The Collective Feminine Wisdom Body —Initiation and Descent to the Goddess - Part 2/2

The Collective Feminine Wisdom Body - By Isa Ka Ra

“The feminine journey is about going down deep into soul, healing and reclaiming, while the masculine journey is up and out, to spirit.” - Maureen Murdock

To access our Collective Feminine Wisdom Body, we must begin with the premise and understanding that women’s lives have a mythology of their own, which is different from that of men. We deny who we are when we attempt to measure our lives, fulfilment, psyche or success by the milestones of the hero’s (masculine) journey. When we begin to reclaim our feminine mythos and come to internally realign with our heroine’s journey, we uncover that there is a tonal resonance within the body of every woman. A vibrational harmonic frequency that is played in the distinctive physical shape of our pelvic bowls, like a singing bowl or bone-made drum. This vibration, this frequency, is attuned to the Goddess, the Earth, the Great Mother to Sophia Ennoia, the Primordial birther of all life and the regenerative creatrix of all existence.

As women, we are played by the Goddess to resonate this regenerative vibrational frequency out into the world, and we can access this tonality within ourselves—this sacred sound, this regenerative, frequential, life-giving, life-affirming vibration within us.

The actual physical structure of the female form is a sacred instrument of regeneration - of birth and life, a true mirror image of the Divine, of the Great Mother, who in her essence is not a frequency of fertility alone but one of regeneration, of death and rebirth, of infinite creative potential, of all that lives and ever will - this infinite creative potential is mirrored and reflected in the female form.

The female body is a sacred landscape. Our life-giving bellies, our pelvic bones so perfectly arranged to expand and contract to allow for birth, the milk that pours from our breasts to nourish but also intelligent enough to produce the antibodies to heal—within the womb of your grandmother lay your mother, yourself and your children—the Feminine body is the body of Life.

The ancient people of Mother Earth knew that all of creation was born through the Goddess, that the Mother was Sacred and the Feminine Divine. This understanding resulted in communities that lived in peace and reciprocity not only with one another but with the land. Great cycles of time were experienced in this way. Generation upon generation lived in peace and reciprocity with each other and the Earth in a matrilineal social and cultural understanding and expression of life and humanity.

Women's bodies collectively sang the Sacred songs of creation and regeneration, free from fear and persecution. Our nervous systems interwoven and interconnected like a great mycelial network across the globe. We vibrated and held a frequency of peace and more life for all—a Sacred Feminine frequency that set the tone for all life.

This tone or frequency, this informational energetic structure that forms the interwoven Womb Web or Collective Feminine Wisdom Body that spanned the Earth and held Her in the vibration of regeneration and more life for all, although woven and vibrationally and tonally held by women and the Sacred Feminine, was revered, strengthened and harmonised by men holding a vibration of reverence to and protection of the Feminine. Not only was the body of women held sacred, but so was the body of Earth.

We have not always been at war with each other, ourselves and the planet. Survival of the fittest and our current androcratic social structures are not our true and only nature. In fact, far from it, there was a time when we lived in peace with ourselves and Mother Earth, held in the vibration of the Sacred Feminine and secured by the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body of consciously resonating women across the globe. This collective frequency is the true energy Matrix of the Earth.

The evidence of the neolithic and Iron Age matrilineal and gynecocratic social structures and complex spiritual, social, agricultural, artistic and culturally rich societies abound, but unfortunately, they do not fit the androcentric patriarchal narrative of male domination and a human soul formed through war, destruction, suffering and subjugation, these narratives have been so deeply ingrained in our collective memories because of the shear depth of the trauma that has been etched into our bones and the bones of our collective ancestors over millennia that we are simply too traumatised to even dream that there once was a world, a way of life a way of being that was not based on suffering and survival.

The entire new age narrative of creating a New Earth is a reactionary result of our collective trauma and amnesia as a species. We know somewhere deep within that a different way of life, of living, is possible, but we have forgotten that it is not some future thing we have to reach forward through time to achieve but, in truth, the memory of our collective ancestral past that is simply asking to be remembered.

