Underworld…A Selection of Facebook Transmissions on the Underworld

I love this image. How it incorporates the red thread, and the illuminated psyche.

8.3.21

Last Summer in June, (12th to be exact) I was guided to begin to work with my own fear of death. I spent a year in this exact practice. “I surrender, I receive, I release, I trust”

I thought I was facing into my own issues with dying. I wasn’t. The nudge was to prepare me for something far worse. To be alive when a child died. It’s interesting where following the thread of truth all the way to its conclusion leads us. 

Gnosis.

“HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND”

Today I cleaned my temple space. Lovingly curated an altar to death. Removed anything that could possibly distract me from being with the frequency of #Resurrection. And prepared myself for a four day Shamanic Container. 

I began thinking about the integration of duality available in the mythic reenactment of Resurrection. 

Last week I wrote about Eris. The dark goddess of Chaos and destruction, Sister of Venus. 

For thousands of years, across cultural lines the Goddess had always come in pairs. Light and dark. One symbolizing heaven and the other hell.

Resurrection was the primary spiritual rite of these lineages.

Temples were erected so that adherents could come at regular intervals to participate in this ceremony.

This narrative is especially pronounced in the story of Inanna and Erishkagel.

Two halves of a whole meet in the underworld, forever changed by the experience…

*On the sidelines of mythical analysis is the hypothesis that instead of these being sister Goddesses, that they are one person embodying duality. Suggesting their may be more to the Resurrection template than meets the eye.*

As it stands now, it is widely accepted that it is meant to signify death and rebirth.

But even our modern understanding glosses over the pain points in the story. 

Death to escape the tired worn out life/body…

Rebirth into the light…

What if, instead of just giving us a template of how to die, we are also being given a template for how to live. A template for integration. 

An understanding that it’s a complete system. The poison and the medicine at once. 

What if instead of just trying to be good, to pass the tests, reaching ever forward towards the light, we are meant to embrace the darker, more shadowy aspects of being alive. To exist simultaneously along all points of this toroidal field of death and rebirth. That we might stand in the brokeness, cruelty, and beauty at once. 

On old parchment paper, with black pen I decided to Scribe these words by Khalil Gibran as a prayer offering for my altar, a reminder to SHE who will be with me as ME.

Because, for as much time and experience as I’ve had in the murkey landscapes of incoherent chaos, it’s always an experience frought with gripping, steering, controlling. Instead let me meet her with the Mantra “I surrender, I receive.”

I want to take the opportunity to lace HER into my skin. Knit HER into my cells. Weave HER into my hair, press HER into my tongue. HER IS PARADOX

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses 

your understanding. 

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its 

heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. 

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the 

daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem 

less wondrous than your joy; 

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 

even as you have always accepted the seasons that 

pass over your fields. 

And you would watch with serenity through the 

winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen. 

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within

you heals your sick self. 

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy 

in silence and tranquillity: 

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by 

the tender hand of the Unseen, 

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has 

been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has 

moistened with His own sacred tears.”

-Khalil Gibran

1.11.22

Corona, you Dark Mistress. What an initiator you have been.

YOU Bowed me low; prostrated me before the deep mysteries You hold. Invited me to kiss the ring of life and death you pressed against my lips.

Paradox.

How you’ve transformed me. Pulled me all the way down to the great below, and Buried me alive.

Pushed my face into the long forgotten, cracks and crevices of grief, rage, and total helplessness. Made me smell them all, taste them all. Savor them slowly.

No escape.

You brought me to the place of deepest surrender. Splayed, and slayed me.

Hail, Teacher.

You Whipped me until I was raw. Then placed the very vessel of my misery into the palm of my hands, until it became a tool of my own empowerment.

And showered me with grace.

Primal. Survival.

You pushed me up against all of the places I STILL want to dominate, extract, grip, and control. Would not let me exit.

Instead you left me like an infant. In a place of pure reception. Lifeless and alone/not alone.

What a journey, a Venus Rx/ Pluto Underworld Odyssey really.

Thank you, thank you.

8.4.22 

(a reflection on the writing from 8.3.21)

A meditation on Hell...The Underworld

Yesterday, I was rereading an article I wrote a year ago.  One of the lines really stood out to me because it contained a word I don’t normally use… “For thousands of years, across cultural lines the Goddess had always come in pairs. Light and dark. One symbolizing heaven and the other hell.”

I don’t like the word “hell” with all of its fire and brimstone connotations.

However, I do spend quite a bit of time talking about the Underworld, and thought I might take a moment to flesh out how “Hell” could be an appropriate word, when in its proper context.

In the post I wrote about the fact that my “underworld” work has been around not gripping, or controlling outcomes. My mantra with this work being “I surrender, I receive, I release, I trust.

My fear of death was actually a fear of a loss of control, a fear of the unknown. It had been showing up all over my world. And the more I talked about it, the more I heard from others that had a similar make-up.

Over-Control, or Over-Responsibility, (extreme vigilance) is a type of trauma response. I had so much resistance to the unknown. I wanted to dictate outcomes. Conquering my reality with the force of my will.

So I set out to become a practitioner of the Underworld. That meant unwinding the places that this pattern was choking off my ability to truly flourish. Which inevitably led me to engage more deeply with the underworld than I ever had before.

———

Hell, from the Hebrew root word, she'ol is often understood in the mainstream western world as hell, the place of the damned or the underworld.

However, when we look at the root words, sha'al, “asked”, she'eylah “request”, we see that the word was likely co-opted later. Or we overlayed other ideas onto it.

Sha’al shows up in the Hebrew bible 200 times. We see that when it is used, it is to derive information that is “Unknown”. In other words, the questions are not rhetorical.

Request, She’eylah, as used in prayer to ask God to bestow favor on us, generally denotes something that one does not already possess. In the Hymn of Inanna, we see that she must give up all of the things she divinely possessed to gain entrance to the Underworld. (I’ve related to this in the past as things that give us a feeling of safety and power. And while it can be that, some Underworld experiences require us to give things even more precious than this)

When we then study she’ol, in its context, it is evident that nobody actually knew anything about it.

