Readings: Introduction and Chapter 1 of Women Who Run with the Wolves

As we begin, it's essential to establish a foundation for who is really authoring these stories—who is calling us inward to tend to the soul-deep longing for the cultivation of creativity and erotic expression.

La Que Sabe is the one who knows. She is the primordial woman inside of us who understands the soul's longing and feeds us information—soul knowing—to guide us into the most life-force, essence-honoring directions. She is our internal compass, the voice beneath the noise. Before we can descend, create, or offer anything to the world, we must first meet the one who knows. We must learn to hear her voice in the quiet, to trust her guidance when the world grows loud, to follow her even when she leads us into the dark.

This month is an introduction—a formal meeting with the guide who will walk with us through every season of this study. We learn her names, her nature, her ways. We practice listening for her whisper beneath the chatter of our domesticated minds. We begin to understand that she has been waiting for us, patient as stone, old as bone.

"La Que Sabe knows the personal past and the ancient past, for she has survived generation after generation and is old beyond time. She is the archivist of feminine intent. She is the keeper of the traditions for women." — Chapter 1, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Readings: Part 1 of Chapter 10, Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life (first 13 paragraphs)

"Creativity is a shapechanger. One moment it takes this form, the next that. It is like a dazzling spirit who appears to us all, yet is hard to describe for no one agrees on what they saw in that brilliant flash."

This month, we explore the phenomena of the creative lifeforce—not as a thing to be captured or controlled, but as a living presence that moves through us in forms we cannot predict. What is creativity, really? Who has access to it? And how might we cultivate a relationship with this dazzling spirit who refuses to be pinned down, who shape-shifts the moment we think we've understood her?

She appears as a poem one day, a conversation the next. She shows up in the way you arrange flowers in a vase, the way you solve a problem at work, the way you comfort a child or rearrange furniture or suddenly understand something you've been puzzling over for years. Creativity is not confined to canvas or page—she is the force that moves through all acts of making, mending, and meaning-making. She is the impulse to bring something new into being, to see with fresh eyes, to respond to life with aliveness.

But we have been taught to look for her only in certain places, in certain forms. We have been told she belongs to artists, to the specially gifted, to those who have been anointed by institutions or markets. And so we miss her when she appears in our own lives wearing unexpected clothing

Readings: The Myth of La Llorona and paragraphs 14–21 of Chapter 10 (The Pollution of the Wild Soul, Poison in the River), plus Chapter 2: Stalking the Intruder: The Beginning Initiation

Companion Archetypes: Lilith and Ariadne

During April's study, we walk with three different archetypes to make sense of the different ways in which a woman's creative lifeforce and oracular nature might be mishandled by a destructive animus—and the cost of such encounters.

La Llorona shows us what happens when a woman's river is poisoned. Lilith refused domestication and was exiled for it. Ariadne gave her thread to a man who abandoned her. These are cautionary tales, but they are also tales of what survives.

"This tale uses the metaphors of the beautiful woman and the pure river of life to describe a woman's creative process in its normal state. But here, when interactive with a destructive animus, both the woman and the river decline. Then a woman whose creative life is dwindling experiences, like La Llorona, a sensation of poisoning, deformation, a desire to kill off everything." — Chapter 10, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Readings: Chapter 4: The Mate: Union with the One Who Knows, Chapter 5: When the Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Chapter 10 (Man on the River, Taking Back the River)

May's study is a continuation of April's work as we explore how our outward interactions with the destructive animus reflect the state of the internal man. There are unconscious aspects of our soul self that we seek to externalize in relationships and dynamics with men—but these aspects are actually part of our own internal soul nature. They long to be met, fed, developed, and brought into wholeness.

The man on the river is not just the lover who disappoints us, the father who failed us, the partner who cannot see us. He is also the inner masculine force that either protects our creative waters or pollutes them. He is the part of us that can build structures to hold our wildness or build cages to contain it. He is the voice that says "you can" or "you can't," the hand that opens the door or locks it shut.

The work of May is learning to stop running from what terrifies us and instead offer it tenderness. The underdeveloped animus transforms when we are willing to meet him with courage—to see him not as enemy but as the lost part of ourselves that needs our attention, our compassion, our willingness to bring him home. This is shadow work. This is soul work. This is the work of taking back the river by reclaiming the inner masculine from its destructive patterns and teaching it, slowly, to serve life instead of death.

Readings: Review of April and May material on the Animus, with supplementary references from Marion Woodman, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Carl Jung

We’ll meet weekly from June 18th - July 9th. This 4-week semester is dedicated to reviewing and integrating everything we learned in April and May around the Animus—deepening our understanding through the lens of Jungian depth psychology.

