Healing the Masculine & Feminine Series: Part I – The True Origins Of The Patriarchy That Will Change Your Perspective

There is great interest these days in balancing our inner masculine and feminine parts, to for example attract the right partner or unlock higher levels of spiritual consciousness. The missing piece however in most teachings is undoing our patriarchal conditioning and healing our patriarchal wounding. Healing the Masculine & Feminine series is an eight-article series by Sabriyé Dubrie of Soul Teachings on healing our patriarchal conditioning and truly balancing our inner feminine & inner masculine parts within ourselves. As a society, we are only starting to understand how deeply our patriarchal wounding still influences us today; and how it wreaks havoc in our romantic relationships, our relationship with our parents, our relationship with the opposite sex, our relationship as women amongst ourselves, and in what it means to be a woman or a man in our own lives. 

The teachings shared are gleaned from my own healing journey on a Soul path level and my experience in working with over a thousand clients using the Soul Embodiment® Therapy method. For those interested in learning this method as a therapist, I run a yearly Soul Embodiment® Therapy Certification Program to train therapists worldwide in this revolutionary healing modality.

In this Soul teaching on the origins of the patriarchy you will learn:

• Why talking about the patriarchy is not about being anti-men
• How the patriarchy has impacted women
• The false premises that the patriarchy was built on
• How our subconscious patriarchal conditioning plays out in our lives
• And more…

Talking about the patriarchy does NOT equal anti-men

Often men think that talking about the patriarchy is about bashing men and certainly some women carry such deep wounding toward men that they will use any excuse to bash men. But the truth is that the patriarchy hurts men as well in many ways, although it seems to be a system that favors men, not all men were or are favored equally.

Although all men were favored more than women, in most cases, most men were throughout history subservient to more powerful men above them.

Most men as much as women, had little autonomy and had their lives planned for them by either older male relatives or a ruler with little to no say in the matter. That was if you were born a free man, if you were born a slave then you had no status or say in your life to begin with. When we think of slavery we often think of African slavery, but institutionalized slavery across all races runs as far back as 3500 BC, which means that many men and women were slaves, serfs, etc. throughout history. In fact, there are more people living in slavery today than were extracted from Africa over 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Source: Euronews.com

A man’s status highly depended on where he ended up in the social hierarchy. ‘By the time written history began, distinct economic and social classes were in existence, with members of each class occupying a certain place in the organization of work. At the apex of the social pyramid stood the ruler (often worshiped as a divinity in Mesopotamia and Egypt) and the nobles (probably grown out of a warrior group that had subjugated its neighbors). Closely aligned with them were the priests; possessing knowledge of writing and mathematics, the priests served as government officials, organizing and directing the economy and overseeing clerks and scribes. The traders and merchants, who distributed and exchanged goods produced by others, were below the noble-priest class in the social pyramid. A sizable group of artisans and craftsmen, producing specialized goods, belonged to the lower economic classes. Even lower in the social hierarchy were the peasants, and at the bottom of the social scale were the slaves, most likely originating as war captives or ruined debtors.’ Source: britannica.com

So not only did not all men benefit from the patriarchy to the same extent throughout history, but men irrespective of their status were cut off from their own femininity to various degrees as well, often resulting in strained relationships with spouses and children, difficulty in expressing their emotions, expressing empathy and all other aspects that would make them seem less masculine.

The patriarchy as a system

The word ‘patriarchy’ is derived from the Greek word patriarkhēs, it literally means “the rule of the father” and is used to refer to a social system where men control a disproportionately large share of social, economic, political and religious power, and where inheritance usually passes down the male lineage.

Patriarchy literally means “the rule of the father”.

Within the patriarchal system, the masculine is seen as more important, more valuable, and more capable than the feminine. The masculine not only protects and provides for the feminine but acts on her behalf as she has no legal authority to act on her own behalf. Within the patriarchy, the woman is like a child under the care of either her male family members or her husband.

Patriarchy vs. Matriarchy

Matriarchy is a social system where the female elders have authority over a group of people. Matriarchal societies will have a reverence for women and will be nurturing societies that respect women overall. Matriarchs are rulers of a culture or society. They make laws, govern and make business decisions. They also have roles that are not given to men. There are some key differences between matriarchy and some other female-centering concepts.

• Matrilineal refers to tracing familial relationships through the maternal bloodline.
• Matrilocal is a cultural custom where a husband lives with his new partner in her village or tribe; this occurs when Exogamy occurs. Exogamy is marriage outside of a person’s clan.
• Matrifocal is the familial custom where the mother is the leader of the family unit but not in a dominant manner. Matricentric is another term used to describe this custom.