For instance, it was used when proper burial rites couldn’t be performed. As in this line "No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning." Thus his father wept for him (RSV). In this account Jacob believed his son Joseph had been eaten by a wild beast. As Joseph's body could not possibly be in a grave.

There is good reason for the mind to relate to “The Underworld” or “Hell”, as the place of the “Unknown”. We often suffer the most when operating in the unknown, especially when we feel we lack safety.

For me, the reason I embarked on this path was so that I could engage with “world upending” events without gripping. So that I could surrender and stay present with myself in the midst of them.

I have so much more to say about the Underworld. This is exploration is but a fractal of what is here in this vast place of regeneration. But I’m going to save that for another day. I just thought I’d begin by illustrating that it is truly a quintessential mystery.

How do we as a culture, and in our personal lives, relate to the unknown, to the mystery? It's a good question to begin to play with.

9.14.22

As a youngster, I had an innate way of discharging excess energy from rupture, upset, and being unsupported.

I would roar, shake, dance, keen, get lost somewhere, etc, in an effort to process my emotions.

At a certain point though, these practices became unacceptable.

My fathers motto was “children should be seen and not heard”. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that growing up. My whole being rejected it. Hated the cruelty and unfairness of it.

In his own humanity, he just had a very low threshold for outward displays of emotion. He didn’t know how to comfort or cope with my feral side. Which was clearly at odds with my process.

So I was punished and shut away when I expressed anything but stoicism to something unpleasant. Something my body couldn’t swallow.

After years of being shut away in my room for shedding tears, a silent scream began to build. My body curled in on itself. And it all got locked inside.

It was as if each unexpressed rupture had put down roots, grew shoots of ghost pipe, and a complex network of multilayered trauma sprouted where I should have been.

This left me exiled from my body, writhing in physical pain, struggling to paint on a smile each morning.

It was as if I existed in a state of suspension, hovering  just above the gates of the underworld. Too afraid to drop down, paralyzed by the fear of the great below, but likewise, I had no idea how to stand up again.

Finally, the bough that held me broke. I knew I had no choice but to just let go,  drop to the bottom. And let the monsters feed on the outer shell that imprisoned me.

What I’ve learned in my evolving relationship to that persistent lament is that every rupture, every emotion with depth, has a sound and a shape.

I’ve met mythological monsters, and creatures that leapt from the pages of our comic books along my inner sojourn.

Somewhere along the River Styx, I remembered how to animate, to give voice and expression, to all of the silent screams, and beasts of burden that lived on the inside.

While I love writing, and do my best to use my pen to illuminate what lives in the veiled recesses of our experience. It doesn’t quite capture, in full poetic justice, the landscape of psyche.

The concepts resist getting pinned down with words. Words just seem to make what I’m pointing too, smaller. More flat, and two dimensional.

Anyone who has braved the wilderness of soul can attest to what I mean.

Psyche lives and expresses itself in a world that exists beyond language.

In a training workshop in my twenties, the leader asked us to create collages that didn’t include words.

Instead we were to capture the frequency of what stalked us using only pictures of what lived in the cracks and crevices, beyond the rational mind. She asked us to find representations for flying monkeys that populated our field.

It was at that workshop I was first introduced to the creatures that haunted, and imprisoned me. Where I first looked them in the eye. Was able to personify them. And thus able to build a connection to them.

-

I’ve found, it’s The myth of normality, the pressure to conform, that can both literally and/or metaphorically devour us.

The commitment to normality is our society’s way of smoothing over trauma. If keeping us just functional enough… never addressing the root.

How do we break free?

And The work that allows us to animate the more than human feelings that lurk in the dark, that assists us in connecting, relating, and befriending our demons and what grows in the shadows, is the journey to the Underworld and back again.

This journey takes all of our vestments of worldly power. Our attachments, and coping strategies that appeared to keep us safe, but in reality imprisons us.

Removes every worldly possession of false power, until we are naked and bowed low, before the trickster deity of “living death”. Her name is Mother of Paradox.

She targets our ossifications, ravages where we are crystallized, and feasts on our “petty tricks”. She strips us of our notions around purity and perfection. Until there is no card of strategy left to play.

She leaves us to revel in her cosmic joke, that all of the power and control structures we’ve invested in, all of the ideas of safety, and security, that we thought gave us power to play like the God’s, have in actuality, incarcerated us.

That authentic empowerment comes when we surrender fully to the truth of the moment. When we open and allow evolutionary eros, the power of the big gods, to move through us.

After we are annihilated and spit out from the mouth of the devourer, we are ready to rise again.

What is described here is an Underworld Journey of Epic proportions.

It’s an attempt to reclaim the exiled self.

Why do I mention this now?

All of this comes up as Venus is just about to dip below the Horizon, making her own Underworld journey through December 2nd. She embarks on her own sojourn to meet her Trickster Sister Eris (Erishkagal) in the Underworld. It is a time when love feels distant. And trauma triggers blare their signal, begging to be explored.

It helps to have a guide. To travel with someone who can see in the dark.

Because while parts of the Underworld journey sound univiting, there are specific energetics to the cycle that can make the journey *a little less* unpleasant, and definitely more profound.

I have been passionate about guiding the top to bottom cycle in the form of Venus/Inanna’s Myth for the last decade.

So…

Come on a journey with me to the Underworld…

You are going anyways as Venus vanishes on the far side of the sun. Might as well not go it alone…

9.16.22

A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY - VENUS' FINAL DESCENT

The threads of the Underworld grab us in one of two ways.

There is the sudden plunge, that is the result of an outside force. A fire, a death, an accident, etc.

And then, there is the slow descent.

Wherein the threads of katabasis reach out like tendrils, slowly wrapping themselves around our ankles and wrists, invading our thoughts and beliefs.

The Underworld = The Unconscious from a psychological standpoint.

Whether we go to the underworld, by our own design, or by the design of the universe, this journey always results in a reclamation of our inner gold if it’s done properly.

