The Bones We Carry: La Loba, Midlife, and the Return of the Wild Woman

If you have attended a Wild Beauty Embodiment group, you are familiar with the invitation that comes at the close of our time together: an invitation to join one another in a howl. For some people, the first howl can feel strange. There is something vulnerable about making a sound that is not quite language, something that reaches beneath the social self and asks the body to speak in a different way. And yet, by the time we arrive at the end of our time together, the howl often feels less like an exercise and more like a remembering.

The invitation comes from one of the central stories in Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run with the Wolves, a book that has accompanied me for decades. I first encountered Estés' work in my twenties while studying expressive arts therapy, and I was drawn into the stories before I had language for what they were stirring in me. The stories seemed to belong to an older way of knowing, one rooted in image, instinct, psyche, and the natural world. I have returned to the book many times since then, and each time the stories meet me differently. One of the gifts of myth is that a story remains the same while we arrive carrying a different life. What once felt mysterious can become recognizable. What once seemed like metaphor can begin to feel like memory.

The story at the heart of Estés' first chapter is the story of La Loba, the Wolf Woman. La Loba lives in a hidden place in the desert, gathering the bones of wolves. She searches among the dry and forgotten places, collecting what has been scattered until she has assembled the skeleton of a wolf. When the bones are complete, she sings over them, and through her singing the wolf comes alive again and eventually runs back into the wild.

Estés uses La Loba as an image of the Wild Woman and of the instinctual life that can become buried beneath the adaptations required of us. What moves me most about the story is that La Loba does not create the wolf. She gathers what remains. She recognizes that something essential has survived, even when its living form is no longer visible.

I think about La Loba often when I work with women in midlife.

There is a particular kind of reckoning that can happen during these years. The children who once needed so much of us begin moving toward their own lives. Parents grow older. Relationships change. Work can lose some of its familiar meaning. The body enters a new landscape, with rhythms that are less predictable and often less willing to accommodate the pace at which we have always lived.

Beneath these visible changes, many women begin wondering where certain parts of themselves have gone.

There is the woman who used to make things simply because she loved making them, the woman who knew what she wanted before she learned to question whether she was allowed to want it, and the woman who could rest, play, create, wander, desire, or say no without explaining herself. These parts of us can become difficult to recognize after years of being responsible, productive, accommodating, and attentive to the needs of everyone around us.

Sometimes we don't realize we have lost contact with those parts because we became so skilled at living without them.

The body often knows before the mind does. It speaks through exhaustion, tension, longing, grief, pleasure, restlessness, tears, and the strange feeling that something is asking to change even when we cannot yet say what that something is.

We are often taught to treat such experiences as problems to solve. Embodiment offers another way of listening. Rather than asking the body to conform to our expectations, we begin developing a relationship with the body as a source of information and lived wisdom. We become curious about sensation, movement, breath, desire, contraction, expansion, and the subtle ways our bodies respond when something is true for us.

The gathering of bones in La Loba's story feels deeply resonant with embodiment. Embodiment can become a practice of remembering, a way of noticing the pieces of ourselves that have remained alive beneath years of adaptation. We gather those pieces slowly, with tenderness and without demanding that they immediately make sense.

The work is not to return to the woman we were before life changed us. We cannot go backward, and we don't need to. The woman who emerges in midlife carries more history, more complexity, more grief, and more wisdom than the woman who entered it. The work is to bring these parts back into relationship with the woman we have become.

La Loba's story does not end with gathering the bones. La Loba sings.

Gathering the bones is not the end of the work. Something must breathe life into what has been recovered. The song is an expression of the soul's voice, the sound that comes from somewhere deeper than performance or perfection. The song carries instinct, longing, grief, creativity, and aliveness.

This part of the process is why we howl.

At the close of our group, the howl becomes more than a reference to a story. The howl becomes an embodied act of recognition. We have spent our time together listening beneath familiar stories, noticing what our bodies have been carrying, gathering pieces of ourselves that may have been forgotten or set aside, and creating enough safety for something more instinctive to emerge.

When we howl together, we are not trying to sound beautiful. We are not performing for one another. We are letting the body make a sound that does not need to be translated into words. We are practicing the courage to be heard and the willingness to hear one another.

The howl carries something that ordinary conversation cannot. The howl is primal without being primitive, vulnerable without requiring explanation. The howl reminds us that we are creatures who belong to one another and to the living world around us. The howl gives voice to the part of us that knows how to call out, listen for an answer, and recognize belonging when it arrives.

The most important part of the howl is that we do it together. We are not howling alone in the wilderness, wondering whether anyone will hear us. We are surrounded by others who have listened, witnessed, and accompanied one another through the work. Our voices rise together, different in tone and texture, yet belonging to the same moment. The sound becomes a reminder that reclaiming our wildness does not require us to leave relationship behind. We become more fully ourselves in the presence of others who are willing to witness our becoming.

I hope the group members carry that experience with them when they leave the circle: not another set of instructions for becoming a better version of themselves, but a deeper familiarity with their own bodies and a renewed trust in what lives there.

The bones have been gathered. The song has begun. When we howl together, we remind one another that the Wild Woman was never lost. She was always there,  listening for us.

A Wild Beauty Inquiry

As you think about the season of life you are living now, what part of you is asking to be gathered back into relationship?

Rather than searching for an intellectual answer, bring the question into your body. Notice what happens as you imagine reconnecting with that part of yourself. Is there a sensation, an image, a memory, a movement, or a longing that arises?

Stay with whatever you notice without needing to explain it.

Then ask yourself: What would it mean to give that part of me a voice?