Wild Woman Interview

Here are some pithy excerpts from an interview with Sylvia Brallier about the wild woman archetype.

What are your experiences with wildness and being a wild woman?

Life is very precious. You only have a limited amount of time here, so you might as well be doing what really matters to you. It will serve you best to be focused on what your truth is. A major part of what defines my truth is my passion, and one of my passions is my creative process. That process has many avenues that it takes, but the goal for me is to be fully involved in what I am doing and what it is that I am feeling without a lot of editing going on.

One of the central premises of my path as a wild woman is an attempt to be fully authentic with what I am doing. So wildness doesn't mean, "How big," "How grandiose," or, " How visible can I make this?" It's much more about how real can I be, and how much can I stay in my truth regardless of other things that could be pressing against that. Dancing is a particularly potent example of where that comes out for me. When I pay attention to sensation as the initial impulse for my movement instead of some mind construct, an amazing thing begins to happen. Deeper parts of myself come forward, a magical thing occurs. I have a tangible experience of how my core energy wants to express itself through my body and I begin to get glimmers of my divine essence.

Being authentic also means being able to interact with people truthfully, to really say what I think and feel about things. That doesn't mean it gives me license to be rude or license to do whatever I want despite what anybody thinks. I don't really think of being wild as going against society necessarily, though it may inadvertently go against some societal norms. I think of it more as being willing to be compassionately, fully in my experience, in a way that honors others and honors myself as fully as possible

Personally, I find that it is most constructive for me to be wild in environments where wildness is permissible, because it doesn't seem to promote my Wild Woman all that much to have to push hard against something else. For me, it's really useful to be in an environment where that's honored and appreciated, although there are times when a person needs to push against external forces for the greater good. Another person's wild self may flourish best when they are dealing with difficult interactions or situations, or they are working hard to break down archaic social structures. It is very much like plants. Some grow best in harsh environments, while others need lots of rain, and just the right amount of sun to thrive.

Sometimes the experience of wildness is being willing to live my life outside of what the norms of society say life is supposed to look like. For example, you're "supposed to" get a nine to five job. You're "supposed to" have certain things in order to fit in or be "normal". You're "supposed to think and feel certain things." Part of the process of letting the wild woman free is to let go of all the supposed to's in order to fit in, and allow my self-esteem, or my worth, or my sense of belonging, to be more about what my personal path is, as opposed to what the societal norm is dictating-and that may go along fine with the societal norm is, or it may not. So for me, being wild doesn't necessarily mean being "in opposition to." It is more about what's true for me at this moment. I think there are ways in which you can be fully wild without necessarily having it be an act of rebellion.

Do you have any images, myths, and/or belief of the Wild Woman?

Well, some of the Goddesses that I work with are pretty wild, Kali, for instance. Kali is an Indian destruction Goddess. She's the goddess of small pox. She has skulls around her neck, and she has a skirt of arms. It all sounds very gruesome, but it's all symbolic. Her real job is that she's a destroyer of illusion. She destroys that which is not true. Strangely enough, she is also thought of as Goddess of time, but it makes sense if you think of time as a line upon which evolution can occur. That would make her the Goddess of the evolution of consciousness.

Kali is her own gal. She stays true to what is true to her, even if it means destroying the parts of herself that are in the way of her own bliss, or destroying anything that no longer serves the wholeness of reality. That destruction is very compassionate. Something is being destroyed, but in the destruction of that which doesn't serve, something more constructive can be created. So she's very compassionate, and her destruction is very compassionate. Kali is also a protectress who destroys that which is ignorant, forgetful, and against the flow and cares for wise, the innocent, and the sacred. She's fearless. In order to be a wild woman, you have to push through a lot of fear, predominantly the fear of being fully yourself. A wild woman has to confront her fears of what other people are going to think, fears about what might happen to her in society, and other fears like the fears of loss of love, life or freedom in order to be a peace warrior or a creativity warrior, or whatever kind of warrior she is lead to be. If a person's action is being dictated by fear, they are not able to really be their full self. A big part of the path is to drop your fear and go with your heart.

How do you cultivate and nourish wildness in yourself and your world?