However, In the second case, the case of the slow descent, ruled by the Venus cycle, we are forced to visit the underworld because we are operating in the unconscious in some area of our lives through this principle that Jung spoke about…

“The rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. This is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

We see in the Underworld story of Venus/Inanna that she travels to the Underworld to meet her opposing halve, her dark sister, Eris/Erishkagel.

It’s incredible to see how beautifully the sky story mirrors this back to us.

In Astrology, oppositions take on the nature of Libra.

Casting a mirroring effect between two archetypes, having them act in opposition to each other to illuminate some part of our unconscious programming that we were previously unaware.

In the Sky Story our current Venus Star Point, that takes place at Venus’ Superior Conjunction, her “Underworld” phase, for the first time in History that I know of… Venus in Libra, will OPPOSE her dark sister Eris in Aries. Playing out this psychological phenomenon in near perfect symmetry.

What is even more fantastical in this symmetry to the myth of Inanna, is that Eris it thought to be ruled by Libra giving Eris the quality of a mirroring trickster Goddess invested in divine justice through the qualities of an Underworld Deity.

—-

In terms of the Underworld & Venus…

Love & Desire, (areas ruled by Venus), can both be born from the act of projection. Projection has been highly codified with a negative connotation in modern times. However, projection itself is actually a neutral function of being human.

It is the act of casting our inner gold onto someone else. The act of casting another person in the place of God for us, until we ourselves are able to hold our gold in that area of our lives. It shows us what we admire, and what we desire to become. We need projection to be able to dream and even to relate. (this is deep, I can’t possibly cover it in one post)

Projection becomes problematic when it is unconscious, when there is no agreement, or when we don’t take our gold back, allowing someone to continue to hold it long after the sell by date.

Venus disappearing, or her influence being occulted by the rays of the sun, often causes an area where we’ve cast our gold, to become illuminated. In essence, the stars fall from our eyes.

The projection becomes toxic when the person or thing we’d cast into the role of God is revealed as fallible or human. And this phenomenon of  “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” becomes active.

In other words, we must become conscious of our projections, and  reclaim our inner gold for ourselves.

It is in the Underworld that we meet with reality as it is. We see ourselves and all of our limitations precisely as they are. And all of our projections get called back to us. It is a place of inner alchemy. Whereby we stop mixing our metals with other people, and have an opportunity to repurify them.

Today, Venus finally dips below the horizon, and out of sight for most of the world. In a few places she will still be visible for the next several days.

By the time the fall equinox is upon us, the point in which the balance of light on the planet shifts towards darkness, Venus will but all have vanished from the sky. What a metaphorical marvel!

As we make this Underworld trek over the next 70 some odd days, it will be important to notice this dynamic and take ourselves into this inquiry..

Where have I cast the image of God (or an archetype) onto another person?

Where might I be jealous, or envious? Where do I feel disgust, or a desire to extinguish another’s light? Where do I admire people?

How do those complex emotions inform who I want to become?

And is my lack of being able to step into that role for myself, causing me pain or anguish?

What does our own inner gold, (places of self mastery) verses our outer gold ( *our worldly vestments of false power”) even mean? And how do I differentiate between the two?

The dark sister is the holder, or unconscious repository of all of our toxic projections, the ones that have become outdated. Meeting with her helps us to reclaim our inner gold. To revivify our being, to fill ourselves to brim with our own essence- self. To cut away the dying parts or the cords that have been cast onto to others.

Said another way…

When we allow others to be human, we give permission to ourselves to be human as well. When we appreciate others in both their mastery AND humanity, we can more easily identify our gifts and what we bring to the world, while also having approval for the parts of us that aren’t yet masterful.

This is, in part, the opportunity before us.

As always, more to come….

10.16.22

There was a time I would have said “I’ve done it all, I’ve really lived”!!

Even with young kids in tow.

I had always said yes to life when it came knocking.

I’ve said yes to travel, to adventures, to living overseas. I said yes to more than one “once in a lifetime love affair”.

I lived with a playful open heart.

Even when it got broken, I didn’t close it.

The very nature of living a full life, dictates that we will inevitably face the dark.

If I didn’t know better, at the time, I’d have said I had taken numerous trips to the underworld and popped back up again by sheer force of will. Proud of my inner strength.

Then, in 2012, amongst all of the other evolutionary and energetic shifts in the collective, Pluto crossed my ascendant and I was thrust into the biggest Underworld initiation of my life. This time for real.

On the floor of my new kitchen, in a strange place, with no family, and very few friends, I dissolved into nothingness.

I remember the thrust of descent blotted out my vision with bright yellow sparks. I couldn’t make out the edges of the room.

I felt my DNA shifting and rearranging. I knew nothing would ever be the same.

I didn’t have the strength to scrape myself off the floor this time.

My husband came home from work and moved me to our bedroom.

For days I stared at the ceiling fan, round and round it went.

I couldn’t shower. I couldn’t eat. I could hardly see.

Almost a week later, my very exasperated man, finally sat down on the bed beside me, and tried to muster all of the empathy he could…

“You need to get up. Your kids need you, I need you. It’s been a week. That’s enough.”

I remember thinking, “I have four kids. They do need me. There is no one else here to help with them. He has to work. I do need to get it together”.

So I tried to swallow all my pain. Stuff myself into shape that just didn’t fit anymore, and keep going.

All the while holding an enormous amount of resentment that I hadn’t been able to fall apart.

And so of course, I got sick.

Chronic pain set it. My appendix got infected. It would leak into my body, and it would patch itself up with scar tissue.

A very apt metaphor, for what I had done on the outside.

I went on this way for almost three years as my life slowly fell apart.

Because when the deity of the Underworld calls you, she will not be denied. 

She requires nothing but full submission to the dismantling.

There is no place that we can will ourselves out of an Underworld encounter once the gates open.

We can try. But eventually she will have her way with us….

It’s a common theme that we scrape at the edges of the tunnel on our way down.

Throw our arms and legs out to the sides to keep us from plunging into the deep abyss.

Try to hold on to some semblance of our old life.

Because descent feels so utterly unsafe.

