Reclaiming the Wild Woman

On healing the fractured feminine psyche & remembering our instinctual power

For six thousand years, the wild feminine has been exiled, hunted, tamed, and caged. Her instincts cut off, her fire dimmed. Yet she hasn’t disappeared. She still waits in our bodies, our wombs, our voices, for us to remember her.

The Atrophying of the Feminine Psyche

The wild feminine has been under siege for millennia. Suppressed in our homes, hunted on the streets, and caged in the natural world. Just as forests have been cut down to satisfy man’s hunger for power, so too has the internal wilderness of the feminine been dominated and eradicated - until she has become all but forgotten.

Today, few women remain truly connected to their wild nature. Like the endangered wild wolves, they survive on the edges - instinctual, untamed, and under constant threat by the forces that seek to domesticate them.

The instinctual feminine is ancient, intuitive, and deeply knowing. She is the wolf mother: soft yet fierce, playful yet protective, sensual yet wise.

This deep-rooted feminine instinct has been dulled and systematically suppressed under patriarchal systems that reward compliance and punish ferocity.

In the Shadow of the Maiden

In patriarchal culture, women are taught to be accommodating, agreeable, and palatable. The obsession with the maiden archetype, especially eternal youth, has evolved into a cultural pathology.

Body hair is removed to make us look like little girls. Aging is feared and wrinkles are shamed. Women are expected to stay forever young, always desirable to the male gaze.

This fixation borders on the pedophilic: women are infantilized, groomed to remain in a pre-adult state of passivity and prettiness.

A stark reflection of the infantilised feminine is found in mainstream pornography’s obsession with the “barely legal girl” and “daddy” dynamic - a fetishization of youthful innocence, often coupled with incestuous undertones and power-based domination.

This isn’t just about fantasy; it mirrors a culture that keeps women frozen in girlhood, prized for their passivity, their submission, and sexualised from an early age.

It reveals a society that, albeit covertly, celebrates the younger-girl/older-man dynamic as a living embodiment of the unresolved father-daughter wound.

Another shadow aspect of the maiden is the damsel in distress - helpless, passive, and waiting to be saved. This narrative has been deeply embedded in our collective consciousness through Hollywood and popular media, to the point where many women carry a longing to be chosen, claimed and made complete by someone outside of themselves. We wait around for the knight in shining armor to rescue us from our life, instead of stepping into our power and creating the life we desire on our own.

In this way, the shadow of the maiden shows up as the belief that we are not capable of creating the life we long for on our own - that we need a man to build it for us, to choose us, to lead the way. It’s the internalized story that our power lies not within, but in being desired, saved, or guided by someone else.

Navigating the pressures placed on us since girlhood is deeply taxing - on our minds, bodies, and overall well-being. On top of that, we’re relentlessly bombarded by media and advertising urging us to preserve our youth through costly, often harmful procedures. Our bodies are constantly scrutinized and evaluated, while natural processes such as menstruation are shamed and taught to be hidden at all costs.

When so much of our precious energy is spent accommodating the male gaze and seeking approval from a patriarchal culture, our psyches begin to fragment.

Do you see how patriarchal consciousness disconnects us from our own power so deeply that we begin to outsource it to the very forces that feed off our disempowerment? How we hand over our instincts, our truth, our inner knowing to a predatory system disguised as saviour?

The Madonna/Whore Split

Not only has the feminine been infantilised and domesticated out of her instinctual wild nature, but her psyche has also been deeply fragmented by the constant policing of her body and sexuality through the lens of patriarchal religion and culture.

From a young age, girls and women are taught to be desirable, but not too sexy. To be pure, yet not frigid. Fun and flirty, yet not too loud or outspoken. These rules shift depending on culture, but are especially present in the Western world. We are trained to embody the light, the pleasing, the acceptable - while banishing the parts that are wild, erotic, and instinctual. The dark feminine is both desired and demonised.

This split keeps us fractured. Never whole. Never home in ourselves.

This is what we call the Madonna-Whore split.

The Madonna is the eternal virgin - pure, modest, selfless, and nurturing. Patriarchy loves her.

The Whore is the opposite - sexual, untamed, desiring, and therefore exiled.

And yet, no matter how much the church and other patriarchal forces have tried to suppress or eradicate her, the dark feminine lives on.

In this culture, she has been pushed into the shadows - into the dark alleyways where prostitutes risk their lives to survive, or into dimly lit strip clubs where men pay to glimpse her in the undulating curve of a spine or the shimmer of sweat on bare skin.