Self-love is the answer to that question, because to be in your truth, you've really got to love and trust yourself. You have to be willing to love yourself beyond what someone else might think or feel, and that takes a lot of courage. In order to have that courage, you've got to be strong inside yourself in order to live outside of the box. The box is the restrictions you place on yourself that keep you small in order to feel safe. In order to break out of the box, you have to be willing to align with your highest ambitions for yourself. Ambition isn't quite the word I want to use, let's call it aligning with your highest potentiality. My experience is that in order to do that, you must look at what you want most in life, and in so doing, you discover what you most fear. Usually what you most fear is hanging between you and your cherished desire, and that desire is a the great "carrot on the stick" to entice you to get through the thing that you're most afraid of.

In terms of my work with teaching and helping people to cultivate wildness.. both for men and for women, one of the things I focus on is how we can be true to ourselves. How do we, operate, move, and speak from our truth completely, instead of withholding, instead of hiding out, instead of suppressing whatever our true feelings are.

Once a friend told me that he asked the Indian saint Anandamoyi Ma, "What is the fastest path to enlightenment?" She told him, "Always tell the truth." That is a profound yet simple piece of truth right there. When we really stand fully in what is true for us, our inconsistencies get sheared away, the ego drops, and we become fully intimate with ourselves and with others. People usually tell white lies, or even bald face lies because they don't feel safe.. It is important that people feel safe in order to fully show up, with every wart and blemish, as well as there most luminous and lovely selves.. They some how need to know they will not have loss of life or love because they revealed themselves.

A great deal of essential energy is wasted in hiding out. Shame in particular really sucks up a lot of energy, physically, emotionally, and mentally. All this energy is going into protecting some fragile part of the self. Once I was in a group therapy session, and everyone was asked to share the thing they were most ashamed of. Every single person was terrified to share their awful secret. When we did share, a funny thing happened. People were surprised to experience compassion for everyone there, in a place within themselves where there had only been self-judgment, and they felt a sense of liberation. I once heard it said. " You're only sick as your secrets." Secrets are like a cancer that eats people from the inside out. When we aren't investing a lot of energy on hiding out, we are freed from the inside out.

How do we feel safe in an uncertain world? I don't have the answer, though perhaps part of the answer comes from asking another question, which is "Where is that safety really coming from? Ultimately, safety has to come internally, because it's not necessarily going always going to come from outside. The nature of our perception of reality is even more important than the facts of what is occurring. You ask two people about the same event, and you will get two completely different answers because of how each one perceives reality.

If I was coming from a completely liberated perspective, I imagine that I would know that my soul is safe and loved no matter what happens to my emotions, or my body, or any third dimensionally oriented thing. I would know there is a deeper safety that comes from my love for myself, and experiencing myself as an immortal soul. It takes a lot of compassion and kindness to come to that awareness, as well as a belief that there is more to our existence than our day to day experience here on the planet.

What obstacles do you hit in claiming, feeling, and expressing wildness?

Repression, and fear of oppression, are major obstacles I face in fully embracing my wild woman. My fear of oppression causes me to repress my full expression in order to stay safe. One of the things I fear is being judged not good enough. Sometimes, if I feel as though someone does not like something like my voice, for instance, that hits the place inside of me that is still looking for external approval. Internally, that message might sound like, "I'm no good, I want to curl up and go away. I want to hide under a rock." I am letting my fear of what other people think get in the way of my self-expression.

I also have a big fear of death, destruction, and torture. I wish it was less of an internal feature, but there it is, all the same. My fear of violence and being silenced limits my experience here on the earth plane. I believe that our psyches extrapolate out to more mundane issues from big scary messages. A really big scary issue seeps into all aspects of our lives, and make us subconsciously afraid of death and destruction during things like public speaking, or even some thing like having to go to the grocery store. It doesn't have to make sense. It's your unconscious running the show. How many weird dreams have you had? That is a good example of the psyche taking off on its own trip. The process of clearing those fears out of your system makes you freer to be self-realized.

Q: Is there power, and if so what kind, involved in your experience of wildness?

Yeah, lots of power! There's this incredible experience I have when I'm dancing at the edge of what I could possibly do…operating at the edge of possibility with great intensity. Being in any particularly artistic situation there are times when you drop into the flow, and all of a sudden you're riding this incredible high. You're being danced or you're being drummed or you're being played, or your paintbrush is being operated by some force that is beyond what your ego is operating on. It's feels as though you're surfing on this huge cosmic current, and it's such an incredible ecstatic high.

