Reflecting upon last week's post about the wounded female speaking out and splitting the illusion, a thought occurred to me: Are all females wounded?
Or, more precisely, does a wounded soul choose to incarnate in a female body in order to process its pain? It was a question not meant to generalize or discriminate but to probe the deeper logic of embodiment - why we take birth as we do.
My daughter’s response was immediate and grounding: “All humans are wounded. You think men don’t carry wounds?”
That answer turned the key. Of course woundedness is universal. It is not gendered. But how that wounding expresses and is processed may differ depending on the vessel - male, female, or otherwise.
Each incarnation is an experiment in balance. Souls seem to oscillate between polarities, tasting the full range of human experience: activity and receptivity, assertion and nurture, reason and feeling, order and flow.
Gender, in this sense, is less a binary, more a tuning fork - each lifetime resonates to a slightly different set of frequencies along the multi-layered masculine–feminine spectrum. The body is simply the instrument through which the soul works out its harmonics.
Ancient mystic traditions often recognized this. Many cultures regarded the androgynous, the gender-fluid, or those born with either both or no genitalia as spiritually significant - as if they held within them the blueprint for integrating both halves of human duality. Perhaps, as my daughter suggested, such beings take on the complex task of healing both lines, masculine and feminine, within the collective psyche.
Wounds are not only personal; they are civilizational.
In patriarchal societies, the feminine, in both women and men, has been suppressed: the intuitive, the emotional, the relational, the earth-honouring. The result is centuries of psychic imbalance, producing both wounded women and wounded men - the former through oppression, the latter through emotional amputation.
In a matrilineal or egalitarian society, the reverse might occur. The masculine drive for independence, conquest, and identity could become the neglected pole. Every culture, in its extremes, generates its own shadow.
Thus, incarnation may be the soul’s way of participating in a larger evolutionary balancing act, to experience firsthand the side of the human story it once ignored or injured. The “black sheep” in every family or tribe might then be seen as the corrective agent, the soul assigned to heal the unhealed generational line.
If men and women appear to handle pain differently, it may not be because one feels more deeply than the other but because each is conditioned, biologically and socially, to process pain through different channels. The feminine psyche tends to turn inward, metabolizing sorrow through empathy, expression, and relational healing. The masculine psyche often turns outward, diffusing pain through action, humour, logic, or distraction.
Neither is superior; they are complementary mechanisms within the same species, and sometimes, within the same soul, across lifetimes.
Over time, the soul learns to blend these: to act with compassion, to feel with clarity. When the vessel (the feminine) and the oar (the masculine) move in rhythm, healing becomes wholeness.
In the end, woundedness may not be a flaw but the very engine of reincarnation, the friction that polishes the soul. As my daughter wisely said, there is no one way or another, just a sustained ebb and flow until resolution. The soul, tired of the machismo of one life, might next choose the open vulnerability of the feminine; and having healed that, return to embody the masculine with newfound tenderness.
Perhaps the goal is not to escape the wound but to understand it, to become the healer of both halves of humanity within oneself.
If incarnation is a dialogue, in this instance between wound and wisdom, then gender would be its syntax, the way the story gets told.
Each lifetime adds a new paragraph to that grand narrative, moving the collective toward integration, where masculine and feminine, strength and softness, vessel and oar, become one rhythm - the rhythm of the Whole healing itself through the individuals.