These concepts are different from a matriarchy, which refers to a woman governing a social system. Matriarchy Meaning Matriarchy was first developed as a word and given meaning in 1881 in English. It originated as a counterpart to “patriarchy.” The original meaning of matriarchy was a government by mothers. Recently introduced as a word, it seems to line up with the modern use of the term. Source: Study.com 

A matriarchy is no better than a patriarchy because they’re both built on an unequal distribution of power.

There’s often this idea that a matriarchy is somehow better than the patriarchy and this is incorrect. A just and equal society is not created through the dominance of one gender over the other, which is why a matriarchal society is not the answer. Instead, a society where we have balanced the feminine and masculine within ourselves, making them equally important and valuable is the way to a gender-equal society.

The reality of women living in a patriarchal system

Living as a woman in a patriarchal society had many downsides as women often had no legal status of their own, in many cases this meant that they were not eligible to inherit and if they did their husbands controlled their money and estate. They were not free to marry who they wanted (but most men weren’t either throughout history, as arranged marriage used to be the norm worldwide). Women were often also not allowed to go to school or receive higher education, depending on their social class they weren’t allowed to work, nor could women have bank accounts, vote, etc.

Women were in many cases, second-class citizens.

They weren’t seen as full witnesses in court, they were allowed to divorce in some cases but then would often be forced to leave their children with the father if they wanted to leave. Some cultures practiced female infanticide, but even if this wasn’t the case girls were often worked harder, treated with less respect, and fed less than the boys in the same household. The fact that a girl would grow up and be ‘lost’ to her husband’s household with the girl’s family having to pay a potential dowry to the husband’s family, only added to the idea that girls weren’t worth investing in, while boys stayed with their parents and would provide for them and take care of them when they were old.

After seeing a past life of my own where I was starved as a young girl to be able to feed the boys in our tribe long ago when Tibet and Nepal were one country, I researched this phenomenon and found that this was a widespread practice even in Europe that lasted well into the 1900s.

Girls got less food, often shorter breastfeeding periods, poorer care, and generally worse living conditions than boys. Source: phys.org

This might be explained by the fact that girls have a natural biological advantage when it comes to survival from the fetal stage onwards. The majority of stillbirths and miscarriages are boys. Baby boys are also more vulnerable to stress than baby girls, and more prone to diseases. Females are also better equipped to survive famine and epidemics.

A research project into “Missing Girls” during 1700 -1950 found that boys experienced better living conditions and were prioritized by their parents during difficult periods of poverty and famine. Boys were given more food than girls, mothers tended to breastfeed boys longer, and boys received better care and living conditions.

In environments with high mortality rates, the way girls were treated when they got sick, as well as the amount of work they were required to do, could have led to more of them dying from the combined effects of malnutrition and disease. Source: phys.org

All of this could be because girls and women were considered less valuable than boys, but there may actually be a more neutral explanation that grabs back to evolutionary survival mechanisms passed down genetically.

The true origins of patriarchy

It was also in this past life as a young girl starved in the then Nepalese part of Tibet that I was shown the true origins of the patriarchal ideology. This was in a Soul Embodiment® Therapy session facilitated by one of the certified therapists I trained in the Soul Embodiment® Therapy Certification program.

The original wound to a pattern is always benign, nothing is truly ever created from malice even when it can certainly look that way. The same is true for the patriarchy, no one ever sat down and consciously decided that women were inferior to men rather it was an idea that evolved over time.

I was shown that in the beginning, when we didn’t have the societal systems in place as we developed later on, everything revolved around survival. According to archeological evidence, prehistoric human ancestors such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo ergaster were nomadic. Rather than settle in one place for long periods of time, they were constantly on the move in search of food and shelter. They were hunter-gatherers, this was the only way of life for humans until about 12,000 years ago when archaeological studies show evidence of the emergence of agriculture. Human lifestyles began to change as groups formed permanent settlements and tended crops. Source: Nationalgeographic.org

Life was very tribal and as we know from tribal societies and communities today, the survival of the group precedes the survival of the individual or you could say that the personal desires and needs are often called to be sacrificed for the greater good of the group. In those times, there were often conflicts with other nomadic groups, and because everyone was simply trying to survive and dependent on what they could hunt and gather in the wild there were often raids and conflicts over those scarce resources. In this setting, boys and men were relied upon to protect the nomadic tribe from wild animals and rivaling tribes that not only wanted to steal food but also women and perhaps children who could be used as slaves.

Men with their muscular build, bigger chest span, and greater lung capacity were much better suited to ENSURE survival for the group.

Although women are biologically hardwired to survive the most extreme circumstances, men with their muscular build, bigger chest span, and greater lung capacity were much better suited to ENSURE survival for the group. It is this, that made men in an environment where everyone was struggling to survive a cherished good because a tribe was only as strong as the men that protected it. Therefore to ensure that as many people would survive as possible, much was invested in keeping their protectors both healthy and strong because in doing so they protected the older and weaker as well as the younger members of the tribe.