I say this often: we don’t need to create a New Earth. We simply need to remember, and Rebirth an Old Earth, a true Earth and the memory of how to do that is etched into the womb and pelvic bowl of every woman; it is carved into the heart of every man. It is the energetic woven structure of the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body, this mycelial network that each of us has and is an access point to, this source of life and creation that forms an interconnected web of information not for us to be taught as such but rather to be remembered and recognised.

I know this may all sound like some long-lost mystical, ethereal concept that we can discuss at length but can’t quite access or wrap our heads around...

And to that, I say exactly! Because the wisdom body is not something that can ever be understood mentally, it is not an intellectual concept of higher spiritual philosophy. It is not the masculine journey of up-and-out spiritual attainment.

It is the deep feminine embodiment and remembering of our descending prayers, our body prayers, our hand prayers, prayers that birth, prayers that bleed the blood of life, prayers that produce milk, prayers that tend and coax the fertile land, prayers that hold and stroke and calm, prayers that create, prayers of touch, of taste of scent and sound, prayers that are felt and lived and build the bodies of our children as they do our own. Our shape-shifting prayers as we move through the feminine cycles and the birth-death-rebirth of our feminine being.

These are the embodied prayers, the prayers that take us face to face with the Goddess so that we are looking into the mirror of our Sacred Feminine selves, deep beneath the surface of the mind, deep beneath the noise and layers of trauma and lies that have cleaved us from our Mother’s arms and our own reflection as sacred. There, in those depths, we can hear the voices of our wisdom keepers; they are waiting for us to remember our forgotten tongues and speak with them again.

The collective feminine pain body is the initiatory aspect of our journey; reawakening the Feminine Wisdom Body and descending into an embodied connection with the Goddess is how we initiate. Our descent is often characterised as a journey to the underworld; this journey may be filled with confusion and grief, alienation and disillusion, rage and despair. We may experience a sense of being stripped bare, naked and alone, raw and turned inside out, unable to recognise ourselves or understand at first how or why we’ve entered into this seeming darkness.

To the outside world, especially when we are first navigating the initiation of our feminine descent, we may seem depressed, distant, preoccupied and inaccessible. The depth of our collective sorrow may have no clear name as we become the keening woman moving through the rites of lamentations, often without understanding or awareness of these rites, as our tears become ever-present. During this part of the journey, we may feel a sense of abandonment and an utter lack of comfort; the friends or pursuits that once made us feel good or supported suddenly hold little interest, and we are called to dig in the earth, whether physically or metaphorically, to retreat into long walks alone in the woods.

The mud and trees and living Earth becoming our companions. This is often a time of voluntary isolation, which to the outside world may seem like a complete loss of self or a deep depression. And because of our own lack of understanding of our Herioine’s journey and the necessity of the descent in order to meet ourselves more truly and activate our access to our wisdom body, we may get stuck and not know that this is all part of the beautiful, powerful process of our birth-death-rebirth cycles.

“Women find their way back to themselves not by moving up and out into the light like men, but by moving down into the depths of the ground of their being. Her metaphor of digging the earth to find her way back to herself expresses woman's initiation process. The spiritual experience for women is one of moving more deeply into self rather than out of self.

Many women describe the need to remove themselves from the "male realm" during this period of voluntary isolation. The artist and therapist Patricia Reis writes:

It took me four years to go through the whole process of destructuring, death, inner seeding, fruition, and renewal. One very important aspect of this time has to do with the fact that I removed myself completely from the whole outer arena of the "male world." In order to accomplish my own second birth, so to speak, I had consciously to separate myself from the world of men. It was this deliberate process of pulling in, or creating my own female matrix that helped me to find my own inner powers, my own feminine ground.

I doubt that I could have accomplished this in any other way!

