Scripting · “You Assign the Meaning”
Descansos
To draw a life-timeline and mark a cross at every ‘death’ — each loss, missed road, betrayal, or part of you that stopped — so the losses are honoured, the patterns become visible, and grief turns into conscious reclamation rather than unfelt residue.
Descansos in 5 lines: Draw your life as a timeline on poster board. Mark a small cross at every death — not just the literal ones, but each loss, missed road, betrayal, and part of you that went silent. Name each in a few words. Sit with the whole map: grieve what was never grieved, and say goodbye to what’s truly over. Then write into the losses that still hold life — what you survived, the patterns, what you’ll reclaim. Revisit over time.
What it is
Descansos (Spanish, “resting places”) are the small roadside crosses in Latin America that mark where a life was lost — a place the living pause to remember. Clarissa Pinkola Estés turns this into a depth-psychological writing exercise: you draw the timeline of your own life and mark a cross at every death in it — not only literal deaths, but every loss, abandonment, missed road, betrayal, abuse, failure, or moment a part of you went silent.
The purpose is not to wallow but to honour what was lost so it can finally be grieved and reclaimed: “Descansos is a meditation… for honoring the dead parts of the self.” It works by paying creative attention to what was buried (The Inner Creates the Outer), by writing new awareness over old impressions in the subconscious (The Inner Creates the Outer), and by facing the deaths a life requires before it can renew (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
Estés gives this as a hands-on exercise in Women Who Run With the Wolves (the “Marking Territory: The Boundaries of Rage and Forgiveness” / homing material). Faithfully:
- Make the timeline. Take a sheet of white poster board (or large paper) and a black marker. Draw a long line representing your life, from birth at one end to now at the other. Roughly divide it by decade or by era so you can place events in time.
- Mark a cross at each death. Move along the line and place a small cross wherever something died — a person you lost, yes, but also: the road you didn’t take, the dream you set down, the friendship that broke, the years given to something that betrayed you, the self that went quiet after a wound, the love that ended, the chance that passed. Estés is explicit that these “deaths” are mostly not literal — they are the turning points and losses of an inner life.
- Name each one, briefly. Beside each cross write a few words: here, my trust in X died; here, the painter in me; here, the marriage. Don’t elaborate yet — just name and mark, so the whole shape of the losses appears at once.
- Sit with the completed map. Look at the whole. Estés’ instruction is essentially a meditation: to grieve consciously what was never grieved, and to say goodbye to what is genuinely over — “to consign whatever is dead to the dead.” Some crosses you simply honour; some you can now release.
- Then write the reclamation. For the losses that still hold life, write into them — what you survived, what you learned, what grew from the loss, and what, if anything, you want to reclaim or finish. Look across the map for patterns: how you tend to meet loss, where the same death keeps recurring, what you abandon first.
- Revisit. This is not a one-sitting exercise. Estés frames it as ongoing — you return, add crosses, mourn more, and slowly the “ghost roads” stop draining the living present. (Sourcing note: descansos, the poster-board-and-cross method, “honoring the dead parts of the self,” and the goodbye/grieving frame are Estés’ own, attributed; the protocol is faithfully summarised from Women Who Run With the Wolves, described not reproduced.)
Source & Lineage
Clarissa Pinkola Estés (b. 1945) is a Jungian psychoanalyst, poet, and cantadora (keeper of the old stories). Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992) reads myths and fairy tales as maps of the “Wild Woman” archetype and the instinctual psyche, and threads through them concrete practices for reclaiming vitality.
Descansos is the most-cited of these practices. It sits in the Jungian lineage of shadow work and grief-as-individuation, and resonates with life-review therapy and ritualised mourning across cultures. → (cf.
Jung; Marion Woodman).
Common refinements
Only marking literal deaths. The point is the figurative ones — missed roads, silenced selves, broken trust. Those are where the charge is.
- Turning it into endless re-wounding. The aim is to honour and then release what is over, not to relive it indefinitely. If a cross only reopens pain, mark it and move on; return when steadier.
- Doing it all in one heavy sitting. Estés frames it as ongoing. Small, repeated sessions are kinder and go deeper.
- Skipping the goodbye. Naming the loss without ever consigning the dead to the dead leaves the ghost roads draining the present. The release is half the medicine.
- Refinement: keep the map; revisit yearly. New crosses appear; old ones lose their grip — which is itself evidence of the reclamation.