In her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., utilizes her work in the field of wildlife biology to broaden our understanding of the feminine travails in Moderna[*].

“Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind.”

We can imagine what sort of detractors these would be. To place this dynamic within the context of healing, we see that what the author is proposing is not gender bias in any way, not an attack on men, but indeed a call to action.
It has already been brought to our attention that Medical Doctors may be the new priests, the new church being science, and while the religious power structures of the past have been offering connection to “God” in exchange for cutting off our connection to our body, and investing our trust in a male authority (a mediator with, or even monger of the divine), the Allopathic, or Western (more properly Modern) Medical Model has offered us a connection to “Health,” in exchange for our livelihood, expecting us to trust companies of insurance and believing that the body will be better if they can surgically remove all its bad parts. All the same pieces are in fashion, but rearanged to look different (see casting out satan, and the obsession with soaps which "kill 99.9% of germs").
In the Natural medicine world there is no reason to blame an outside force. The pop-scientist, Pasteur, who put forth the still used germ theory would, much the same as Richard Nixon, decades later indighted himself on his own crude tape recordings, dosumenting the true purpose for creating Insurance Companies, Pasteur admitted on his death bed that the theory he propogated was not a tool for the creation of health, but rather the accumulation of money. While there are germs and bacteria in our world, just as there are seeds of flowers and maggots, these things will not propagate in the human body if the body does not foster them—just as soil which too wet will create mold and dead flesh will find ways to decompose, so too will balanced soil give rise blossoms. In this model we are responsible for our health to a degree which may appear as radical as did the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., however this is simply the way things must be done, for it is in accord with the way things are.
This being a holistic model it applies not only to physical ailments, but also to mental-emotional traumas as well. We can no more blame the ground we walk on for our knee problems, than can we blame some one’s sneeze for our sickness, nor can we say that some one else is responsible for the state of our mind. “You make me angry,” has become a statement of a long outdated mode of being, if you angry, or happy, or depressed, it is your responsibility. There are environmental conditions to be accounted for, however if your life, your home, your body is making you sad, would you want some one else to impose changes upon your life, your home, or perhaps your body? Who is the expert who would know how to change your life?
When we take this view of our life, our health, and our connection to God, we challenge a lot inside of ourselves and we open our availability to greater clarity. All spiritual paths have their language for a “middle way,” a Goldilocks principle of not too little, not too much, neither self flagellation, nor excesses. Who is responsible for the death of a sheep? The wolf that ate it, or the rancher who locked it in a pen? Was it the hunger of the wolf or the excess of the rancher that was the crime?
So too we discover in this model of self responsibility that we do to others as we do to ourselves. A man is strong, not because he holds control over the woman he is with, but because he can be relaxed enough to let her fill her full strength and then meet her there. We would like to think a strong civilization has strong walls as big weapons. However if one observes a river, the “strong” rocks protruding from the water, one will see upon them the signs of time, the rock has worn away, after a spring flood, the rocks may have been tossed about. Though one can see the signs of time on the faces of the rock, what age is the water?
The beauty of the rock is not that it imposes its way on all other types. In mythology there is often the image of a demon or “bad guy” who can turn people and things to stone. The virtue of rock is not to create more rock, but to give context. Seeing the strength of rock, its solidity we are able to conceive the fluidity of water, the flux of the seasonal plants, etc. Still building walls to protect one self, only seems to beget the building of more walls. The rock has no concern for itself, it is simply strong and its strength simply wears away to the softness of sandy beaches. The moment the rock becomes concerned for its self, it gives rise to war fare.
What of the warrior who slays the demon, is not the warrior virtuous? Perhaps. Often these myths arise from cultures stuck in the paradigm I have been describing which is blame-centric and surrounded by walls. These images arise of monsters who only wish to destroy more and more, with out recognizing that such stories are all mirrors, we are doomed to live them out. We can only write about what we can conceive and we can only conceive what we can do. We may observe things doing what we can not, but what we see we will label incorrectly, if, refusing to remain still and observant longer, we jump to such construction. Thus, I say, perhaps the hero would be virtuous if the monster were really, but instead I see a single character chasing its tail with a knife, crying, “Get back here you!”