And we have “responsibilities”. Life dictates that we keep it together.

Our paradigm insists that “loosing it” is for weak people.

But this orientation only leads too more destruction in its power-over stance. It’s utterly paralyzing. Stasis sets in as we fight against the downward pull.

I needed to find a way to give myself permission to finally let go and fall into the groundless place below.

It would have been really helpful to have a map, or a guide. To know and understand what was happening to me.

10.21.22

There’s this way when we are in the midst of an organic Underworld Journey, the kind that is involuntary, the kind that feels “thrust upon us”, by an outside force, we can become angry with the level of suffering we are in.

It can feel frustrating, like the pain is grating on us, exposing every nerve. And we didn’t ask for this!!

It’s not as though we made the conscious choice to change jobs or end a relationship. We were given a steaming pile of sh!t, and now we have to figure out what to do with it.

It’s hard in these gateways to see a way out, to keep the faith.

I‘ve had an unusually hard life. Or so the people around me say.

Long ago I learned that the only thing that manifests in comparing my pain, or even my luck, to others is more suffering. So I don’t tend to do that.

I accept my lot.

Since childhood I have been an alchemist, attempting to turn the lead of my circumstances into gold.

It must be an odd way to approach huge challenges in the ordinary world because people around me always comment on how “well I handle being in circumstances that are full of manure”.

For me, this is second nature. I truly value my life. I want to live. The only way I could have resurrected my life from the many piles of ash it’s become over the years, has been to figure out this piece. (Plus I’m a Scorpio, so that helps)

Although the way it transpires changes a little each time. The orientation stays the same. The orientation to being a yes for the journey. Wherever it takes me.

But this time it brought me here.

When my son died, I was like “seriously? Wtf? When do I get to rest from the constant pummeling of pain and loss?”.

I’m human. Of course I had that moment. A moment I recognized as a “Job” moment.

Wondering why my childhood Bible lessons kept surfacing, and being oriented towards alchemy, I decided I’d follow the nudge. So I ordered a book by Richard Rohr called “Job and the Mystery of Suffering”.

I liked the title. “The Mystery of Suffering”.

On the first page, the very first page, the initial dose of medicine came…

“Although the story of Job (who endured an almost unending assault of loss) has usually been regarded as a study of the mystery of Evil, I’d prefer to look at it as the anatomy of a conversion. A diagram for those who “fall into the hands of a Living God” Heb. 10:31. -R Rohr

Ahhh, of course, this is exactly where I am on the Map, I am in the hands of Her (the living God)

And as I’ve begun to see myself as being in an ever deepening encounter with God, it has kept me from stepping outside of my predicament and judging it from the outside, where I’d inevitably find myself in a really bitter place.

Rather I see Her sometimes ruthless compassion as totally benevolent.

Which has helped me open inside of my experience. Open to the pure, unadulterated life force coursing through the pain. Letting it chisel some new shape from the molten rock my of my life.

I’m still so in the midst of it all. Down in the alchemical chamber being emulsified by loss. I have no idea how it will all look down the road.

Though I do know that this whole experience of “being in the hands of a living god”, keeps deepening my relationship to trust. 

This whole year has been an initiation with trust. Even before my son left. It was the word I called in at the new year.

I’d noticed just how much being in the midst of a World Wide event like 2020, had shaken my trust. And how much “safety” was choking out any signs of life.

So I thought I’d be learning to trust life again. And I had. I had begun to really deepen my relationship to trusting the perfection of all things. Again.

Then my son died.

This? As perfect? That was a tall order.

What I’ve actually learned is, I have to trust the wisdom of death as much as I’ve learned to trust the perfection of life. Because they are the same. 

And I have to trust them without being attached to an outcome, or even a meaning. Without there being a bigger fuck!ng plan. There might be. But as soon as I hook onto that, I’ve

un-surrendered. Wanting to take an active part in how it all works out in the end.

Take the chisel in my hand. Rather than be chiseled.

Be the hands of the living God rather than resting in them.

Certainty is so fuc$!ng seductive.

But it’s also rigid and controlling.

Trust is open. But it takes all of us. Surrender takes all of us.

Like Job, in an organic underworld experience, we will keep wrestling with our pain and suffering until we don’t anymore.

Suffering comes from our stories about what has happened to us. From the mind. From our unconscious contracts with our own mental loops and early conditioning. From the land of “shoulds”. From wanting to control the outcome.

Pain is different. Pain flows up from the depths of love. It feels like grief and longing, but is divorced from the mind. It is open, and deeply connected to the mystery.

We will flip flop from suffering to pain and back again, until finally, we miraculously emerge from the chrysalis. Wholly Changed.

And it will all happen without any force from us. Without willing ourselves along the path. Without certainty.

It will happen when we rest ourselves in the hands of the living God. The Great Mother.

This is where we are on our #Venus Journey as she is occulted by the Sun, Squaring Pluto. With a Solar Eclipse in Scorpio immediately following.

Nestling into Her. Waiting to be transformed by the Mystery.

10.23.22

One of the reasons I felt so called to host Underworld is because my son had a lot of trouble compassionately holding himself in these spots. And when we don’t know how to hold ourselves compassionately, it becomes hard to even allow others to hold us. We can become perpetually stuck down here without this element. *

We had an amazing gathering yesterday. I really want to thank everyone who made it live. I personally felt so held by the amazing women who came as I shared so much of my personal story.

The most important thing for me was to serve the energy. That meant showing up in the frequency of the Underworld.

I had prepared nothing.

There were no slides.

This was not a “class”.

It was a transmission from dissolution stage of the Alchemical Cycle. And more than anything I wanted to communicate directly from the rawness it evokes in us. From my humanity. Not in the role as expert or teacher. Giving full permission to whatever came through, including any glitches, or gaffe’s. Or any insecurity around the fact that I am in the midst of a significant life passage. I am not who I was five months ago, and I have not yet arrived at who I will eventually become.

11.05.22 VENUS

When Venus is on the Far Side of the Sun, she is furthest from Earth. The Sun's Rays somewhat occluding her influence on us.