And yet it wasn’t always this way.

Before patriarchy, the dark feminine was celebrated, not feared. She was honoured in goddess cultures across the ancient world, where sexuality and spirit were not split apart, but woven together.

Godesses such as Inanna, Ishtar, and Hathor embodied both fierce erotic power and deep feminine wisdom. They were worshipped as whole beings.

In these cultures, the figure of the sacred prostitute, also known as the temple priestess, held a revered place in society. Her body was not shamed but seen as a vessel for the divine. Through sacred sexuality, she offered healing, initiation, and remembrance.

Patriarchy fears the dark feminine like nothing else. And so by exiling her, it created deep distortions within both women and men. Women, however, bear the brunt of this exile - constantly forced to walk a fine and invisible line between what is acceptable and what is not.

To embody both erotic power and nurturing depth is still considered taboo. To be both soft and sovereign, sensual and self-sourced, disrupts the current paradigm.

But it is precisely through reclaiming these disowned parts that have been shamed, silenced, and forbidden that the feminine psyche begins to mend.

Wholeness does not come through perfection or purity. It comes through integration. And when we welcome back the parts we were taught to fear, we begin to remember what it truly means to be a woman. Not a distorted projection or a performance, but a whole being, layered, wild, erotic, and deeply alive.

The Initiation Into Wholeness

The feminine wound cannot be fully healed until we reclaim our sovereignty and re-integrate the fragmented self.

This journey is not about becoming a new version of ourselves but about remembering who we’ve always been beneath the conditioning.

It’s an initiation.

And like all initiations, it often begins with rupture: heartbreak, betrayal, or deep grief.

It can also surface as a deep, primal longing for the wild, for the untamed, for the raw. A fierce urge to cast off the shackles of conformity and rebel against the systems that have kept us small for far too long.

Sometimes it comes as a clear vision, an impulse to disappear into the woods with nothing but a backpack and a tent. You may not know why or how, only that something in you aches for it. And before you can explain it, you’ve told your friends, your family, your workplace: you won’t be reachable this week.

Listen to those pulls. To the longings. The desires. They are all guiding posts. They are flickers of wilderness, little wild poppies planted in your heart and womb for you to follow.

However she shows up in our life - we must thank the wild feminine. For her return is a sign of our health. A sign that our psyche is no longer numb or subdued but awakening - to the possibility of a fuller, truer, and yes, wilder life.

We are given a choice: to cling to the illusion of safety or step into the unknown.

The wild woman doesn’t wait for permission. She does not ask or wait to be saved. She knows the way home is through the dark woods, not around it.

The Path to Healing: Rewilding

How do we reclaim our fullness in a world built on our fragmentation?

We rewild.

We turn toward what is feral, untamed, and true inside us. We listen to our bodies, our dreams, and our desires.

We sing, we paint, we howl.

We gather in circles with other women and speak our truths.

We honor our cycles, our blood, our pleasure.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote:

“The wild nature carries the bundles for healing… She is both vehicle and destination.”

To rewild is not to regress - it is to return to what is primal and whole within us.

I believe we are all, both men and women, in deep need of rewilding. But I also hold that women, especially, need a healthy dose of wilderness in their lives to be truly well.

Our bodies mirror nature so intimately through our wombs, our cycles, and our ability to bring life into this world.

It’s no coincidence we call the Earth Mother. Or the ocean. Or the moon.
All three, I believe, hold deep ancestral medicine for women.

For women, our medicine lives in nature, in ritual, in creative expression, and in sisterhood.

And in the deep reclamation of our gifts, our magic, and our power.

The majority of spiritual traditions were created by men for men. Many women, when they begin to hear the whispers of their soul, when they start to question whether the life they are living is truly it, will naturally seek out the spiritual world.

And while that world can offer its gifts, it can also, at times, lead to further fragmentation, as much of new age spirituality and Eastern philosophy still operates within patriarchal consciousness.

This is not a warning against practicing yoga, meditation, or exploring wisdom traditions that speak to you.

Not at all.

But please remember this. No external teacher is needed for you to come home to yourself. No complex theory or rigid spiritual practice done at a certain hour each day is required for you to become whole.

You already are.

You contain everything you need within.

And often, time in nature and time with other women is all it takes to remember.

To all my wild women and the ones walking the path of awakening, I see you. I honor you. Thank you for continuously disrupting the systems and powers that be with your very presence.

This piece is an ode to you. To my love for you. To my reverence.

May more and more women rise, reclaiming our wilderness, our instincts, and our inherent wholeness.