We have observed a few fundamental reasons why this kind of suffering flies under the radar and is not openly realised and acknowledged by the sufferer.

 

Firstly, the characteristics that define our silent suffering have become so normalised in our modern culture that people do not even realise they are affected. Every second advertisement on television is geared to making us feel better, insinuating that to feel not okay is normal. Such as ads for pharmaceuticals or artificial stimulants, subliminally suggesting to us that to feel depressed and lethargic is nothing to be concerned about, just consume these substances and you can go on with your life without any worry.

 

Secondly, we are conditioned to believe that certain types of emotions are more acceptable than others. For example, emotions such as happiness and joy are deemed “positive”, whereas sadness, anger, or depression are viewed as “negative” and less socially acceptable. In truth, there is no such thing as a positive or negative emotion, all are just natural expressions of different types of energy moving through us, this is why they are called ‘e-motions’ (energy-in-motion). By judging, blocking and suppressing our emotions and their natural flow through us, we severely limit our ability to interact with the world through true, authentic and vulnerable expression. Blocked emotional energy generates deep internal stagnation, disharmony, and fragmentation, which ultimately prevents us from healing and reclaiming our wholeness.

 

Thirdly, our western culture – which is influenced heavily by Hollywood, the mainstream media, and 24/7 gossip/drama-based entertainment (and celebrity worshipping) – provides a limited and distorted criteria of success. From a very young age we are led to believe that in order to be successful, we must be wealthy, attractive, intelligent, sexy, popular, and confident, and it is heavily implied that anything less than this is akin to failure.

On top of this, our narcissistic ‘highlights reel/my life is better than yours’ social media culturehas perpetuated our collective fear of being ordinary, as well as having developed a culture of constantly judging and comparing ourselves to others. We feel pressure to prove to the world that we are living ‘extraordinary’ lives, and this pressure and our tendency to judge and compare, causes us to hide the parts of ourselves that we feel shame about. Author and research professor Brené Brown refers to ours as a ‘shame-based’ culture, fuelled by a collective mindset of scarcity.

According to Brown, scarcity is the ‘never enough’ problem. In her book ‘Daring Greatly‘, she explains that “the word ‘scarce’ is from the Old Norman French ‘scars’, meaning “restricted in quantity”. Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

In a scarcity-fueled culture, the struggle for people to reveal their true selves (including their suffering and vulnerabilities) to the world is significant. Having been conditioned to view the world from a place of “never enough”, we are prone to compare ourselves to others and use them as a benchmark, assessing whether we measure up, or need to be more. The danger with this constant comparing to see​ if we measure up is that everyone else we are comparing ourselves to also harbours this scarcity “never enough” mindset, and therefore only present very select versions of themselves to the world – hiding behind carefully constructed personality masks.

Thus, we are programmed by our culture to compare our lives to ideals of perfection in others and society that are not even real. According to Brenè Brown, when we feel shame about ourselves, it is akin to real pain in the body. Expressing how we truly feel to others through vulnerability and authenticity is one way to release this pain, yet in a shame based culture this is very challenging because we are conditioned to judge certain emotions as “negative” and not socially acceptable. As a result, the pain remains trapped in body, which compounds everyday, and we suffer more.

Humanity’s Primary Cultural Wound

Our personal suffering and our search for wholeness has led us to discover what we believe is the source of all human suffering, as well as the driving force behind all individual and collective behaviour that does not align with wholeness. The source of our suffering can be traced back to a single core wound, or what has been referred to by embodiment expert and author Philip Shepherd as ‘humanity’s primary cultural wound’

 

Humanity’s primary cultural wound refers to our collective split between our head and our body, a deep fracture of our very being that has caused us to become disconnected from the wisdom, presence, intuition, and knowing intelligence of the body. Most of us are trapped in the prison of our head, ruled by its incessant and never ending loops of chatter, and our head-centric culture supports this disconnect. Trapped in the prison of the head, seperate from the wisdom of our being (our body in wholeness), we are fragmented. (Important note: When we say ‘we’ here, we are referring to those of us born into and influenced by western civilisation and culture, for not every human on this planet is suffering from this primary wound)

 

In his books ‘New Self, New World’, and ‘Radical Wholeness‘, Philip Shepherd has put together compelling explanations and understandings with​ regards to how this wound affects us. We must also give major credit to researcher and writer Bernhard Guenther, from www.veilofreality.com, for not only introducing us to Philip Shepherd’s work, but for his own powerful messages and teachings on the subjects of embodiment and wholeness. As well, his writings have deeply challenged our perceptions of the world, and for this reason we recommend entering his website with a very open mind.

