Skeleton Woman and the Bones We're Afraid to Touch

There's a particular kind of wisdom that flows when women gather in circle.

Even when we explore themes that have been banished into the shadows of our culture—like Death—something ancient recognizes the territory. I may be presenting a story that's new to the women sitting with me, but the wild one in them knows it already. She recognizes the patterns etched into the tale, the rhythms she carries in her bones.

Death is no different.

Last week, eight of us gathered in Wholly Woman to spend an evening with Skeleton Woman—the figure at the heart of one of Clarissa Pinkola Estés' most potent tales. We explored Death. Not the vilified Grim Reaper coming for everything you love, but Death as a partner to life, Death as a bridge into connection with the Great Mystery, as passage, as the rhythm pulsing through our bodies every month, every inhale and exhale, every ending that makes space for beginning.

What I witnessed was what always happens when we tell these old stories: recognition. The soul remembers what the mind forgot. The soul knows these cycles.

These tales aren't entertainment. They're medicine. They're maps back to what we already know.

What We've Thrown Over the Cliff

In our culture, we've been taught to throw Skeleton Woman over the cliff. To avoid her. To pathologize decline and endings as failures rather than recognizing them as essential passages.

We live in a world that insists on perpetual summer—constant growth, endless productivity, relentless positivity. We're told that death is the enemy. That decrease means something's wrong. That if we're doing it right, we'll stay in the light, in the fullness, in the bloom.

But our bodies know differently.

Our bodies carry the wisdom of seasons, of cycles, of the truth that death is always in the process of incubating new life. We bleed and release every month. We shed skin. We exhale to make room for the next breath. The feminine body is the life/death/life cycle embodied.

And yet we've lost our reverence for this. We've lost the rituals, the stories, the spaces where death is honored as teacher rather than feared as thief.

This divorce from the life/death/life nature impairs our ability to move with life's natural rhythms. It keeps us running from what needs to end—the infatuation stage of a relationship, the part of us that ties our worth to our performance, the creative project that no longer carries aliveness, the illusion that when with luck or with flow, we won't have to work hard anymore. Resisting the death aspect keeps us exhausted, trying to stay in perpetual bloom when the soul is calling us into the fertile dark.

Why We Need Skeleton Woman

To build a relationship with Skeleton Woman is to build a relationship with the life/death/life nature itself—in our creativity, our relationships, our sense of self, our very aliveness.

Without this relationship, we stay stuck in fantasies. We fish for treasure and run when we see what's actually required. We want the feast without the fasting. The pleasure without the pain. The birth without the labor.

We want to be fed for life, but we're terrified of what feeding ourselves actually asks of us.

The story tells us: a fisherman goes out hunting and accidentally hooks the bones of a woman who was thrown into the sea. He hauls her up, sees her, and runs—dragging her behind him, clattering and bouncing, all the way home.

The more he runs, the more alive she becomes.

Here's what happens when we run: our attempts to outrun death create a dam in the river of our soul. The natural flow stops. What should move through us—grief, release, transformation—builds up behind the dam. And downstream? Entropy. Decay. The stagnation we were trying to avoid by running in the first place.

We think we're protecting ourselves. But we're actually cutting ourselves off from the life/death/life cycle that could regenerate us. We're choosing slow death over the necessary deaths that would fertilize our lives again.

What It Means to Stop Running from the Life-Death-Life Cycle

In the circle, what emerged was tender and honest. The ways we've hidden. The strategies we've used. The rationalizations that sound so convincing in the moment.

"This isn't what I signed up for."

"I'm not ready yet."

"This isn't the right time."

"I'll face it when I'm stronger."

But here's what the story teaches: there will never be a time when we feel completely ready. At some point, we simply need to stop. To turn around. To light a lamp and look.

And when we do—when we finally stop running and begin the patient work of getting close—something shifts.

We start to see that the "not-so-beautiful" parts aren't the enemy. Our hunger to be loved. Our inadequacies. Our childish fantasies of eternal spring. The reality that destruction is woven into creation. These aren't defects. They're part of the pattern.

To love anything—a person, a project, a calling—means to commit to staying through all the seasons. The sparks and the silence. The fullness and the emptiness. The building and the breaking down.

This is devotional love. The kind that can't exist without facing the life/death/life cycle head-on.

The Gift of the Bones

The skeleton—with its hundreds of small and odd-shaped sticks and knobs—represents interrelated parts. When one bone turns, all the rest turn, even if imperceptibly.

Life cycles are exactly like this.

When life moves, the bones of death move sympathetically. When death moves, the bones of life begin to turn too. Nothing is separate. Nothing is wasted. Every ending feeds every beginning.

This is what happens when we stop pathologizing the deaths in our lives. When we stop trying to rescue ourselves from a wintering season or a decline. When we find spaces and people who can accompany us in death processes without trying to fix us.

We learn wild patience. Not the forced patience of the ego, but the patience that comes from the soul. The patience that trusts timing. That honors the mystery. That knows we don't make the magic happen—we only have to stop running, get close with care, and let our body's deepest rhythms do their work.

In getting close and curious, we learn to ask the questions that matter:

What must die in me in order for me to love?

What am I afraid to let go of?

What life am I afraid to give birth to?

If not now, when?

The Medicine of the Circle

What I witnessed in our gathering was the recognition that happens when women remember together. When we speak the unspeakable. When we name what we've been running from and realize we're not alone in the running.

We closed the evening with words like "nourished," "grateful," "held." Not because we solved anything or figured it out. But because we sat with Skeleton Woman. We touched the bones of our own lives with tenderness. We remembered that death isn't the enemy—it's the passage.

This is the medicine of ancestral tales. This is why we gather. This is what happens when women stop treating themselves as problems to solve and start honoring themselves as cycles, as mysteries, as wild ones who've always known the way home.

Skeleton Woman waits beneath all our waters, patient, knowing the secret of regeneration.

The only question is: will you stop running long enough to let her teach you?

If you're hungry for spaces where death isn't pathologized and your wholeness is remembered, Wholly Woman is a membership community where we practice this together. We gather monthly around myths, embodiment, and the kind of soul work that reminds you: you were never broken. You're just becoming.