It's always deeply felt in the interior realms for me. A vague sense of displacement. A lack of immediate access to an ever present, living, source of love.

Not everyone will feel this way.

But for those of us who do, What do we do when we feel cut off from a living source of love?

This is the practice mat for me in regards to self holding and the path of deep trust.

Trust that the Mystery Herself is the Great Mother, and at no time am I actually cut off from her benevolence. Even if “it seems that way”.

It’s the principle of trust that even if “mother/lover leaves, they are always coming back” and we are always etherically connected.

Quantum entangled, if you will. We are always being held in a state of profound grace. We cannot be abandoned. Not by Her. 

However, separation is a deep wound at the heart of our current humanity.

Loss of connection.

It is intrinsic to the collective pain body, and can evoke a sense of almost existential grief. Where we feel a tinge of longing for something elusive rather than tangible.

In this period, it is common to feel a sense of loss for something we can’t quite put our finger on. It’s just there, operating in the background. Low grade sadness. 

If you are feeling this way, I want to reassure you that it’s a normal occurrence during Venus’ Superior Conjunction.

Which makes it a phenomenal time to do grief work with the deeper thing underneath. The nameless, wordless, nonlinear, inexplicable, pains that feel as though they were almost seeded in another time or dimension.

Through Paradox Venus reveals her Underworld Curriculum.

She is asking us to work with and hold paradox, complexity, nuance all over the place. To stop boiling our inner and outer world down to false binaries.

But rather to hold Two Truths at once.

The apparent truth, and the deeper truth.

Source, and Anti-source are one.

Her quality of “here, not here”.

Separate, but “can never be separate”.

Along with the mysteries of death, She also reveals through the quality of eternity, an everlasting, ever renewing life.

And it is TRUST and relaxing or surrendering into the nature of cycles, having faith in their benevolent grace, that we are carried through the darkness.

She asks a lot of us in this period. Remember, the throne room is where Erishkagel is giving birth.

In order for us to give birth to what we incarnated to embody….

To hold the BIG LOVE….

We must surrender known attachments and projections that are preventing Her current from moving through us.

She asks, to Surrender our preferences to how things “should be”.

To give up entitlements. To stop grabbing for scraps.

So we might finally step into the bigger thing.

The bigger love.

The inexhaustible connection we all have to the benevolence of the Universe.

What exists beyond separation. Beyond paradox. Beyond duality.

Birth, Grief, Surrender, and Trust, go hand and hand. As a birth doula, and mother of four, ask me how I know these things are inexorably intertwined.

What we ultimately conceive in the throne room initiation, is the ability to hold more Truth and LOVE. Because we've made space in the letting go. The falling away. The things we've honored and put to rest. The dying.

Truth and love are the substances of healing, wholeness, and authenticity.

Venus Underworld Work is deep, profound, life & death affirming work.

Many deep bows for those who are in the trenches, on the Path of Deep Trust. 

9.9.23

The year was 2012.

Pluto was crossing over my Ascendent

I had finally worked up the nerve to find and present myself to my birth mother.

I finally felt “good enough”

You see, I had a lot of issues in my early years. I took an unconventional path, and often landed myself in a less than ideal circumstances.

I often acted first and thought about it later. And even though I hated myself for this pattern. It took a ton of effort to shift it because of my own self cruelty.

But now, in the year 2012, I had finally quintessentially arrived.

I had a house, car, and a husband

You see, I lived with this nagging thought that if I presented myself to her as less than perfect, less than having that “better life” that adoption promises, it would make her regret her choice and cause problems with the perfect reunion I had fantasized about my whole life.

I can’t tell you the logic I used to arrive here. Only it felt like a winning formula and I clung to it like a baby at the breast.

But things didn’t go at all like I planned.

I reached the climax of my life, the journey “back home”, only to have the door slammed in my face and none of my questions answered. I had never even thought about life beyond this moment. It the same way for so many orphans. That mythology of finding the long lost parents, only to be nestled in the bosom of their love.

Suddenly I realized that the years of effort I invested in being “good enough”were for naught.

She wanted nothing to do with me, and told the family they MUST follow suit.

It didn’t matter that I had done all of this for her. She didn’t know that I had stayed in a relationship I should have left years before because I couldn’t bear the thought facing her as a single mom with 4 kids.

And no one else knew that I had done it all for her either. They couldn’t fathom why I was so upset.

In the wake of her rejection, I was seething with self pity and resentment for every place I had abandoned myself for her.

Surely I must be the most pitiful person in the world. I couldn’t make my own mother love me.

No one was able to meet me in that pain.

It went on like this for days after that fateful phone call. Stunned. Dispirited. Detached.

Watching the ceiling fan spin from my view on the bed that had now neatly molded to my body.

Then one day, the woman I had been arrived at my bedside.

She said “look at you!!” Look at how pathetic you are feeling sorry for yourself, get up, get breakfast on the table. You can’t just lay here”.

And I agreed. She was right. She was always right. I was this ugly unloveable creature, and if I wasn’t earning my love from others, there would eventually be no love.

So I scraped myself off the floor and tried to put myself back together again.

I distinctly remember that morning, standing in the kitchen, over a frying pan and eggs, with every cell in body twisted into a burning ache.

I looked over at the cupboard I’d collapsed into when my Grandfather said “never contact us again”.

And I had a thought that would later haunt me.

“This feels like picking up the pieces of my shattered body, and trying to glue them back together. Only they don’t fit right anymore. Every place there is a crack, there is pain.

Its like I had been a flower vase that was thrown to the ground and broken into a million pieces. I will never be the same.

Despite knowing this, the only template I had for living at that point, was to do what I had been. After all it got me the husband, house, and car. Even if they weren’t quite the right fit, shouldn’t I try and be grateful? So the punisher inside went on running the show. Trying to keep things neat and tidy. At least on the outside.

I spent the next three years trying to get on with it. Being berated by the woman I used to be. Being shamed nonstop for how I broken and depressed I felt. And getting sicker each day.