In the Taoist Practice of Tai Chi Chuan, duality is worked with through movement for the practitioner to find unity. The duality we all have likely seen in this information age is the Yin-Yang, the play of darkness and light upon mountain slopes, observed by geographers of ancient China gave first voice to this. It now represents also softness and strength, feminine and masculine, cool and warm, etc. It is said, “Ultimate yin is yang, thus if you invest in great gain you will suffer great loss, invest in little gain and you will suffer little loss. Therefore invest in loss.” To have ultimate strength is to be weak. We can see this in body building competitions where participants have built up so much muscle they can no longer access the full range of movement of their arms and legs. Their movements, though full of a potential strength, have become slow and cumbersome like that of turtles. The more walls we build around the worlds we create, the more that we have to defend, the more violence we will inevitably see in our lives. Conversely, the more we are able to open our eyes to the world around us, letting go of our creations, our fabrications and be naked, the more vitality and strength we allow to flow into us.
Jesus encouraged any who would listen to him to give away their belongings and live with him as an ascetic. By keeping nothing that could be taken from him, he was able to spend the rest of his life giving.
To return to the “detractors” of the wild woman spoken of by Estes, we see that first and foremost they are detractors of themselves. If women are “falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, [and] of less value,” it is by others who cannot control their own appetites, who use their cleverness destructively, who attack first, and who do not know of their own value. The priest condemns all the qualities in his congregation which he can not come to terms with in himself, and the surgeon removes from his patients all that which he does not fully understand within his own body.
It has been proposed that male aggression has causal lines connected to having genitalia housed on the exterior of the body. The female reproductive organs are protected within, while the male has the most sensitive part of his body out in the open, subject to being more easily damaged, and with the loss of the foreskin, more quickly desensitized. From fear of such pain as this, the phallus becomes a correlate of a weapon. Swords, missiles, guns, these things all resemble penises, but it is not the other way round. The penis only becomes a symbolic tool for fighting when there is fear of ones own death; the organ itself is inherently life giving. In this we see the principal again, of ultimate strength becoming weakness. While the vagina may be related to yin, the receptive, deep within is the creative, the womb, able to manifest a new life from itself. The male body on the other hand is protruding, hard, and strong by nature. In this there is the weakness, the fear of breaking, fear of not being hard enough, fear of being hurt. From this yin comes again yang and the male strikes out, preemptively to try and secure some corner of safety for himself. This is the history of patriarchy we see spilled out behind us. We most go a step further into another step of yin, as species our masculine must not go again into weakness but gentleness, receptivity. Many a marriage has been the training ground for this, providing a huge back log of all degrees of success. We see with each generation passed, that, just as the river out lives the stone, on average, women have longer life spans than their mates. Men, rather than fixating on passing on some idea of legacy or project to their offspring must come to terms with the better half of their nature, and with their own vulnerability and the reality of death in life. Just like the myths we construct we create in our world that which we have the most difficulty facing, Just like Achilles, waging war has become a way of trying to hide from mortality. A true woman is not a woman who, through much effort and striving becomes a man, but a woman who is strong by virtue of her feminine qualities. Like wise I do not propose that men become more like women. I propose that we have built a world which is gender-centric and if women feel they need to become more like men to “make it in this world,” then we need to reexamine the world we are in the practice of creating. Perhaps from decades of building walls, clashing swords and fear of not being hard enough, there are other virtues that have been underdeveloped in the male vocabulary.
If you need to have sheep, have a flock of sheep, protect them, be their steward. But if your purpose in having sheep is to profit from them, then you have become a wolf in shepherd’s clothing. Indeed, because the wolf only takes as much as it needs to survive, we may have become worse than the monsters we created in myth.
With the back log of human experience through out the ages and the current faculties and capacities of the species, we could see our selves with such depth, that we have spun off into the polar opposite, religiously devoting huge quantities of time and energy to distractions, incising our experience to its most mundane. I do not know whether we are able to see our selves with much greater clarity than any animal, or whether animals remain in such a state of awareness and have never been able to make choices such as we, who have opted to dam up what we were born with and then fear its coming. However I do suspect that the greater fear which differentiates us from other animals is not in fact the fear stemming from consciousness of our own death, rather it is the fear of seeing ourselves as deeply as we are able.
[*] the present kingdom of time