Women Who Run with the Wolves
Tenth Chapter: La Llorona & Little Match Girl
TBD, April 2026, MST
In this Women Who Run with the Wolves book club session, we enter the haunting terrain of Chapter 10 through two sorrow-laden figures: La Llorona and The Little Match Girl. These stories speak to the places in the psyche where grief is not witnessed, where love is withheld, and where the instinct to protect what is precious arrives too late, or is never taught at all.
We explore how chronic loss, abandonment, and emotional deprivation shape the inner life of women, and how the Wild Woman archetype calls us not into despair, but into vigilance, reclamation, and sacred responsibility for the soul.
This chapter is not about tragedy for its own sake. It is about learning to see what has been freezing, starving, or wandering within us, and responding with warmth, boundary, and fierce compassion. Together, we reflect on the cost of misplaced loyalty, the dangers of numbing or dissociation, and the deep psychological repair that begins when grief is finally allowed to speak.
You are warmly invited to join our ongoing Women Who Run with the Wolves book club on Insight Timer. Whether you are reading along closely or arriving intuitively, your presence is welcome. Come as you are, this is a space for honesty, depth, and remembering what the soul has always needed.
Reflection Questions
The Folktale of La Llorona and the Fairytale of The Little Match Girl
1. Where in my life have I learned to endure emotional cold rather than name it?
What did endurance protect me from, and what did it cost?
2. The Little Match Girl lights brief moments of warmth before returning to the cold. Where do I reach for fleeting comfort instead of sustained nourishment or protection?
3. La Llorona’s grief is bound to loss, but also to misdirected devotion. Have I ever stayed loyal to something, or someone, that asked me to abandon my own soul?
4. What part of me learned early that no one was coming to help?
How has that belief shaped my vigilance, my self-reliance, or my exhaustion?
5. In these stories, rescue arrives too late, or not at all. How does my nervous system respond to that truth: with fear, anger, numbness, or grief?
6. What does “warmth” mean to me now, not metaphorically, but psychologically?
What creates real, lasting warmth in my inner life?
7. Where have I mistaken longing for love, or suffering for devotion? How did I learn that pattern?
8. Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of learning to guard the soul. What would it mean for me to become a vigilant protector of my inner child, instincts, and grief?
9. If grief could speak freely, without being rushed toward healing, what would it say? What has it been trying to teach me?
10. What small act of presence, boundary, or care could I offer the part of me that has been wandering in the cold? Not as a grand fix, but as a beginning.