I had been thrust over the edge of the proverbial well that leads to the underworld. Jutted my arms and legs out to the side to stop myself from hitting the bottom. And I stayed that we for years.

In extraordinary resistance.

See the problem was, I was scared of the dark, scared of the down.

Stasis set in.

I couldn’t accumulate the force necessary to draw me up.  Yet was terrified to drop into the murky swamp below.

Finally in 2015 I fell. With a splash I entered the sludge of all of my repressed pain, anguish, hurt,  sh!t, piss, and vomit. I was lathered up with my own ugliness.

I needed to drop the flower vase again, only this time, I was meant to leave the pieces on the ground. Instead of gluing them back together in that old shape again.

Facing each unloved piece of myself was so healing. I wondered what I had been afraid of? Yes it was initially terrifying. Yes I was sure I’d be annihilated when I fell. But none of that is what actually happened.

It did take all of me. It required that I give up every single thing I believed to be true about myself. Underworld journeys necessitate that. Nothing short of every identity we’ve ever hid behind will eventually be sacrificed to Deity of the Kur.

But it also gave me back to myself. It taught me how to “die while I lived”.

I emerged from that underworld, more me than I had ever been.

Wholly.

It also gave me a map for this terrain. It initiated me in the intricacies of each

gate of the descent journey.

If I hadn’t previously descended. Melted off all of the dross of the first 33 years of my life, I don’t know how I would have made it through the last 14 months.

When Tanner died I knew the exact pose to take. I knew exactly where I was going, and what I’d be doing along the way. 

This, exactly this is why I am so passionate about teaching the Mythopoetic Story of Inanna and the Venus Mysteries. These are the Rites metaphorical Death and Resurrection.

It is my medicine. Metamorphosis.

Her cycle is the map. And I can say on no uncertain terms that I have been initiated by Her to share this deep, medicine path with others.

Venus has always been intimately tied to the Death and Resurrection Mysteries. They called Jesus “He of the Morning Star”

This template is one of psychological wholeness. It’s a template of living revelation.

If you know that you are hovering over the deep. And that the deep has secrets to teach you.

If you know that to live well, and play a big game while you are here, you must also know how to die well, this journey may be for you.

4.10.24

BEYOND THE ARCHETYPES. VENUS - MARS - Aries and the UNDERWORLD

Given that Venus now sits in the sign of Aries ruled by Mars, and hovers just above the Underworld, I thought it might be a good time to check in with the archetypes.

For me, Astrology has become a way to understand the forces of the Universe, and our place in it.

As an Archetypal Astrologer, I’m always interested in the personified form of the energies. I think it helps immensely when pointing to the specific elements or fields of reality the planets are playing in, and how they are being expressed and influencing us.

But to really understand a Venus bathed in Martian energy, in a fulsome way, it becomes necessary to pull back the curtain on the archetypes, and understand how the force of these planets is acting on us, and through us, all the time.

In other words, we must also understand the forces and energies that lay behind the archetypes.

When we do that, we find that Venus and Mars ARE the primary action behind this specific dimension of reality we live in.

Venus is a yin or receptive force of being, while Mars is yang, the force of action. Yin is darkness, while yang is light. Yin is immanence, while Yang is transcendence.

One might say the Sun and Moon are also these things. And they are. One way of describing the difference between the Moon and Venus is that the Moon is the undifferentiated ground of Feminine Being, (we can project any feminine archetype onto the Moon) whereas Venus is the “Differentiated Feminine”. Who we are, our unique feminine expression.

As far as Venus and Mars go as “stand-ins” for the Masculine and Feminine, In my own Ayurvedic lineage, we have Purusha and Prakriti, Shakti and Shiva, in other traditions there is Marduk and Tiamatc, Arthur and Guinevere, Jesus and Mary Magdalene etc.

In all cases, one (the feminine) is the unmanifest, liminal, unconscious, pool of pure potentiality, and the other is the thing that erects it, that strategizes it, builds it. (Mars)

Said another way, Venus takes on the state of beingness, the chaotic force of the void, the warm breath that awakens and vivifies, while Mars is the action piece. Mars’ mandate is to act on and hold the creation and desires of Venus.

All this makes Aries very creative territory for Venus to travel through. Remember creativity comes through working with the forces of chaos and tension. In my own cosmology Mars and Aries rule the Solar Plexus chakra. Here, like an aikido master, Venus can work WITH the momentum of energy and frequency to sculpt or carve something new. She moves on instinct.

One of the most important things to understand about the forces that underlie our dimension of reality is that they are complimentary. They work in dynamic union with one another. While they are certainly polarities, they are not in opposition to each other. I believe this is a necessary piece of nuance to bring into our awareness at this time. For each to be in its highest expression, the other force must be present. (in it’s non personified form)

When we personify these energies, it’s easy to see them as being opposed. It can become difficult not to overlay gender wars/differences onto the Archetypes. But we can also see their highest personified expression in Heiros Gamas, the Sacred Marriage.

I am a huge fan of bringing others into relationship with the Feminine force of reality, not because I don’t like the masculine force, but, because the feminine force is undernourished inside our current paradigm. We’ve largely associated Yin like qualities as having less value than Yang like qualities. We prize action over being.

As Venus is now in Aries readying herself to descend into the Underworld, realm of the Feminine, now is the one of the best times to acquaint yourself with these forces, so you can hold your rod of truth in the dark, disorienting, irrational, terrain of the Bardo, and thrive there.

The saying “don’t ever mistake my kindness for weakness” is an important element to understanding the realm of the Underworld Feminine. She is not only a fluffy Aphrodite-like character. A Goddess of Beauty and love. She is not Eve, born out of Adam’s rib. Those are all distortions of her true, deeper, more holistic,  essence.

The Underworld is key to holding these deeper codes.

Underworld Venus is far more akin to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Chod, than any of the Bubble-Gum Love Goddesses of the Greek and Romans Fantasies.

In an act of extraordinary compassion, Underworld Venus cracks open the hope and fear of the wounded heart right on the charnel ground of chaos and fear. Pierces like a laser beam through the core of outdated karmic patterns. And prepares the body to become a tantric feast of the darkness, so we can ultimately come home to who we truly are. The Feminine ultimately *rests on Her own ground, without altering it. She is.

