On Ego Death, Inner Safety & the Wild Soul
There is a wildness that lives within all of us. An ancient knowing that resides deep in our bones. A current of truth that pulses beneath the stories and masks that we were taught to wear. When I say wildness, I am referring to the intuitive, untamed, deeply wise and uncontainable part of ourselves, not the chaotic, feral or reckless.
The archetype of the wild woman and untamed nature — a universal force which is not limited by gender and dwells within all human beings, has appeared in many forms across cultures, mythologies, and traditions. This part of us has been given many different names throughout history and in different traditions, including but not limited to, the Wild Woman, Crone, Divine Feminine, Goddess, Kali, Lilith, La Loba / Wolf Woman, Medicine Woman, Priestess, Witch, Shamaness and the list goes on.
“She is the female soul, yet she is more, she is the source of the feminine. She is life, death, life force. She is intuition, the see-er, the deep listener. She is the source, the light, the dark, the daybreak. She is the one we leave home to look for and she is the one we come home to. She has been lost and half forgotten for a long long time.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés
For years I felt this powerful force calling me back to myself. I felt this instinctive inner voice that whispered to me - “There is more to life than this, there is more to your reality than this, and you will know what I mean by that one day, just trust me, hold on.”
And here I am now, writing this, more connected and embodied in my truth than I ever have been, knowing that that voice came from a part of me that was connected to everything and not bound by space or time. The sacred part, the divine part, whatever you want to call it, has always been with me, even when I have felt lost, alone and depressed.
This is the voice that now guides most of my life, because not only do I choose to listen to it, but I allow my life path to be forged by it. This is the voice of what I call my soul, my heart. There are many labels for it, but I know it is the one thing that a lot of people on this path talk about. It is something that cannot be truly known through thinking it, or reading about it; it is something that is only known through felt experience. Language can shrink it, cage it, limit it. The Celts knew what many of us are remembering now — the sacred cannot be contained — it moves through mystery, through breath, through the whisper of the wind in the trees. It is so much more than what we can comprehend within our mind. They understood that to be truly spiritual was not to rise above life, but to merge with it — to let the wildness of the sacred move through your body, your grief, your joy, your breath. They knew that the highest form of spirituality was embracing the full expression of our humanity.
The scared does not fit into boxes, it dissolves them. And this is the exact RE-membering process I have been experiencing for about 3 years now. The dying of my ego, the re-emerging of my soul.
Reclaiming more of my true nature has not been an easy or a gentle process. It has been raw, messy, scary, liberating, exhausting, and so so real. I have had to face many of my egoic and survival based fears. I have had to let go of many masks I wore for protection. I have had to die a thousand deaths to be able to rediscover my truth. I have had to learn how to start healing my nervous system from a constant state of fight, flight & freeze and cultivate a deeper sense of safety within myself so that I can start to embody these uncovered truths deeply, fiercely and confidently.
This journey is both liberation and loss. And it requires deep safety — embodied safety — to hold space for all that will be unraveled along the way. Embodying a deeper safety within ourselves, calls for us to learn to grow our capacity in our nervous system through gentle somatic & body based practices — this does not mean being calm and zen all of the time, it means allowing emotions & sensations — the comfortable and the uncomfortable — to move through us without getting stuck in overwhelm or dissociation. Growing in capacity means becoming more able to stay present and regulated in our body even in the face of discomfort, stress and uncertainty rather than shutting down, numbing out, dissociating or going into fight, flight, fawn or freeze. We need to work more with both the body and the mind (the whole) to truly heal ourselves at the deepest level, not just the mind and not the just body. The more capacity we build, the more space we create for our truth, our power and our vulnerability to live within us without shame, without needing to hide it, run from it or push it down. In a world that asks us to perform, produce, and override ourselves, growing, healing and rewiring our nervous system capacity becomes an act of rebellion — and of remembrance. This is the path to reclaiming our true nature, our wild soul.
This longing to connect to our true wild nature lives within us all and I have first hand witnessed it in so many people that I have met, in clients, in the communities I am a part of and especially in the women’s circles I have run and the ones I have attended. I sense in the collective, a quiet ache for authenticity, freedom, and aliveness. I sense a soul-level homesickness, a longing, a remembering. This isn’t always conscious in everyone but it is felt maybe as a vague emptiness, an ache, or a restlessness. This longing is not for something new, it is for something ancient, something whole.
Many of our systems — especially in western culture — have severed us from our instinctual, soulful nature, resulting in us disconnecting us from our bodies, our truths and Mother Earth. As a society we have ended up primarily living from our mind (disembodied) and not from our body and our heart (embodied) — so no wonder there is so much DIS-EASE and illness, we are missing a vital piece of the puzzle… THE BODY. This isn’t to blame or shame western culture, just to bring some awareness to it and the things that need to change. I have heard someone say that our Western Culture is a trauma response and I couldn’t agree more, just look at how we live — dissociated, disconnected, hyper-independent, over-performing, hungry for control / power, perfectionism, suppression of the feminine, constant productivity as our identity, constant doing to avoid being, out of rhythm with the earths cycles / the feminine cycles etc etc. Western culture isn’t bad, its wounded. And like any wounded person, its developed survival strategies which have become our “normal.”
But we are starting to wake up, we are starting to see that how we have been living is not serving us any longer.
The truth is — your wildness was never lost, only buried.
Under conditioning, under fear, under stories and narratives and the pressure to be palatable.
But it is still there.
In your body.
In your breath.
In the quiet pulse beneath it all.
May you grow your capacity to return to what is real.
May you find the courage to do the things that aren’t easy, but necessary.
May you return back to the truth of who you are.
You are the medicine. You are the gift.
The world needs YOUR LIGHT.
Keep shining, keep growing, keep loving.
Live fully, love deeply.
Darc x