The Wound or The Wisdom
- Isakara
- Aug 3
- 6 min read
There has been a very present theme in my sessions and in my own experience over the last week or so around how we know whether we are responding to or perceiving our environment from our wounds/pain body or our wisdom/wisdom body, and I thought, as Chiron stations retrograde today, perhaps it was a good time to speak into this theme as I believe it is coming up for a reason.
Last week the question was posed to me within the framework of the Pain Body to Wisdom Body course as “How do I know if I’m acting from a wound vs wisdom?”
It’s a great question BTW, so thank you to the woman who asked it.
It’s also a question that then repeated itself in many ways in other sessions and that came up for me over the weekend as a mother around a reaction I had to and an experience with my son.
How do we know?
How do we know whether the voice we are listening to is our pain body speaking, or our wisdom body?
In order to answer that question, it probably helps to have a very simple understanding of what I mean when I speak about the Collective Feminine Pain Body and the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body.
The Collective Feminine Pain Body is the inherited field of separation from the Feminine that shapes how women relate to themselves, one another, the Earth, and life itself. It is an ancestral and collective wound carried through our bodies, our lineages, and our shared consciousness.
This field is woven from three core wounds.
The Mother Wound is the wound of separation from the Great Mother, from nature, and often from our own mothers. It shapes our sense of belonging, safety, nourishment and our capacity to receive life.
The Sister Wound is the wound of mistrust, comparison, competition and disconnection between women. It fractures our relationship with sisterhood and often leaves us disconnected from our own bodies and feminine nature.
The Witch Wound is the wound of persecution. It expresses as the fear of being seen, speaking our truth, embodying our power or living differently. It often leads us to hide, comply, silence ourselves or make ourselves smaller in order to feel safe.
Together these three wounds form the energetic structure of the Collective Feminine Pain Body. By bringing them into awareness and transforming them into wisdom, we begin to reclaim the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body, allowing us to relate to ourselves, one another, the Earth and all of life from a place of resourced wisdom rather than inherited pain. It is the journey of making medicine from the poison.
When the Collective Feminine Pain Body is activated within us through our personal, ancestral or collective trauma, we respond to the world around us from that place of pain. It influences the way we behave, the stories we tell ourselves, the things we believe and what we perceive to be possible or true.
I often think of it like planting a fruit tree in poisoned soil. The tree may appear healthy and strong, and it may even bear beautiful fruit, but the fruit will always carry something of the soil that nourished it. In much the same way, when we are responding from our wounds, our lives may appear outwardly successful or even loving, yet our thoughts, our choices and our relationships are still being fed by inherited pain.
The Collective Feminine Wisdom Body, on the other hand, is the living field of remembrance that reconnects women to the Sacred Feminine, the Great Mother - Sophia Ennoia, the Earth and the regenerative intelligence of life itself. It is an embodied, collective field of wisdom accessible to every woman not through striving or intellectual understanding, but through deep remembrance, embodiment and the Heroine's journey of descent into the soul.
This field is woven from three core expressions of feminine wisdom.
Mother Medicine is the remembrance of our innate capacity to nurture, regenerate and birth life in all its forms. It is the embodied wisdom of compassion, responsibility and creation, restoring our relationship with ourselves, the Great Mother and all of life.
Sister Sanctuary is the remembrance of belonging. It restores trust, reciprocity and authentic connection between women, allowing us to experience ourselves as part of an interconnected web of support rather than through separation, competition or mistrust.
Witch Wisdom is the remembrance of our intuitive, embodied knowing. It is the courage to stand in our truth, honour our cycles, trust our inner guidance and live in right relationship with the Sacred Feminine without fear of persecution or rejection.
Together these three expressions form the energetic structure of the Collective Feminine Wisdom Body. As we move through the Heroine's journey, remembering rather than striving, we gradually reawaken this field within ourselves. In doing so, we begin to live from our body's innate wisdom, reconnect with the Earth and the Great Mother and participate in the rebirth of the Beauty Way through our own embodied presence.
So perhaps we come back to the original question.
How do we know when we are responding from that wounded place?
There are some key factors we can use to tell if we are in the wound or the wisdom.
The Wound:
Your body will tell you - for me, there is always a kind of contraction that happens when I am responding from my pain body, and I have confirmed this with so many others - they feel something somewhere in their body contract.
An urgency - there always seems to be a sense of urgency when the pain body is reacting, no space to stop, to breathe, to think/feel things through. Time contracts.
The pattern - you’ve been here before, the same argument, the same fear, the personal, ancestral pattern repeating and you already know what’s coming next, but like a runaway train it feels impossible to stop and you can’t help either continuing the behaviour yourself or looking for ways to recreate the familiar pattern because especially our pain body identities feel safest when they can predict what will happen next even if that prediction is harm. The predictable harm feels safer than the unpredictable or unknown outcome of breaking the pattern or even believing the pattern can be broken.
Fear / Anxiety - there is a frequency of fear driving our reactions/actions.
The results - Our reactions or responses cause either ourselves or others some level of harm; even if it is very slight, it is there.
The Wisdom:
Your body will tell you - there will be a sense of expansion, something greater than yourself, a sense of connection, like a field wrapped around your body holding and bringing in an ability to perceive from a more interconnected, supported place.
Spaciousness - where the wounded response requires urgency, the wisdom response grants us spaciousness and the ability to take our time; even when something may truly need an urgent response, that urgency doesn’t become internalised. Time expands.
The pattern - we recognise the pattern vs seeking to reaffirm the belief/pattern; we seek to see the ways in which we can respond differently. We are able to move from the probability of our repeating wounded patterns to the possibility our wisdom body creates without the noise and fear of the unknown.
Excitement or Calm - We are able to feel a sense of inspired excitement, curiosity and joy or simply a deep sense of calm in the way we react or respond. Weirdly, as opposed to anxiety, excitement and calm can co-exist in the same moment when the Wisdom Body is activated.
The result - Our reactions or responses have a positive effect on either ourselves or others; even if it is very slight, there is something positive that is gained.
Of course, this is a simplification. None of us lives permanently in our pain body or permanently from the Wisdom Body. We move between them, often many times in a single day. The practice is not about getting it right all the time; it is about learning to recognise where we are with honesty and compassion so that, little by little, we become more able to choose differently.
The journey from living in a constant state of pain body activation to remembering our Collective Feminine Wisdom Body is neither quick nor linear. It asks us to return to ourselves again and again, layer by layer, wound by wound, remembrance by remembrance.
We are the ones birthing and dreaming our world into being, whether we realise it or not. Every thought we think, every relationship we nurture, every way in which we choose to respond rather than react contributes something to the collective field that all of us share.
For me, that is what this work has always been about. It has never been about “healing” some broken version of myself or those I work with. It has always been about remembering the women who existed before the wounds taught us who they needed us to become.
I believe that is how we begin to reawaken the Beauty Way.
Not by becoming someone else - but by remembering who we have always been beneath the noise of the wounds.
If you would like to explore this journey a little deeper, click the button below.
Or book a Connection Call, and we can explore if the journey of reawakening your Wisdom Body could be for you.
In Alchemy
Isa 🌹
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