We have observed that, as we have worked on healing our primary wound (through embodiment practices, which we will elaborate on in another article, and which Shepherd covers in depth in ‘New Self/New World), everything else in our lives has began to harmonise naturally, including the way we relate to the world, to each other, and to ourselves.

You can think of this primary wound as similar to having a flesh wound on the arm that gets infected, with the infection spreading around the body. This infection would no doubt cause imbalances and symptoms of disease such as fever, nausea, fatigue, and general sickness. We could focus on these symptoms and try to attack them one by one, such as by taking drugs for the nausea and vomiting, or we could simply address the wound on the arm. When we clean it up and allow it to heal, the body naturally re-harmonises itself. Or, alternatively we could ignore the wound completely and just focus on the symptoms, and even adapt our lives around these symptoms, learning to tolerate and live with them.

This wounded state then becomes our new normal, and we eventually forget what it felt like before being wounded.

This last option sounds like a rather insane thing to do, but it is exactly what the large majority of humanity has unconsciously done simply because we are blind to our primary wound. Our lives, our culture, and this entire world, have been afflicted by the infection caused by our primary wound, and this is why we believe that there is so much distortion.

We have existed in this wounded and fragmented state for so long that our culture does not even recognise or refer to humanity being any other way.

Our western architecture, institutions, art, and institutions, all seek to reinforce and normalise humanity’s fragmented head-centric state. The only references to a species grounded in wholeness, experiencing the world through the feeling centres of the gut, are certain select cultures scattered around the world. As well as ‘some’ nomadic tribes who prefer to remain far away from modern civilisation, and we are conditioned to view these cultures as “primitive” or “strange”.

If one however can separate themselves from their deep cultural conditioning and personal bias, and begin to analyse our western world from a place of sincere and objective scrutiny, it reveals itself to be built largely on a foundation of suppression and distortion of truth.

Here is a list of distortions from our own observations, and unfortunately these are only the tip of the ice-berg.

– How our entire planet is being saturated with more and more powerful wifi pollution, without any concern of the consequences despite a large growing body of evidence that wifi pollution may be extremely harmful to human health.

It seems that just about everything in our world has been infected by our primary wound, but we have simply adapted ourselves to the distortions this has caused because it is all we have ever known. And yes it is important to focus on remedies for these symptoms, which is something we plan on doing throughout our journey here at Seeds of Awareness, but without addressing our primary wound, we will just continue to chase our tails.

What we will attempt to do now is to help you understand this primary wound on a deeper level, and to bring your awareness towards what we believe needs to be one of humanity’s main focus points, which is to reclaim our wholeness.

Human consciousness contains two different points of awareness – male and female – that are intimately connected, but which also display vastly different qualities.

 

The point of awareness of the male aspect of consciousness can be located in the head, and it is represented by qualities of logic, reason, hierarchy and structure, willful doing, as well as focus on linear time.

Conversely, the female aspect of consciousness – with its qualities of sensitivity, intuition, wisdom, and presence – is located in the gut. Specifically, the female aspect of consciousness resides in an area of the gut referred to as the ‘pelvic bowl’.

For a very long time, as a culture, we have over-identified with the male aspect of consciousness – with a major precedence being placed on ‘doing, thinking and reasoning’. We have done so at the expense of the inner female qualities of ‘being, ‘feeling and intuitively moving through life’.

“We’ve put all our faith in and all our accolades on the brain in the head. We think reason is supreme, and we try to think our way through problems and stop feeling them. When that schism between our thinking and our being actually heals, you feel every thought. There is no division between thinking and feeling. But we give reason this place of supremacy in our culture. In the most important things in our life, reason is utterly impotent. You can’t reason your way into the present. You can’t reason your way into luck. You can’t reason your way into your soul’s purpose.” – Philip Shepherd

With our point of awareness residing primarily in the head (the male aspect of consciousness), we disconnect from the sensitive and intuitive qualities of our inner female and create an imbalance of energies. When not balanced by our present, wise, and intuitive female qualities, our inner male transforms into the destructive archetype of the ‘male tyrant’.

We want to be extremely clear here that these aspects of consciousness have absolutely nothing to do with gender, as some people may misinterpret this to be an attack on men. This however could not be further from the truth. The female and male aspects of consciousness are inherent in both women and men, and women can embody the male tyrant just as much as men.