A woman moves down into the depths to reclaim the parts of herself that split off when she rejected the mother and shattered the mirror of the feminine. To make this journey, a woman puts aside her fascination with the intellect and games of the cultural mind and acquaints herself, perhaps for the first time, with her body, her emotions, her sexuality, her intuition, her images, her values, and her mind. This is what she finds in the depths.”

- Maurene Murdoc - The Heroine’s Journey

Within these depths, we open the channels to our collective feminine wisdom body and begin to learn how to integrate this experience into our outer worlds. The process is often involuntary; in fact, for most women in our current social construct, the initiations are made so much more difficult to navigate because of the effect of the collective pain body, keeping us isolated from our own and other women’s wisdom. We no longer have the guidance of living elders who have made these journeys with conscious grace and can help us navigate, so we all stumble around in the dark, seeking assistance from patriarchal structures such as allopathic psychology or the medical and industrial complex and so the cycles are either broken or mitigated by advice from those who do not understand the magick of the feminine descending journey or disrupted by medications that numb and dull our senses.

As Patricia Reis wrote, we need to remove ourselves from the “male world” to fully immerse ourselves in this journey back to the Goddess. This does not imply or suggest that men need to be removed from our world but rather speaks to removing ourselves from the limited worldview and experiences of the overly intellectualised patriarchal consensus as well as the mythology of the Hero’s journey and masculine spiritual pursuit. This is the process of the wound by wound working through the feminine pain body to find our way back to the Goddess, not as some external off-planet being or the feminine part /aspect of the sacred, but the Goddess as a Sacred totality of which we as women are a reflection and embodiment. That holy trinity of Maiden, Mother, and Crone reclaimed and internalised as an expression of our Spirit and being.

As our eyes begin to adjust to the darkness of the fertile womb cave of the Feminine, as we work through layers of our wounds, the urgent yearning to fully reawaken and connect with the Sacred Feminine stirs, with every layer we hold in compassion to heal, we access a layer of the Feminine Wisdom Body. As with all things Feminine, it is important to remember that the journey from pain-body to wisdom-body is circular. It is not a linear process that moves from point A to B, from wounded to healed. It is a labyrinthine path that you will walk repeatedly with each cycle and each season; as you pull back each layer to reveal a little more.

 There is no skipping ahead, no way to “hack” the Feminine; the Goddess demands time, slow, steady flow, birth, death, and rebirth. Within that willingness to soft water your way through the wounds in your own body and being and then back, back through the songlines that make up your lineage, the Beauty Way begins to reawaken and reveal itself to you.

The wisdom body is revealed gently. Layer by layer, we notice our ability to shapeshift more consciously. We begin to experience our cycles not as some kind of punishment but as a tool that we can use to navigate our days and enter into deeper communion with the wisdom of our own physical body and the Matrix body of the Great Mother and Mother Earth. We begin to more clearly sense the world around us through our Feminine Form; we learn to speak the language of our body and senses, and often, for the first time as a woman, we learn to listen to what the collective Feminine and our body is whispering to us at every moment of every day.

As these channels open again and we truly learn to listen, there is often an initial experience of profound grief for the time we had spent in exile, imprisoned in the collective pain body and the patriarchal consensus or the “patrix”, as I like to call it. This grief tends to move through us not only for what we have lost but for our mothers, grandmothers and all those who came before us, as well as the grief for those of us still trapped in the captor bond. It is important to make space and honour this grief and to acknowledge that you will move through the stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and when acceptance lands, the access to the wisdom body deepens once more. It is also important to understand that you cannot save someone who is not ready to be freed from their own Stockholm syndrome with the patriarchy.

We are learning to speak a long-lost language, the language of the Goddess, our Mother tongue that was torn from us and buried under the rubble of an occupying force. It is not always easy to learn this old, forgotten language, but in your belly and your heart, you know it when you hear it. And so our Feminine Wisdom Body is rebuilt... as Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote, “Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...”

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 Vulval Madonna/Anasyrma 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🌹