I would say the power of ecstasy is more available to those who are willing to fully let out the stops. Because it's about full engagement-instead of having places where you're reserving back or unsure. When you do that, you split yourself and you don't have your full power. When you can fully engage and commit to the moment of what you're doing, that's where the power is. It's the full moment of now; it's the full moment of your will aligned with your heart. That is the crux of it right there. When your heart and your will are completely engaged in what it is that you're doing, there is tremendous power. When you can merge the will and the heart there is incredible potential within reach-it's both the active and the receptive forces in complete engagement within yourself. You can accomplish what you thought you'd never be able to accomplish when you have both your attention and your intention aligned. That's when things really move forward. When you're saying, "oohhh, maybe I will" or "I kind of want to.." your full power isn't available because there is some part of you that's withholding. I believe the key is getting in complete alignment with yourself. Then when you're really in alignment, that's when the floodgates open, and that's when you get to do some serious surfing.

Q: Do you perceive the wild masculine as different from the wild feminine?

Well, there are different manifestations, but I think we're talking about the core of humanity-the core of human experience. The principle of wildness is very tantric in nature. A Tibetan Lama once told me that the definition of tantra is to become a full manifestation of divinity. It is my belief that at the very core of our being, we are Divine. I imagine being fully self-expressed is about a wild as you can get.

I believe there is a difference between masculine and feminine energy, though ultimately we're androgynous beings. We all have feminine and masculine attributes, yin-yang. Each of us has both those aspects. and actually a lot of times the wild woman is the woman accessing her male part. How about if we frame it this way, not to say that women have heart and men have will, but that there is a tendency towards men having more access to their will and women having more access to their heart. So what we're really talking about is a completely balanced synergy of those forces internally, which opens the way for the archetype of the wild one to come forward.

Perhaps the wild woman archetype is being able to empower the heart with the will, and the wild male archetype empowering the will with the heart. It is the alignment of those two operational centers in equal quantities that create balance. Men have been socialized to operate from their will. A common message that men receive is "Don't think about what you feel-don't feel." Whereas women have more of a tendency to drop into victim mode. "Ohhh…. I'm feeling really disempowered and I can't do anything about it." That's needing the will! So I really see it as a similar thing, which is needing to activate different parts of the self. Of course, this is a very broad generalization, because every woman and every man is different, so I'm sort of loathe to generalize, but if you look at society on the whole, that correlation's pretty easy to see.

Q: Have you read Women Who Run With The Wolves?

I've read part of it, but I have not read the whole book yet. From what I have heard and read, it does elucidate some very potent archetypal experiences of women in a very eloquent and touching way

. There was this series called Earth's Children, - by Jean Auel that I read back in the early'80's. Several of the books in the series featured this whole notion of a Goddess culture and an empowered woman. Getting a chance to imagine that actually had a pretty profound affect on me. It was a good example of a woman who had special powers and could act on them.

Myth and story have profoundly influenced me. I like reading fantasy because there are lots of examples of empowered women that are extraordinarily gifted in ways that are beyond normal comprehension. It helps me to aspire to "live outside the box." There are many myths about Gods and Goddesses that can give me examples of wildness as well. Unfortunately, in mainstream society we aren't exposed a lot of role models of wild women. So we can dip into myth and fiction to give ourselves examples of wildness. This can help to make the "magi" wake up within our "imagination, " and make dreams reality.

The ecstatic state is about not only seeking the highest and most incredible thing. To go for the highest you have to drop the ballast. You have to be willing to drop away what is in the way. So by nature, it is intimately connected with destruction. I am not talking about destruction of the world, or people or things around, but within yourself, and situations that do not serve you; to remove that which is in the way of your most true self. Obviously, that in and of itself is a whole big piece of work. To get really into your diamond self you've got to burn a lot of coal. And the reason why the wild woman archetypes are often associated with destruction is because you must destroy in order to create, but knowing what to destroy, that's the trick. I believe that if you are really in the flow, then what naturally needs to be destroyed will naturally drop away.

One thing that is required is the willingness to do risk taking. We get used to playing it safe, so the path requires having the courage to move outside of what we believe to be safe and familiar. That does not necessarily mean taking risks that are potentially harmful to us, but risks that are potentially growthful. It is the willingness to drop into the unknown-and see what happens. If you want to enter new territory you've got to go someplace you've never been.

© Sylvia Brallier
http://SylviaBrallier.com

Author of the award winning book,
Dancing in the Eye of Transformation,
Ten Keys to Creative Consciousness