The Taoist Yin/Yang symbol represents the beautiful dance and harmony that exists between the female and male aspects of consciousness within us all, and this dance and harmony can also be seen occurring in nature. For example, in the relationship between the sun (male) and the Earth (female).

Unfortunately, however, our primary wound has caused a fracture between our inner energies. We are programmed to live in the head, over-identifying with the male aspect of consciousness. Thus, the inner female has been deeply suppressed for many thousands of years, and the implication of this is that it has cut humanity off from its feeling centres. As a collective, we have lost true connection – not only to nature and to this planet – but also to ourselves and each other.

When these two aspects of consciousness are balanced and in harmony, the inner male instinctively and naturally serves the female, trusting and surrendering completely to her guidance and wisdom. When unified, the male aspect of consciousness is nourished and healed by the female’s healing energy, and as a result he is deeply strengthened. Balanced and softened by the female, he becomes what many people refer to as the ‘Sacred, or Divine Masculine’.

We however feel that these spiritual terms have become largely distorted and misunderstood as a result of religious indoctrination, and therefore we prefer to use the term ‘Transcendent Masculine’. The word ‘transcendent’ simply means to be exceptional and rise above the ordinary,​ which is referring to the inner male and females ability, when unified and in harmony, to transcend the inner tyrant.

The Transcendent Masculine is characterised by qualities of strength, honour, determination, focus, service, and resilience. When those qualities combine with the inner Transcendent (also referred to by many as ‘Sacred/Divine’) Feminine’s qualities of grounded sensitivity, presence, intuition, receptiveness, and wisdom, together they form the Inner Warrior.

Our Inner Warrior is reflected by our two different aspects of consciousness unifying to form a whole. Through the sacred marriage between the male and female, we can achieve a beautiful balance of strength and flexibility, knowledge and wisdom, fierceness and softness, focus and presence, determination and grace, receptiveness and sensitivity, knowing and faith, and dark and light. With this internal balance, we create a safe space that allows our hearts to begin opening up once more, revealing our immense love into the world, a powerful and unstoppable healing force.

Bernhard Guenther explains how all of our ancient myths and tales – wherein the hero saves the trapped and enslaved princess – can be linked back to our inner Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell first wrote about the Hero’s Journey (a template with which Hollywood writes its scripts – Star Wars is a great example), whereby – for our own inner hero to achieve true wholeness –​ we must go within our own darkness, fight the tyrant (often depicted as a beast or dark lord) and rescue the trapped princess from the hidden underworld.

Essentially, this means restoring balance between the inner male and female energies, transcending the inner tyrant.

“In my view and experience, Embodiment, reconnecting with one’s wholeness, fusing the separation of the inner male and female IS the process of what is called “ascension” or “awakening”. It is the “philosopher’s stone”, “holy grail” or the story of “the hero going into the underworld, saving/marrying the princess/bride” (his own feminine aspect of Being) as depicted in mythology. It connects us with the wholeness of nature/the world, our inner guidance system and divinity, as well as our own individual purpose for being here, something the mind can never ever grasp.” – Bernhard Guenther

Ultimately, when the inner male becomes disconnected from the inner female, not only does he inhibit his transcendent potential, but he also shifts from heart-centred, compassionate and loyal service (embodying the Inner Warrior), to a self-serving and fear-driven tyrant, who creates destruction and chaos everywhere he goes. Essentially, his focus shifts from service to the female and service to the world, to service to himself.

 

On top of this, he misidentifies with and serves the head-constructed ego, wherein he cleverly hides behind the ego’s personality masks and ambitions (something we will talk about in another article). When not balanced by the inner female energies, the inner male’s strength and resolve converts to fear and the inner tyrant takes his reign over our being.

Ruled by fear, the inner male’s determination and focus becomes imposing and inflexible rigidity. His care, compassion, and kindness becomes criticism, intolerance, and judgment. His belief in abundance transforms into a fear of scarcity. Instead of feeling and knowing the oneness of the Universe, he views himself as separate and independent.

Instead of cooperation and harmony, he thrives on hierarchy, competition and control over others. Instead of having faith and surrendering to ‘what is’, he is filled with distrust, envy, and the need to control.

