The Joyous Body
Summary
The Joyous Body: Part Three of “The Dangerous Old Woman”
“It is the nature of the saplings to quake in the winds; hesitant, learning to hold their own places. But, the older trees, with their years of testing and being tested, they are the ones who, whether in the long stern winds or misty gales, sway the most. Less a bouquet of tentative trembling first-time buds, now much more the leaf-perfumed hips of a hundred wide women dancing—these old ones, regardless of form, sway, by heart, to the music that thunders through them.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés invites you to join her and the Dangerous Old Woman “at the fireside” once again for the third volume of her masterwork on the archetype of the wise woman. This six-session on-demand online program features original stories, poems, and psychological commentary on the challenges, remedies, and ancient knowings of the holy female body, “that which is not a dumb servant but a divine fellow traveler and consort.”
Session One
Bones: Listening for the Creation Song
The Ancient Bristlecone Pines
Archetypal personification: La Anciana, The Midwife Exemplar
On creating new life from old
On the cycle of entropy, death, and vital return
“The Scar Queen” prayer
Session Two
On the 10,000 Kinds of Beauty, on Ageless Beauty and True Self Love
Tree Leitmotif: The Forest for the Trees
Archetypal personification: Old Woman Truth, The Old Woman as “The Original”
Storyteller’s Story: The Beauty-teria
Story of “The Deer”
Decoration of the body
Women’s vicious competition
Beatrice Woods’ story
Story of the old woman in the ladies’ room
“Blessings for Bodies”
Session Three
“Las Barbas Platas, The Great Silverbeards: Making Peace with the Body
Tree Leitmotif: The Good Orcharder
Archetypal personification: the consort
Storyteller’s Story: “The Such-Lovely” Woman’s Tender Body
The challenges of menses, perimenopause, and menopause
Overcoming body shame
“The Homely Girl”
La panocha, the vulva
The body as radiant being
Session Four
The Old Scar Washer, “Little Clay Pot”
Tree Leitmotif: The Leaf Scar
Archetypal personification: The wounded healer
Storyteller’s Story: Taking the Father Home Again
On remarkable life emerging from the midst of the wound
On healing from the inside out
On finding meaning in the midst of the trauma
You did not die
Mercy for the body
Not the time of the breast alone
Add-on and removable parts
On the twists of fate that occur in life
Session Five
Tongue-cut Sparrow: How to Silence a Woman
Tree Leitmotif: The Scarlet and Vermillion Tree
Archetypal Personification: La Alma; The Soul as Pilot; The Visionary
Storyteller’s Story: How the White-Throated Sparrow Came to the New World
On regaining one’s true voice
On the still small voice
Story of Mary “Wings,” WWII cargo pilot
Story of how a bird and the soul flies
Women’s dreams
Story reference to truth-telling, caught talking to the birds
Memoria, Sabiduria, and other concepts that allow a woman to sing despite bad injuries and still fly free
Session Six
Táncoló Nagymamák, The Dancing Grandmothers
Tree Leitmotif: The Fairy-Ring Tree
Archetypal personification: Las Abuelitas, The Little Grandmothers
Storyteller’s Story: The Child Dying to Dust
On how when one is cruelly cut-down, one can grow back
On the duty of the old to live on to test the young
“Grandmother Snow in hospital wanting to go outside”
Taking joy in teaching