Or she is like the Dakini, who “is a messenger of spaciousness and a force of truth, presiding over the funeral of self-deception. Wherever we cling, she cuts; whatever we think we can hide, even from ourselves, she reveals. The dakini traditionally appears during transitions: moments between worlds, between life and death, in visions between sleep and waking, in cemeteries and charnel grounds” - Wisdom Rising,

Taken together we’ve got a fierce, bold, creative, chaotic (Her upcoming conjunction to both the  North Node and Eris) Venus in Aries. Along with Mercury doing his “backwards cosmic trickster dance” (Gary Caton) and we are still bathing in the post eclipse energies, which may have us feeling a lot of movement and momentum, but with no idea where to put the energy, where we are headed, or what that looks like.

Why? Because we are in a primal dimension. Not a logical one. The subconscious is active given Mars’ placement in Pisces. The chaos and evolutionary forces feel soo present but a bit underground. Perhaps our vision of the future feels a bit foggy. I think we must let this be ok. Because for the next few months, those of us who work with Venus will find ourselves shadow boxing rather than consciously creating.

For these reasons, it is the Underworld initiated who are most equipped to see us through… she guides us through the groundlessness inherent in disintegrating systems, and dying paradigms. While simultaneously, creatively, birthing the new through Her own unique differentiated template. It is the fire dance of the Underworld that further refines our sense of differentiation.

5.2.24

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK.

In Shamanic cosmology The Underworld is the realm of the Feminine. Of the Mother, of the Soul.

We travel to the Underworld for deep nourishment. Once there, we allow ourselves to lay down in the soil, and receive Her nutrients.

In the Underworld we are “fertilized” by our worldly experiences and they are then transmuted into a “new thing”.

“One Thing Becomes Another in the Mother”

The Underworld is a realm of “soul retrieval”… a homecoming for our exiled parts. Where they can be reintegrated with love.

It’s a realm of rest and digestion.

The Underworld is the Inner World.

While the “Underworld” carries certain negative connotations in our over-materialized culture, this is simply another manifestation of our collective “Mother wound” that darkly colors our perception of the lower worlds.

A genuine Underworld experience re-introduces us, body and soul, to the living source of love that pulsates from the center of the Earth. And reminds us that we are never separate from it.

It offers us an ecstatic encounter with life.

In the Underworld, there is a welcome release of what is weighing us down. There is room for our lament.

Imagine the way a child runs to its Mother when things feel too big to carry alone. This is what the Underworld offers us. An opportunity hand off our excess baggage to the Mother.

In the Underworld, She holds and embraces us as we give over the parts of ourselves that we’ve found difficult to love.

And with the eyes of love, she cherishes us.

It is here we are reintroduced to the interconnected web of life and we find a different kind of belonging.

Yes, the “work” of the Underworld is deep and profound. But it is NOT a trip to the Hell Realms as our myths and culture might have us believe.

It is a trip to the realms of our very own nature. Deep in the soil, connected to the roots.

——

The Myth of Inanna is Star Story, a Venus Star story to be exact.

If you remember in Inanna’s myth, she descends through Seven Gates and arrives in the Underworld to meet her Dark Sister Erishkagel.

Erishkagel is the mythic representation of Inanna’s exiled parts.

When we meet Erishkagel, she is on the floor giving birth. At the very same time she slays Inanna. Thus, the story is telling us, there is a simultaneous death and birth.

As this drama plays out, two of Inanna’s helpers from the Upper World come down and deeply empathize with Erishkagel as she writhes on the floor in labor. They mirror her pain back to her through the eyes of love. Repeating after Her as she moans.

Then they move onto Inanna and sprinkle her with the bread and water of life and she is revived.

This clues us into a two important things. First, the motif of the “Mother” as being a central character in the story.

Secondly, the metaphorical, simultaneous, death and rebirth, is a symbolic clue of transmutation, or becoming a new thing through the medium of love and compassion.

Said another way, it is through meeting ourselves in the metaphorical dark, with the love of the Mother, we become a new thing. Fully transformed.

This is the central “Drama” of the Venus Story. This is why the Underworld is experience is central to our Venus work.

We know when children are well loved and well attached, they go on to do amazing things. In essence, the Underworld gives us the opportunity to be born again. Well loved, and reconnected to this living source of love… This is how we can be our most vital and creative.

There are often Challenge Gates we must navigate through to enter the Underworld. We must confront our own cultural misconceptions of the Dark, and how they are alive in us. How, in the same ways our culture has selectively exiled what lives in the shadows, what it deems taboo, this is mirrored in our relationship to our inner world. Or the world of our own unconscious.

5.10.24

WHAT IS IT WITHIN US?

An inquiry…

Tomorrow , we will meet for our first Underworld Call.

I have kept the curriculum (somewhat) close to my chest. Not revealing exactly what we will be doing.

Why?

Because part of approaching the Underworld properly, is the cultivation of “Deep Anchored Trust”. The ability to trust the “Mystery”, Sink into the Unknown.

No matter how much TRUST we step forward with, the word “Underworld” can elicit certain responses in us.

On one hand, this is because the Underworld is highly connotated by the collective. Related to the “Dark”. So inspecting our relationship to the “Dark” is rich territory for self discovery.

In myth and fairy tale, it’s also related to “letting go”. And many people have fears around “keeping it together”. They have responsibilities, and they believe the underworld means “falling apart” a little bit.

———

I’ve found a treasure trove of self revelation in looking at what comes up for me around the theme of “Underworld”

How the things I project onto the Underworld, are really things that live deep within me.

Our relationship to the "Dark" reveals something about how we’ve been programmed or certain themes that have been codified within us by the collective. By the masculinized energetic that weaves all throughout our western paradigm.

In our Underworld Initiation, you will be handed a new orientation with which to meet with the unknown. You will develop a deeper relationship to the Mystery and the Feminine. One that results in a deeper sense of flourishing, and a reconnection to your deep, authentic creativity. For it is Eris-kagel who holds the Waters of Life, in Her Underworld Throne Room.

