Elise Clement
“Stories are medicine. They are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I’d like to share a medicine story with you. It is a short Liberian fairy tale I came across in Lisa Marchiano’s delightful book, The Vital Spark. I love it because it talks about anger, a powerful emotion I’ve learned a lot from personally (once I tamed my fear of it). Widely misunderstood and mostly repressed, it is an emotion that women often struggle to connect with and use effectively.
For me, this story perfectly illustrates both the incredible driving force that anger can be to reveal our authenticity, get our needs met, set boundaries, and the potential for destruction it contains if its primal power is not wielded consciously.
The Leopard Woman
A man and a woman were making a difficult journey through a dense forest. The woman had her baby strapped to her back. They had no food and grew desperately hungry. Then, unexpectedly, they came upon a vast, grassy plain upon which many animals were grazing contentedly.
Now the woman could turn herself into anything she liked, and her husband said to her, “Turn yourself into a leopard and kill one of those animals so that I may have something to eat.” The woman looked at her husband pointedly. “Do you really mean what you say?” she asked. “Yes!” replied the husband, for he was very hungry.
The woman took her baby off her back and placed the child on the ground. Hair began growing all over her body. She dropped her clothes, and a change came over her face. Her fingers and toes became claws. Within a few moments, a fierce leopard stood before the man, staring at him with hungry eyes. He was scared to death and clambered up a tree for protection. When he climbed up, he could see that his infant child was nearly in the leopard’s jaws, but he was too frightened to climb down and rescue him.
When the leopard saw that she had frightened her husband good and proper, she ran off to hunt as he had asked. She captured a young heifer and dragged it back to where her husband and child were. Her husband cried out, begging her to transform herself back into a woman.
Slowly, the hair disappeared, and the claws turned back into fingers and toes. Finally, she was a woman once more. Her husband was so frightened that he would not come down from the tree until after she had put her clothes back on and tied her baby to her back again. Then she said to him, “Never ask a woman to do a man’s work again.”
Questions for personal reflection (extracted from Lisa Marchiano’s book):
- In the story the woman turns into a dangerous leopard. What happens when you get angry? Where do you feel it in your body? How do you express it, and how does it usually manifest itself in your close relationships?
- Are you afraid of feeling angry? What have you learned from your culture or from your family of origin about anger?
- The leopard woman may be a danger to her husband and child, but she also captures food for them. Anger can be life-giving, helping us to set limits and go after what we want. Where has anger been beneficial for you? When has it helped you to achieve a goal?
Different life phases hold the potential to bring us face to face with repressed anger or rage. For me, it was unleashed with full force at the beginning of my mothering journey. For some women, anger will show up more strongly as they reach perimenopause or menopause. For others, it is an emotion that overtakes them at a specific time in their menstrual cycle. No matter when it reveals itself, it’s important to understand that it always carries a valuable message. If you’d like to better understand, manage and connect with your anger, I’d love to support you. You can book an introductory session with me here.