It was simply the most clever survival strategy they had to keep their tribe safe and thriving under the most extreme conditions of famine, drought, intense cold, and unbearable heat. It made total sense for these early humans living under such severe and insecure conditions to organize themselves in this way.

Later on, this made less and less sense but by then no one remembered why things were done this way.

It’s kind of like the pot roast story….

The pot roast story

A young woman is preparing a pot roast while her friend looks on. She cuts off both ends of the roast, prepares it, and puts it in the pan.  “Why do you cut off the ends?” her friend asks. “I don’t know”, she replies. “My mother always did it that way and I learned how to cook it from her”.

Her friend’s question made her curious about her pot roast preparation. During her next visit home, she asked her mother, “How do you cook a pot roast?” Her mother proceeded to explain and added, “You cut off both ends, prepare it, and put it in the pot and then in the oven”. “Why do you cut off the ends?” the daughter asked. Baffled, the mother offered, “That’s how my mother did it and I learned it from her!”

Her daughter’s inquiry made the mother think more about the pot roast preparation. When she next visited her mother in the nursing home, she asked, “Mom, how do you cook a pot roast?” The mother slowly answered, thinking between sentences. “Well, you prepare it with spices, cut off both ends, and put it in the pot”. The mother asked, “But why do you cut off the ends?” The grandmother’s eyes sparkled as she remembered. “Well, the roasts were always bigger than the pot that we had back then. I had to cut off the ends to fit it into the pot that I owned”.

The reptilian brain

Not only can we forget WHY we do things in as little as two or three generations, but survival information also becomes hardcoded in the reptilian brain. This is because the basal ganglia, referred to as the reptilian or primal brain, controls our innate and automatic self-preserving behavior patterns, ensuring our survival and that of our species.

Organisms that are more adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on the genes that aided their success.

I have discussed before that on an incarnation level we retain where we left off in previous lifetimes, rather than starting from zero in each and every new incarnation. The same is true ancestrally as well as on a species level, that we are hardwired for survival based on our predecessor’s experiences that are programmed in our subconscious mind. This is called natural selection. Natural selection is a mechanism of evolution. Organisms that are more adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on the genes that aided their success. This process causes species to change and diverge over time. This means that the successful strategies of our nomadic ancestors to navigate famine, drought, and intense cold or extreme heat are hard coded in our reptilian brain. This is why when humans were presented with such extreme circumstances throughout history, they naturally fell back on this previously successful survival strategy not because they thought women and girls were less valuable per se. Although they did hold such conscious beliefs due to the mechanism described in the pot roast story. Still, their primary reason for giving the boys and men preferential treatment was because that was how their reptilian brain was preprogrammed evolutionarily. Sadly, because of how their societies were still organized due to the pot roast mechanism, boys and men were still vital to their survival but now on a family unit level, which gave the conscious justification for something that was of course not justifiable at all. They were simply grabbing back to a way we had managed to successfully survive the most extreme circumstances in the past, which is neither a conscious nor a voluntary process because we were evolutionarily hardwired to survive in this way. The fact that women are biologically better suited to survive, might very well be an evolutionary adaption to men’s preferential treatment in times of poverty and scarcity. However, the fact that we, as women carry our offspring, might also biologically contribute to the fact that women are better equipped to survive famine and epidemics than men.

The patriarchy from a spiritual perspective

From a spiritual perspective, both the patriarchy as well as the matriarchy are seen as distortions or imbalances, this is because the Soul (our true self) is androgynous both male and female in perfect harmony. Anger at the opposite sex, or the patriarchy/matriarchy makes no sense on a spiritual level because we have all lived both feminine as well as masculine lives. In fact, as women, we have been men many times within patriarchal societies and all currently incarnated men have been women within patriarchal societies many times as well. When we carry such anger it’s always an indication of deeper wounding around the feminine and the masculine. As discussed in the Soul Path Series: Part IV – Masculine & Feminine Split, The Battle Of The Sexes and The Birth Of Duality we voluntarily split our masculine and feminine in order to be able to play the incarnation game as described in Soul Path Series: Part I – Our Split From Source And How It Still Impacts Us Today.

On a Soul level, neither the masculine nor the feminine is inferior or less than the other part.

However on a Soul level, neither the masculine nor the feminine is inferior or less than the other part. Splitting these two parts, allowed us to experience duality which was an important ingredient necessary to be able to play the incarnation game and densify our energy field from light being into physical (human) form. Only within duality do we see things as two separate things instead of the whole they actually represent, which is why from the Soul’s perspective the concept of feminine and masculine is seen as one harmonious interacting thing rather than two opposite or conflicting parts.

