Descensum
The underworld has never existed to destroy us. It exists to REVEAL US. 💋
We’re intrigued by the darkness and mystery of the underworld but very few of us have the courage to go there.
I’ve spent this week observing, listening to, and speaking with women from all walks of life:
The woman who realizes no one is coming to save her.
The people pleaser who stops buying love with labor.
The content creator who stops performing and starts embodying.👀
The wife who refuses to disappear into the institution of marriage.
The woman examining who raised her and rebuilding her foundation.
The woman learning that sovereignty requires courage.
Though their stories seem different on the surface they are all approaching the same initiation.
Descensum.
In my favorite season of American Horror Story, Season 5, Descensum is performed during the Seven Wonders as an advanced form of astral projection. The soul descends directly into its own personal underworld, confronts its deepest fears, and must find its way back before the physical body disintegrates into dust.
Yes, it is fiction, but to me it’s one of the most honest depictions of transformation ever put to screen.
We are constantly being taught to avoid the underworld of our psyche. Loneliness, rejection, failure, abandonment, GRIEF ( A MAJOR ONE), humiliation, aging, and ego death.
We avoid that shit like the plague. We spend years negotiating with life, hoping we can somehow lie to ourselves and negotiate our way around suffering. But the underworld is patient. It waits beneath marriages, friendships, dreams, and SHAPELESS identities and ,eventually, it comes for all of us.
There are countless stories about descent. Not very may explore what happens afterward. I suspect that’s where much of the fear comes from. The great unknown. If we live long enough we will eventually lose something we once believed we could NEVER LIVE WITHOUT.
When my best friend’s mama died
I called mine WEEPING and said “ DON’T YOU EVER FUCKING LEAVE ME ALONE IN THIS HORRIBLE PLACE. I can’t survive without you.” Two years VERY SHORT years later
22 days after seeing me through, what I thought, would be the hardest thing I would ever experience in my life, childbirth , my mama dropped dead.
I got the call ON MY WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, while I was sitting in the NICU struggling to get my baby to latch.
When I got home and tried to go bed, something strange happened to my body. I started convulsing.
I couldn’t stop it.
I have many conspiracy theories about what happened to me that night. I thought my nervous system might, finally, be untangling itself from hers. I thought I might be having a nervous breakdown. I also, thought it might have been my body’s way of rejecting something devastating that my mind was struggling to process.
I NOW know, my initiation was beginning.
DESCENSUM
You can and will, mostly likely, survive the descent into the underworld of your psyche beacuse Descensum is not just the act of going down. It is the sacred art of coming back with your gifts.
Sacred Art.
Coming back with clearer eyes. A gift to you.
Coming back with stronger boundaries. A gift to you.
Coming back with wisdom. A gift to you and The Womanhood
Coming back carrying gifts that can only be found among the bones of what once was. (I love how Dr. Estés is always with us as a comfort and a guide. )
The underworld has never existed to destroy us. It exists to reveal us. To strip away everything weak inauthentic, dishonest, borrowed, performative and dead. Until all that remains is the truth.
This week, we will be discussing the descent into the underworld of our psyche. Are you willing to give up this version of yourself for a better, more embodied one? Can you be burned at the stake, descend into the underworld, face your greatest fears, and return transformed?
Or will you barely return from the darkness cat raggedy, bitter and traumatized by what you lost?
You’ll let us know. 🌹