The Wild Woman Archetype: Maiden vs Mature Feminine

The Wild Woman represents the deepest, most ancient, most soulful part of a woman.

She is Freedom, she is Truth, she is Soul.

The Wild Woman is unbridled nature residing in the body.

She is powerful, beautiful, instinctual, intelligent.

Her wisdom is not the wisdom of the world or of the mind. It’s a different kind altogether, a kind that comes from deep within the bones, in a place we feel but can’t readily identify.

It’s the part of us that remembers, the part that longs for expression, the part that inevitably lashes against the confines of society, our minds, and our egos when it can’t.

Wild Woman is the opposite of a perfectionistic, socially acceptable, ladder-climbing automaton.

She is vibrant, alive, messy, imperfect. She chases truth, freedom, and alignment with Soul. These are her true North.

Women are being increasingly drawn to the Wild Woman Archetype because they are tired of being told what to want, who to be, and how to be her.

We are tired of devoting ourselves to a persona that was never ours to begin with.

We are tired of feeling dry, passionless, depressed, and repressed.

Wild Woman is the antidote to the high achieving, socially palatable, people-pleasing persona that so many of us have been raised to embody.

She is a breath of fresh air.

It is in the Wild Woman that we come back home to ourselves, to our souls, to who we really are. It is in the Wild Woman where we find our true power.

Unless and until we find the Wild Woman, we are existing, but we aren’t really living.

But when we talk about the Wild Woman, there is a more nuanced conversation that needs to be had.

We forget that because this power is with us from the time we are born, she manifests herself in different forms depending on the phase of life we are in and the other archetypes that we embody.

Wild Woman lives in both the psyche of the Maiden and that of the Mature Feminine, but the two look very different.

Without distinguishing between these, we are subject to misunderstanding the truth of this archetype and likely to perpetuate the wounding that so many women are trying to escape from…

The Maiden Archetype

The Maiden archetype represents the first stage of our psychic development as females.

The Maiden is young and immature: physically and spiritually speaking.

She is innocent, naive, carefree, dependent, and idealistic.

She can also be entitled, needy, clingy, desperate, jealous.

The Maiden doesn’t know who she is or what she wants and she’s not supposed to. She’s supposed to explore the world, get her hands dirty, make mistakes and learn from them.

However, she wasn’t meant to do it alone.

If the teachings of the Sacred Feminine had remained in tact, if the knowledge of the Feminine and her ways were respected, then we would have had guidance from our elders.

We would have been taught by a village of women how to go about this process of “Maidening”, of growing, of maturing without losing ourselves to the messages of the world.

But most of us didn’t have this. Most of us were raised by women who also didn’t have this, because their mothers didn’t either.

We’re the daughters of several wounded generations of women who survived despite having the kind of sacred education we all needed.

It is an art, a Sacred Feminine skill to learn how to be with your emotions, regulate your nervous system, all while tuning into your inner guidance and trusting it at the same time.

This is what we need. This is what we are being called to.

The Wild Maiden

The Wild Woman manifests in the psyche of the Maiden as strong, intense, and often unpredictable emotions.

Rage, anger, sadness, joy. Emotions that exist like a storm: Like the ocean, wild, big, and at times unpredictable.

She manifests as the indomitable will of a young woman who will not be told what to do.

She is strong, fierce, headstrong, uncontrollable.

She takes risks, she isn’t self-conscious, and she doesn’t rightly care about what others think.

The Wild Maiden is charming, cute, chaotic, terrible, and sometimes, tortured.

She exists on a spectrum but has a few defining characteristics.

The Wild Maiden is not in control. Not of her emotions, not of her behavior, and not of her life.

She is reactive, taken and thrown about by the storm that brews inside of her.

She might lash out. She might cave in. She might fight. She might flee. She might freeze. She might fawn.

She lives so much of her life as a battle that she can’t actually distinguish a real threat from things that are hard or uncomfortable.

In the darkest form of her shadow, the Wild Maiden is almost…feral.

She doesn’t trust, she pushes away, and she struggles to hold relationships close even though she wants that intimacy more than anything.

The Wild Maiden is dysregulated. She doesn’t know how to be in her body or live with and learn from the emotions that thrash about inside of her.

This is why we all need guidance. And this is why so many adult women are stuck in expired Maidenhood, because they never had anyone to teach them how to move through it.

The Wild Woman

The Wild Woman who exists in the Mature Feminine, Mother, or Queen phase is very different from the Maiden.

She has been initiated.

She has experienced the rites of passage and learned how to navigate the choppy waters of her adolescence to become a fully embodied, fully expressed mature woman.

Her emotions may be just as wild, just as chaotic, just as intense…but she is not dysregulated. Those emotions do not get the best of her. They do not control her or her behavior.

When hard things happen, she may wail and rage and weep, but she does not fall down, play victim, or take it out on others.

She knows the difference between letting the wave move through her versus letting it tear her apart.

It’s not that the Wild Woman is un-contained, but rather that she is self-contained.

She is the container, she is the fountain, she is both the structure AND the ocean that moves inside.

Her strength comes from being torn down and rebuilt time and time again; a layered temple that has seen many battles, weathered many storms.

Her life hasn’t been easy, but it has been true, real, and worth it.

The Wild Woman knows there is a time and place for pain, for pleasure, and for the necessary cycles of death and rebirth.

She is not innocent and naive like the Maiden…she knows that challenges await but she has been forged in the fire that will help her meet them.

The Wild Woman in the Mature Feminine has learned how to be with all the parts of life without giving up on it, without giving up on herself.

Where We Go From Here

Many of the women I work with teeter on the edge of Wild Maiden and Wild Woman.

They are not fully in one or the other, but they are somewhere in between.

Our job is to be the Mother, the Guide, and the Midwife to the Maiden.

To help her learn the sacred skills that she should have learned but didn’t get to.

To help her heal and soothe and pacify the wounds that rile the ocean of emotions inside of her.

And to help her understand how to retain her wild without letting it consume her in its shadow form.

And after that, I’ll be honest, the work doesn’t stop, it just…changes.

When we step into the Mature Feminine we recognize that there are still layers to shed, nuances to ponder, identities to be shifted.

This is what it means to spiral as a woman; it means that we will meet many challenges over the course of our lives but we will meet them in new layers, in new ways, as a different iteration of ourselves.

The Wild Woman is one of the most important archetypes that a woman can work with, for she’s the one who will show you what is true and help to set you free.