The Collective Feminine Pain Body —Separation from the Feminine - Part 1/2

The Collective Feminine Pain Body - By Isa Ka Ra

“Colonialism is a form of vampirism that empowers and bloats the self-image of the colonising empire by draining the life energies of the colonised people; just enough blood is left to allow the colonial subject to perform a day's work for the objective empire. And these drained energies are not only of the present and future, but of the past, of memory itself: the continuity of identity of a people and of each individual who is colonised. No one should recognise this process better than women, for the female sex has functioned as a colony of organised patriarchal power for several thousand years now. Our brains have been emptied out of all memory of our own cultural history, and the colonising power systematically denies such a history ever existed. The colonising power mocks our attempts to rediscover and celebrate our ancient matriarchies as realities. In the past, women have had to accept this enforced female amnesia as "normal”, and many contemporary women continue to believe the female sex has existed always and ab aeterno as an auxiliary to the male-dominated world order. But we continue to dig in the ruins, seeking the energy of memory, believing that the reconstruction of women's ancient history has a revolutionary potential equal to that of any political movement today.” — The Great Cosmic Mother - Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

To begin the journey of clearing and creating medicine from our individual manifestations and experiences of the collective feminine pain body, we must first understand what this wound is, how it came to be, as well as what informs its formation.

Fundamentally, the collective feminine pain body is the deep, energetic, and ancestral wound all women carry, the wound of being born a woman into a wounded patriarchal social structure that is not conducive to life or the needs and health of the feminine. Being born a woman inherently bonds you with the Earth, her cycles, and your animal body as part of the natural world, and our longing for this truth and bond, which has been and is so often severed, reverberates through our lived experience whether we are aware of it or not. Women are the channels through which all life is physically and energetically birthed; women collectively dream existence into being alongside the living Goddess that is our Mother Earth. We are the containers of life. We are deeply interconnected with the wellbeing of our Mother Earth and, as such, suffer on an energetic and fundamental level under the influence of our current wounded patriarchal structure that has created a consensus reality that runs contrary to nature and the sustaining of life. This wound runs through our ancestral lines and connects us to those who came before us and those who will come after us.

From an energetic perspective, the feminine pain body is a complex web woven into the structure of the collective feminine consciousness and experience; this web-like energy structure connects us to one another, our lineages, and our Mother the Earth.

If we start to look a little closer at this energetic informational web, we find that it is woven from three core strands or wounds, these we can describe as the Mother wound, Sister wound and Witch wound, woven together and across space and time through our collective consciousness this forms and informs our individual experience of the collective feminine pain body, but is also the energy structure through which the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body may be accessed once we begin to clear and access the collective medicine of this energetic web or *Matrix.

*Matrix from the root word Mater - late Middle English (in the sense ‘womb’): from Latin, ‘birthing female’, later ‘womb’, from mater, matr- ‘mother’. - Read Embracing the Matrix/Mater/Mother

We begin our Heroine’s journey (as author Maureen Murdock so powerfully illustrated in her book The Heroine’s Journey) as a woman with the first act of this wound, the separation from the Feminine. On a physical level, this happens first at birth, as we are separated from the womb of our mother and come into a life experience on the physical plane during this patriarchal age. This initial separation continues to manifest in various ways, having an etheric effect on the energy body, manifesting in the Root Centre or Base Chakra and having a reflective or mirrored structure in the Heart Centre or Heart Chakra, this structure then energetically informs our individual experience of the Mother Wound.

How deep and expressive this wound will be in your lived experience is informed by your lineage, your soul contracts, your core wound initiations, etc., which go on to form and inform the experience or the potential experience that you will have with your own mother and the Mother as a collective force. So we can look energetically for the traces of the first thread of the collective feminine pain body, The Mother Wound in the Root centre, energetically and in the degree to which separation from the Feminine has manifested in our lived experience, and then from there trace it into it’s potential or reflective manifestation in the Heart Centre. The mother wound will and can be expressed in a myriad of ways, from the physical, emotional, and mental through to spiritual and energetic.