Part of the self-actualization or Ascension process is balancing our inner feminine and masculine in perfect harmony so that we can again fully embody our Divine or Soul Blueprint. In fact, there is no enlightenment or Ascension without healing our relationship with the feminine as we will otherwise not be able to raise our Kundalini or Shakti energy coiled at the bottom of the spine. During Kundalini both feminine (Shakti) and masculine (Shiva) energies unite, not only within your chakras but from both sides of your body. This union is not possible unless the feminine and the masculine are each other’s equals on a conscious level but more importantly on a subconscious level, as our contradicting subconscious beliefs will otherwise cancel out our conscious beliefs around the masculine and the feminine.

Why we need to heal our patriarchal wounding

Our patriarchal conditioning and wounding run much deeper than most of us realize, this is because our conscious beliefs are much more modern in our day and age. They may even be feministic, which will make it even harder to imagine that subconsciously you may still adhere to patriarchal beliefs from past lives, your ancestral lineage, your culture, your religion, and so on…

Your subconscious beliefs may be much more outdated than you would like to believe or even hold possible.

It’s quite common to have subconscious beliefs that are not only outdated but completely contradict our current more modern belief system. For example, in this lifetime I have zero beliefs around virginity or that it is somehow necessary to be a virgin when you marry, not in regard to myself or my daughter when she confided in me after the first time she was intimate with her then-boyfriend. Quite recently in a session with another healer, I uncovered a traumatic past life memory around losing my worth as a woman because I had lost my virginity. When I researched this topic I found that women were subjected to all kinds of virginity tests, to prove their ‘purity’. The most common sign of virginity in a woman was that her hymen remained intact, and husbands would expect that a new wife would bleed during the first time they had sex. Some medieval texts advised women about how to convince a man into believing she was still a virgin. Girls were also given diuretics and only a girl that could resist urinating was considered to be pure and many more ridiculous tests as such including having to prevent water from going through a sieve. When a girl or woman would fail a virginity test she would be an outcast and shunned for her loose morals. But it’s not just about our feminine wounding. It’s also about the false beliefs we carry about men and women from our lifetimes as men that keep us rejecting our inner feminine, suppressing her, or disowning her completely. The state of the relationship between our inner feminine and inner masculine is mirrored back to us in all of the most important relationships in our lives, our romantic relationships, the relationship with our father and mother, our relationship with other women, the opposite sex in general and our relationship with ourselves as a woman.

In the following seven installments of this series, I will discuss one by one how our patriarchal wounding lies at the heart of:

• The mother wound
• The father wound
• The sisterhood wound
• The witches wound
• The wounded masculine
• The wounded feminine
• Our inability to embrace our feminine power

I invite you to join me in this healing series designed to help you heal your patriarchal wounding that is keeping you stuck in the battle of the sexes as well as keeping yourself small to be safe and loved. Our patriarchal wounding is the biggest block to true female empowerment, which is of course not about making men heel and bow but about being able to fully embrace all of who you are as a woman and not just the parts of you that you were allowed or able to express within the narrow definition of womanhood with the patriarchal system. I pray this soul teaching on the patriarchy serves you and has helped you get a deeper understanding of this system and how it was created, For everyone on the spiritual journey it is imperative to heal the relationship between the inner masculine and feminine as we cannot self-actualize, Ascend or reach enlightenment otherwise. We have to heal our relationship both with the feminine as well as the masculine to come to true inner harmony and equality, which is a prerequisite for being able to raise the Kundalini or Shakti energy. Shakti is the Divine Feminine. ‘Tantra solves this mystery by stating that Shakti is an eternal principle that bestows the power to create, sustain, and destroy, and thus gives birth to creation.”….“The Goddess or cosmic feminine force in Tantra is worshipped as Shakti, generally translated as ‘power’, whereas the God or cosmic masculine force is worshipped as Shiva, meaning ‘peace’ The nature of Shakti’s power, which may otherwise be feared or misunderstood. Hers is not a power of aggression, domination, or retribution, as the term “power” is often taken to connote, nor is she out to overthrow the masculine; her power is not oppositional, but rather, precisely, the power of unity, the reconciliation of opposites, and therefore ultimately peace. This means that her highest power is to move us beyond the illusions and conflicts inherent in dualistic perception and deliver us to enlightenment, the consciousness of our unity with all things. This, in turn, is the only true basis for peace, within ourselves and our world.’ Source: icrcanada.org

This, however, is only possible when we can see the feminine as the masculine’s equal, again not just on a conscious level but without any subconscious contradicting (patriarchal) beliefs canceling out our conscious beliefs.

Ready To Take Your Manifesting To The Soul Level?

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With my deepest love,