The summer is for digestion, for letting the seeds we planted in spring take root in the dark soil of the unconscious. We move more slowly. We read more deeply. We allow the concepts to settle into our bodies, to become felt knowledge rather than intellectual understanding.

The summer zine and audio guides will walk you through this review alongside supplementary perspectives on animus development, supporting you in tending this inner marriage—the sacred conjunction between the wild feminine and a protective, generative animus. This is the hieros gamos, the holy wedding, the union of opposites that creates new life. We learn what it means to become a lifegiver—not just to others, but to ourselves, to our own creative projects, to the parts of us that have been waiting to be born.

Readings: Chapter 11: Heat: Retrieving a Sacred Sexuality and Chapter 12: Marking Territory: The Boundaries of Rage and Forgiveness

As we return from summer, we dive into the erotic and how erotic cultivation is not only about sexuality; it also includes knowing where to put our anger, intensity, and passion.

Lilith teaches us about desire that refuses domestication, about the wild hunger that will not be tamed or shamed or made palatable for others. Baubo reminds us that obscene laughter and the bared body can break spells of depression and disconnection—that sometimes the cure for despair is to lift our skirts and cackle at the absurdity of it all. Crescent Moon Bear shows us what it means to retrieve the fire-ember of self when we've been burned, to go back into the ashes and find the coal that still glows red.

And the work of marking territory teaches us that rage, properly channeled, is part of our creative and erotic inheritance. It is the force that says "no" when we need to say no, that draws the line in the sand, that protects what is sacred from what would profane it. Rage is not the opposite of eros—it is eros defending itself.

Together, these figures offer medicine for women who have forgotten they are allowed to want, to hunger, to burn and to protect what is theirs. They remind us that the erotic is not something we perform for others but something we cultivate for ourselves, a heat we tend in the center of our being that radiates outward and warms everything it touches.

Readings: Chapter 10: Clear Water (The Little Match Girl section)

The Little Match Girl is one of the most haunting cautionary tales in Estés' work. This month we study what happens when a woman, cut off from her creative lifeforce, begins to fantasize rather than create—burning through her matches one by one, preferring the hallucination of warmth to the hard work of tending to a real fire.

She stands in the cold, striking match after match, watching visions appear in the flame: a warm stove, a feast, a loving grandmother. Each vision is beautiful, but each one disappears when the match burns out. And so she strikes another, and another, until she has burned through all her matches and frozen to death in the street.

This is what happens when we use our creative energy to escape rather than engage. We burn through our resources creating fantasies of the life we want instead of building the actual life. We spend our fire on daydreams instead of on the difficult, unglamorous work of making something real.

We explore: Where do we escape rather than engage? What are we afraid to feel if we stop fantasizing? How do we know the difference between visionary dreaming and dissociative fantasy? This month asks us to be ruthlessly honest about the ways we avoid our own lives, and to begin the work of bringing our creative fire back to the real world, where it can actually warm us.

Readings: Chapter 10: Clear Water (La Acequia section) and Chapter 11: Heat: Retrieving a Sacred Sexuality

La acequia is the irrigation ditch—the channel we carve so the river can reach the places that need water. This month we ask: What does it mean to be a good channel for creativity? What structures, practices, rituals, and rhythms keep the river flowing to our creative fields?

We return to Chapter 11 to deepen our exploration of sacred sexuality as part of this channeling work. This is the erotic as ecology: understanding that we are not separate from the earth, that our creativity is her creativity, that what flows between the thighs of the earth flows through us.

Readings: Chapter 10: Clear Water (Baba Yaga and the Three Hares)

Baba Yaga is the great initiator—the one who asks, Can you sort the seeds? Can you tend the fire? Can you face what terrifies you and still do the work?

In this myth, we find the pattern for renewing creative fire when it has nearly gone out. The three hares represent what remains when everything else has been burned away: the essential spark that can reignite the whole.

This month we explore what it means to be sent into the forest, to serve the wild initiator, and to return with fire in our hands.

Readings: Chapter 15: Canto Hondo: The Deep Song, with reference back to Chapter 1 (La Loba, La Que Sabe)

The winter semester is for integration and return. We explore canto hondo—the deep song—and the psychic mother world where the soul song lives.

After a year of meeting our guide, understanding what creativity is, confronting what wounds it, repairing the animus, reclaiming the erotic, clearing the channel, and retrieving fire, we ask: What parts of us want to be sung into being?

We return to La Loba, La Que Sabe, who sings over the bones and collects the bones. This is a period of review—gathering everything we've learned and letting it become song. The winter zine and audio guide will support you in locating the deep soul song that has been forming all year in the underground of your being.