The inner tyrant’s fears, which disconnect him from love, are what create the invisible prison walls that keep him imprisoned in the head and a slave to the insatiable ego. This prison is what Morpheus was referring to in the movie ‘The Matrix’, when he says to Neo “… you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”

Because the tyrant is trapped and disconnected from the inner female, he does not understand her and thus deeply fears her. He fears her ability to feel and face everything with rawness and absolute truth, her ability to delve into and shine light onto darkness, to be raw, untameable, wild, fearless, vulnerable, and especially her connection and faith in the Universe. Deeply fearing her, he is obsessed with controlling, suppressing and destroying her (even though she can not be destroyed for she is an inherent archetypal part of our being, just as the inner male is). The tyrant knows that if he surrenders his control over her, he will be transcended, thus she is his greatest threat.

We choose the word ‘transcended’ carefully, for the tyrant can never be fully destroyed or defeated. Being an archetype, he is deeply ingrained into the human psyche. He is as much as a part of us as our inner female and male energies – we just do not have to let him run the show.

This is important to grasp because if we fear him and attempt to avoid the reality of his existence, his power and hold over us grows. It is simply up to us to decide what qualities we choose to embody and align with, the Inner Warrior (representing the unified inner male and female energies, and an open heart), or the inner tyrant (representing the fear driven and disconnected inner male, with a closed heart), and it is up to us to become aware of when the tyrant is playing out in our lives so as not to let him create chaos.​

Ultimately, letting go of our inner tyrant requires humbleness, something that the tyrant can not comprehend. This is because the inner tyrant, being deeply attached with the ego, has convinced himself that he is the ruler of his life and this world, and from this conviction he builds a foundation of arrogance, certainty and self-justification (no matter how destructive and painful to others).

In essence, to reclaim our wholeness and to heal our primary wound means to embark on our own personal Hero’s Journey, and rescue, reunite with, and surrender to our inner female. Allowing the heart to open up and power our lives with love and compassion. Surrendering to and allowing our inner female to rise however, will not happen instantly, as this is a process that takes time, patience, faith and perseverance.

Blocking our access are all of our fears, conditioning, wounds and traumas that lie unacknowledged in our shadow and in the body.

Lovingly and consciously, these fears need to be brought into the light of awareness and integrated back into the whole – one by one, and layer by layer. Depending on what a person has been through, this can be a very delicate process and often it requires outside support.

We must also be aware of, when restoring wholeness, that there exist various forces in our world who wish to keep the female aspect of humanity deeply suppressed, and have successfully done so for a very long time.

For when we are disconnected from her, and our hearts are closed, we are ruled by the tyrant’s fears and are​ thus very easily divided and conquered by others in this world who have chosen to align with their inner tyrant. In knowing this, we can observe when​ these outside influences attempt to trigger our inner tyrant, and consciously breathe and surrender back into wholeness. All of which will be discussed in great length in our upcoming book – ‘Reclaiming your Wholeness in a Fragmented World‘

Essentially, coming back to wholeness is a process and a journey that takes time, patience, and faith. It involves many ups and downs and, in our experience, often taking two steps forward and one step backwards (thus the need for faith and perseverance). Expecting ourselves to be able to embrace and surrender to wholeness as soon as we become aware of humanity’s primary wound, is pushing ourselves too far.

It is akin to releasing a traumatised animal into the wild that has been locked in a cage its whole life, and expecting it to integrate smoothly back into nature without support. Obviously without the proper emotional healing, re-integration training, relearning and re-conditioning, the animal would barely survive a week.

Humanity too has been locked in a cage for a very long time…that cage being the prison of the head, ruled by the ego-serving tyrant and enclosed by invisible walls of fear. And we live in a culture that reinforces this mental prison through powerful forces from the moment we are born.

This first article was written for the purpose of bringing your attention and awareness to humanity’s primary wound, or to provide further guidance for those already embarking on this journey. For awareness is the starting point, and then the Hero’s Journey begins as we either choose or refuse the call from our spirit that beckons us to make our way back home to wholeness and to open up our hearts. Embracing the peace, joy, presence, and love that our birthright.

In future articles we will focus more specifically on the individual aspects of the journey back to wholeness, with the next article honing in specifically on ‘The Process of Awakening, & our Blindness to Wholeness’.

We are excited to be on this journey with you, and this truly is a journey, one that both of us are only just beginning ourselves. It is a unique journey for us all, but we are all in it together and the more we can support each other through vulnerability, compassion, openness, surrender, authenticity, and tapping into our Inner Warrior, the deeper we will be able to go within ourselves.

 

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