I posed some questions to our Underworld Cohort. Questions that I believe might be of service to the wider collective, because we are all experiencing Venus in the Underworld. So even if you aren't planning to journey with us, you can at least participate with this inquiry, and use it to begin a a rich thread of self revelation.

INQUIRIES

"When I feel into the frequency of Underworld, this is what comes alive for me….”

"What is my relationship to the "Dark"? What does this reveal about my relationship to this aspect of the Feminine?"

"How do these answers reveal how I relate to the "Underworld" or "Dark" when these experiences arise in my own life?"

You can meditate on these inquiries, or you can even “free write” (journal) about them with the prompts:

We begin tomorrow. Which means we are on our last call for registration. We have an AMAZING group of women gathering. And would love to welcome you if an exploration of the Underworld, and need to return to a sense of Deep Flourishing and Authentic Creativity, have been calling you.

7.7.24

For the last several weeks I’ve been deep in my own Underworld.

This Underworld has affected my hands, my heart, and my back. So my ability to work, to write, and to make videos, was all hindered.

At first, I took it as a message that I should be laying all these things down and go within. I quite literally couldn’t hold my phone.

Yet my process, the way I process difficult things is to write about them.

This Underworld has had me feeling so adrift, so isolated, at times so terrified and full of grief. I’ve felt desperate and lost without a tether to the outside world. All of the things we might quintessentially think of as Underworld themes.

To be clear, big stuff had been happening. I had a crisis with my son in late April that was hauntingly similar to something I had walked through with Tanner. I overrode that because I was in the midst of a project.

Next, I learned a parent was quite ill. I could feel how my whole body stood in resistance to hearing this news. As I had an inkling before that fateful lunch, that I’d be told the end was nearing.

Not a week later one of my best friends, of over thirty years, was sent home on hospice and died within a week. Thankfully I strung three good days together and was able to see her before she left. A massive blessing to say goodbye.

She passed two days before Tanner’s death anniversary. And her services began two days after.

And while all of this is happening, my own body is breaking down. Despite the fact that I was grieving. I was moving energy. It was just too much. I was being hit with too much. There wasn’t enough space in between. And the first two were far deeper than I realized.

Parents, and children. Is there anything deeper? Anything more primal, ancestral, and intertwined with the essence of who we are?

Just yesterday, I was talking to a friend about how stuck I’ve felt. How I don’t feel like I’ve “mentally” been able to figure out the puzzle of my body. I laugh at my humanity here, because I’m not sure we are supposed too. The connection between the body, and these big emotions is a mystery. A teaching mechanism. Meant to be revealed on the level of soma/body/intelligence. - Not the mind. (after all, my Chiron is in Taurus).

Anyhow, in this conversation with my friend, she said, have you tried miracles, or magic?

I’ll be honest, my initial response was, that sounds kind of “by-passy”, so no I haven’t tried it.

But then I remember after Tanner died, how all of the thoughts, prayers, and love, sent my way, quite literally saved my life.

In fact Tanner specifically told me from beyond the veil, that he would provide enough love for me to stay alive through his loss. Enough love to see me through. My only job was to open wide enough to receive it.

And he did.

Part of that provision came from writing, being witnessed, and opening to the love I felt coming from you all.

However, in this current experience, I have felt so small. So isolated. My nervous system so thin. There’s this strange element of rejection/abandonment that is intertwined with shame. (Likely being adopted/rejected by a parent and subsequently loosing the parent who chose me- is being activated by the thought of loosing my parent to illness now)

There’s old beliefs of  “I deserve this”, or that I am doing this to myself. There is punishment from God in here. The shadow of Pisces, where my south node lives. Intellectually I know this isn’t true, and doesn’t make sense. But my body isn’t getting the message… such is the way of the inner child. Such is the way of epigenetics. Such is the way of distortion and deception.

This has had me sort of hiding…

With all this said… this is a long winded way of stepping into the light. Of expanding enough to ask for your prayers. Asking to be seen down here in this tricky, tender, vulnerable spot.

Opening to God/Source/Spirit/and miracles to come my way.

I am improving. But I want to live a life open to magic and miracles on the quantum level. As well as being able to be in the deep alchemical realms.

Just yesterday I spoke to devoting myself to rewiring the part of me that believes transformation, awakening, and healing, are  ALWAYS a slog. That they come through suffering. Through needing to always trudge through the dark.

That doesn’t mean we are released from doing our work or feeling our feelings. I’ve done plenty of that.

But that I can also be touched by grace. That I deserve, even, to be uplifted by miracles, and provision. This is a big work around generationally as I come from a long line of deep seated meritocratic thinkers.

So, if you feel called to lift up a prayer for my body’s restoration. For my healing. For my heart. For the thing in me that wants to be revealed so that it can move to the surface and be acknowledged consciously, I would so gladly take those prayers, and so desire to be witnessed here.

I remember the way this has translated to true energetic holding and support in the past. I remember the way I felt met and joined even by people I had never met before. It transformed my understanding of “thoughts and prayers”, from something meaningless we said during tragedy, to something mysteriously powerful. It was a way of many hearts and minds directing their gaze at one person or event and saying “I see you, I feel with you, my heart is joining with you”.

(If anyone else feels like they are in a similar spot, just wanting to let you know, the astrology backs this. With Venus in the Underworld, and the co presence of Neptune and Saturn having recently stationed in Pisces. If you’d like prayers for yourself, name it in the comments, and we’ll turn this thread into an uplifting love and light thread for us all. We need the healing of the light as much as the illumination that can come from the dark.)

I’m so excited that my hands are working again and I’ll be able to write more.

I also love to use Archetypal Art: This is how I feel, like I’ve waded through and untangled several threads, but there are more to work through. There are always more red threads to follow for us of the Rose Line

LINKS:

Underworld Journey Part 1 (voice transmission)

What is the Venus Underworld - dispelling myths (video)

Personal Underworld Story (video)