The Mysterial Sequence: The Father Wound

This blog is the third of a five part series on The Mysterial Sequence. To receive insight and support, join us here.

I am passionate about the awakening of consciousness and leadership capacity in women, by opening the channel which will allow for the unfolding of the next level of our evolutionary potential to come online. I call this innate potential Mysterial. My sense is that this is an evolutionary imperative that we be able to call forth more of our feminine and masculine strengths, to meet these complex times.

The Father Archetype

This is the gate through which we come into belonging, into the community, and into our ‘fit’ with society in some way – often through a job, family context of children, geographic location of a home, and more.

Ideally we would come into adulthood and life, and into our metaphorical ‘Castle’ – to take care of things and be taken care of. We all have a pattern in our psyche – a wiring for having a sovereign place in the world. For being valuable inside of the larger system, not just as The Hero out on her own, but actually making it inside a system where there are others we need to show up in front of and for, and to ‘belong’ with.

When a healthy Father archetype ‘comes online’ in women, we: 

• Have installed a deep sense of our own confidence
• Are landed on the ground of our own true authority
• Have a relationship to our power that is grounded in our own unique gifts
• Know how to create structure and order
• Know how to build the systems that will allow our unique gift to be sustained over time

The Mother vessel is the womb and holding container inside of which things gestate. Yet the Father vessel is like a big ship – it is going to move somewhere. It has to be constructed in the right way for this movement to take place. You want your creative seed to come into the world through the Hero Manifestation, after being incubated in the Mother vessel.

One of the things we discovered in our research, was that there was another form of the Masculine which was not Heroic / Warrior. This element was more stable, composed, solid and vessel-like. We needed to distinguish this from the more firey aspect of The Hero.

Since our planet has been inside a masculine construct of wholeness for over 3,000 years, it’s brought us many things from an evolutionary perspective. The Father Archetype came into the culture during a time when it was necessary to build systems and structures – monarchs began to rise, in the modern era the rational mind came in strongly. We certainly would not say that this was the ‘wrong’ development. And yet for women, what has happened in this great sweep of The Father Archetype, is that there has been a ‘Father Wound’ cultivated and passed down through the generations.

Through research with hundreds of women in our University Women’s Leadership Development Programs, the unconscious and often conscious mind held this limiting belief:

The internal dialogue often went, “No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite fit into this pattern that emphasizes and values:

• The rational mind over being intuitive
• Order over free-flow
• ‘My’ group over ‘your’ group
• Belonging and fitting into the rules of this way of being – if I want to be taken care of.”

This has often tilted women into a collapse of our own authority. And at a time, more than ever before, when we need to stand on the ground of our own value (The Mother Archetype ‘I know that I am enough just as I am’). But we can’t show up in our sense of sufficiency, if we buy into the limiting belief that we don’t belong in the world. How does this limiting belief show up in your life, or feel in your body when you speak it out loud?

Ways this manifests for women often include:

• The uber-attempt to try to belong: to fit in no matter what
• To become ‘one of the boys’
• Judging others who don’t belong
• Giving up on even trying to fit in, because you don’t feel you ever will
• You so reject the system, that you live on the fringes, and don’t honor your need for structure in order to create a sustainable contribution

Many women who have worked very hard to fit into this hyper-masculine patriarchal power structure can be very judgmental, and not reach back to mentor other women, or may try to mentor them into being ‘one of the boys’.

This embodied wound of not belonging must be healed. It requires that the first polarity – The Mother and The Hero – be addressed. And when the shadow work in the Father Wound is done, the liberating belief becomes:

Often this liberating belief ripples out through experiences of:

• Being willing to be seen in the world
• Opening to being recognized for your being and your doing, your own unique creative essence in the world
• Having a sense of a Friendly Universe, of not being alone, of being part of a web of connection, to bring your own vital seed contribution to

It’s vital that each of us is willing to grow up, to do the work to open the channel so our deepest innate potential can come through and we can be seen for the beautiful ways that we are stewarding the world, using all of our feminine and masculine gifts together.

As always, thank you for exploring with me. I invite you to explore the next gate in The Mysterial Sequence: The Maiden Wound.