Our second thread belongs to the Sister Wound, which manifests as an extension of the original separation from the feminine. When we are cleaved from our internal feminine support structures and feel abandoned or isolated from the Sacred aspects and manifestation of the Feminine, we experience the effects of the sister wound. These effects often take shape during puberty, which leads us to seek alliance or protection from the masculine. In a functional structure where the masculine was not operating from the projection of the wounded father, this would be a healthy alliance both internally and externally, but in our wounded patriarchal structure, this alliance often takes on a Stockholm syndrome-like nature. Leading to the suppression of the feminine in her Sacred and healed aspects and an identification with the wounded feminine/masculine. We can trace this wound structure in the Sacral/Womb Centre or Sacral Chakra with a mirrored or reflected expression in the Throat Centre. Again this wound will influence and inform our experience and perception of other women as well as our own feminine form and place in the world. As young women identify with the masculine and form beliefs of mistrust towards women, this structure of identification and mistrust is reflected inwards and results in disconnection or rejection of the body and the creative Womb Centre. The impact and experience of the sister wound will and can be expressed in many ways, from the physical, emotional, and mental through to spiritual and energetic.

Lastly, our third thread manifests as the witch wound, which again is an extension of and interwoven with the mother and sister wounds, as we experience the separation from the feminine and our projection of that onto the mother, both our own and the collective or Great Mother, then the segregation and mistrust of the feminine, within ourselves and our own bodies and of other women as well as the more energetic aspects of the feminine, we manifest the third strand of the feminine pain body, which begins with a basic fear for our survival, the evolutionary desire to not being cast out or ostracised. This often leads to all manner of compliance with the status quo in order to keep ourselves “safe” and the experience of the “other” as dangerous or threatening and the belief that we will be persecuted if we are different or don’t follow the rules of the patriarchal consensus reality. This is how we come to fear the witch and not the men who burned her - it is an extension of the Stockholm syndrome that begins in the sister wound, and the desire for alliance to the wounded masculine deepens in the witch wound. The witch wound can also be thought of as the wound of persecution. Once more, the effects of this wound permeate through the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and energetic realms of our being and lives and manifests in a multitude of ways.

The collective feminine pain / collective feminine wisdom body can also be found in our journey through the archetypal evolution from Maiden to Mother to Crone, and the shapeshifting ability each woman possesses to move through these three embodied energetic states. As women, we make a complex cyclical journey through life; not only are we guided by our monthly infradian and daily circadian cycles, but we’re also on an archetypal journey from Maiden to Mother to Crone - Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth. These aspects weave the complex cloth of our lives and all of creation born from and through the Feminine. By recognising that each of these archetypes has its gifts/Sacred expression and shadow/wounded expression, we learn how to witness these aspects within ourselves, how to nurture and grow the gifts/sacred and bring maturity and compassion to the shadow/wounded aspects. We learn to listen to the language each of our archetypes speaks and how to activate the right expression at the right time.

When anchored in her gifts or sacred expression, the Maiden will fight tooth & nail for what she believes in; she will tirelessly stand up for what she believes is right. She will celebrate, dance and play with careless abandon. Joy comes with ease and grace to the Maiden, and she is always there to guide us back into childlike wonder no matter how far we have strayed from her embrace. The Maiden guides us into deeper relationship with ourselves and our sisters to form stronger bonds and create access to the Sister Sanctuary of the collective Feminine Wisdom Body.

When the Shadow Maiden speaks, she tells of the things that happened to her and to anyone she feels she can project upon in a misguided, immature expression of empathy. She has the unmovable conviction of youth and an insistence that her perception and experience are truth or fact in the way that only youthful exuberance and inexperience could ever assert. This aspect is centred and revels in her egoic self, youth and physicality above all things, and weaves the threads of the sister wound into our collective feminine pain body.

