the “me” of it all. But really what we see in these initiation stories again and again is how adolescent that really is.
Maybe a piece of maturation is this. Sonder.
I ask myself how I may treat, speak, and be with people differently when I’m in that awareness.
When I hear this story I can’t help but wonder if maybe it had been a very long time since Kitner had been a wolf. If she had perhaps set aside her wolfy skin to be a wife and to tend to her young daughter in the village.
I wonder when I listen if there was a moment before she took that first 100 steps in the story if she had to pause with her legs trembling a little and say to herself “right, we’ve done this, this is also me, I RUN, I am wild still, and this is my true skin too.”
I often hear mothers tell me that they have “lost themselves” or that they feel they can’t remember who they were and there is a real ache around that loss.
This doesn’t apply only to mothers I see it men and women of all ages.
And when we’re distanced from our skin for a very long time we can start to think that we’ve lost something essential.
Sometimes we have.
But never irrevocably…
And sometimes we’ve just been living and maturing into a different facet of ourselves and the work isn’t to return to what was before we were “mother” or whatever iteration we’re experiencing, which is not possible, but to be our many selves.
And at the end of our lives to be as faceted and dimensional as possible. Ancient Chinese Medicine says this is the goal. That full maturation is that we learn to express and be in all our many expressions, to refine how that is expressed and to cultivate our natural gifts and talents along the way.
To run with the wolves as it were and to also be “that.”
We are more than thing.
We can be sometimes a wolf
And sometimes a woman…
Dangerous Women is beginning soon. This is a sacred community, a mentorship, a teaching space. We’ll wrap ourselves in ancient story, explore what it is to be our most audacious selves, connect with personal vision, free the unconscious mind from outdated programming, and tend to our many selves.
Tiered pricing for those interested in deeper coaching work and lower pricing for those women gathering only for the story and somatic work.
Monthly guidance, live sessions, rituals, guest speakers and more await.