When the Mother speaks, she tells of how all things happen through her. She shows us how we birth all of our experiences, whether perceived as positive or negative, that nothing is ever done to us that wasn't birthed through us, and once birthed, those experiences were ours to nurture so we could either feed them love, forgiveness and compassion and teach them how to heal or we could feed them self pity, fear or even hate and watch them grow into monsters who'll eat us alive. She teaches us how empathy matures and grows into true Compassion, which awakens our Mother Medicine within the collective Feminine Wisdom Body.

When the Shadow Mother speaks, she feeds us with words that grow self-sacrifice, self-doubt and martyrdom. She nurtures and cultivates those parts of ourselves and the collective that thrive on the discord of self-pity, victimhood, fear or even hate. This becomes the twisted thread woven into the Mother Wound of the collective feminine pain body.

When the Crone speaks, and mostly she doesn't because her words are precious, so she doesn't waste them or use them wantonly, but when she does, they carry an unfathomable power that renders all other internal and external noise silent, makes it obsolete, She shows us simply that I AM HAPPENING, and so we activate our higher power and access the Witch Wisdom of our collective Feminine Wisdom Body.

When the Shadow Crone speaks, she shows us all the harm that has been done, all the suffering of the world. This has the potential to drive us into fear and isolation and make us feel powerless against the tides of destruction that have befallen our Sacred Earth and Her daughters; when she is activated, our deepest fears are awakened and weave the Witch Wound into our collective feminine pain body.

As we gently turn inwards and witness how these wounds and archetypes are expressed, we become more empowered to clear the feminine pain body.

So why bother trying to understand and clear our pain body? I get some version of this question often, although it’s usually more along the lines of feeling hopeless or feeling like it’s too much even to begin to unravel it all. To that, I can only try to explain that ALL LIFE IS BIRTHED THROUGH THE FEMININE. We dream the world into being and birth the consensus reality, so it is our responsibility to birth and nurture a reality we would actually want to live within and one we would want to leave to our children and theirs.

*The Feminine holds the frequency of all creation, the frequency of reality, what we are living is what we are collectively birthing. We are experiencing this wounded reality because we are birthing through the wounded feminine - the collective feminine pain body made manifest. So by doing our little bit, each of us can clear and heal and rebirth our Collective Feminine Wisdom Body. Little by little, we can liberate ourselves and all of life from this current wounded state and truly rebirth the Beauty Way.

Read - The Feminine holds the frequency.

We are the wellspring of all life; in our current consensus reality, that well has been poisoned, and the water flowing from it and birthing life is being drawn from this poisoned well. When the Feminine births or creates from the pain body, she births more pain, and the cycle of poison flows back into the well. But when we begin to clear this well within ourselves by clearing our own pain body, we begin to feed that cleared water back into the well. And so every woman who does the work to clear her pain body and address her wounds begins to pour that clean water into the well.

Her ancestors are also cleared through her work, so they can then pour the cleared water into the well. She is capable of guiding her daughters to clear their wounds so they pour their cleared water into the collective well. Soon enough, the cumulative effect, just as it happened to poison the well, begins to clear it again, and The Beauty Way is rebirthed. When the wellspring of life runs clear again, all of life can return to a manifestation of harmony, the Earth can regain Her place as Mother, and women can regain their role as wisdom keepers and life bringers in co-creation with the Great Mother life force / Sophia Ennoia, the Earth and our Sacred Selves in right relation with all life.

This may well be the most important work any of us could ever do, and the beauty of it is that there isn’t one right or wrong way to do it: the path back to dreaming/birthing our world from a place of power and grace resides within each of us, and although I can share some practices and what I have learned thus far on this journey, each of you will have as much wisdom and guidance to bring and share because this work is both collective and individual.

Please read the next article in this 2-part series: "The Collective Feminine Wisdom Body - Initiation and Descent to the Goddess - Part 2/2"

If what you have read here resonates with you and you would like to explore it more deeply and reawaken your Collective Feminine Wisdom Body, then join the From Pain Body to Wisdom Body Journey and let's walk this path of reclamation together.

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The sculpture in this blog post image is Birth Death Rebirth by Lucy Churchill. The image is used with her permission to see more of her works, visit her website - www.lucychurchill.com

In Alchemy

Isa🌹