Reclaiming Healing Part III:Journeying to the Underworld

In the last two posts, I began exploring what healing means to me, starting with dismantling the myth that healing is some sort of final destination. Last week, I focused on the multifaceted nature of healing (e.g. it’s not just one thing). Now I want to somewhat return to the idea of healing as a journey metaphor.

One of the earliest ways that I came to think about healing was in the context of the story of Inanna.

Inanna decides to visit the Underworld when she hears about her sister (shadow self) grieving the death of her husband.

As Inanna takes the journey into the Underworld, she has to pass through seven gates. At each gate she is required to give up one of her Goddess symbols until she gets down there stark naked. She goes into the court where her sister is grieving, but rather than empathize with the pain she sees, she mocks her sister.

In a rage, Ereshkigal orders Inanna to be hung on meat hooks, where Inanna stays for some time. Eventually her lady’s maid/friend/person, Ninshubur, realizes that she isn’t coming back on her own and goes around to all the other gods seeking assistance with getting Inanna back. One of the gods eventually takes pity and creates these creatures that go with Ninshubur down to the Underworld.

Once down there, they begin weeping and grieving with Ereshkigal, and they do that until Ereshkigal releases Inanna.

When Inanna returns to the upper world, she brings with her characteristics of the Underworld goddess.

In turn, it’s hinted that Ereshkigal is pregnant  (a characteristic of the role that Inanna played with fertility and life). So each goddess integrates portions of the other.

Thereafter, Inanna spends part of her time in the upper world and part of her time in the Underworld, and the changing of the seasons is born.

While Inanna’s is hardly the only goddess myth that involves a goddess going down into the Underworld, it’s significant to me in that Inanna does so voluntarily (as opposed to being kidnapped or tricked). I love the image of an intentional, cyclic descent into the dark places of the soul in order to integrate and retrieve those lost, wounded parts of the self.

However, it’s not a static cycle either. Inanna doesn’t repeat the same journey each time. She doesn’t forget what happened in the Underworld. She doesn’t lose what she gained down there. Each time she descends, though we don’t get a tale all over again, it’s implied that she maintains what she has accomplished and the integration she has achieved.

Even the seasons themselves, one of the most profound demonstrations of cycles, are not static. They build on each other.

Healing is not easy. It’s not always pleasant. Often times, it can feel like I am revisiting the same topic over and over, yet the story of Inanna reminds me that while there might be similarities in the process of descent, pain, stripping away of that which protects me, and meeting my fragmented, shadow parts, I am never actually taking the same journey twice.

Healing is a progressive cycle. Each time around, something is different. Maybe it’s that I recognize the things that got me stuck before and avoid them more easily or that I take yet another step towards a decision that I know I need to make but haven’t been able to follow through on yet.

Most often, there is some element of further integration with a part of me that was too emotionally raw to integrate all at one swoop. Repeated journeys into the same territory allow me to do pieces of work that would overwhelm me otherwise. The journey is necessary in exactly the way that it is happening. There’s only so much I can process and face at one time before I need to come back up for air and recuperation.

We live in a society that wants a quick fix for everything, from health to wealth, that I think we have somewhat forgotten that the most important things cannot be done quickly. This is true especially for healing, I think. No one has the resources to stay in the Underworld non-stop. Trying to force more to happen than is ready to happen only causes more damage as the wounds “hang us on meat hooks.”

My contention with the destination myth revolved around the finality of the journey, but Inanna’s story symbolizes how healing can indeed be a journey and a cycle at the same time.

It’s a journey whose destination is to revisit the shadow and the Underworld on a regular, intentional basis in order to further integrate the parts that have been lost down there.

It’s a journey that doesn’t devalue the role of recurrent themes or emotions as evidence of having failed to heal. Rather it portrays them as normal parts of the process that need empathy rather than scoffing and judgment.

 

 

Even the Darkest Night Still Has Light

In the summer, I take the sun for granted. I trust that its light and warmth will be there to drive away the shadows. I bask in the energy and vibrancy of the natural life I see around me.

But in winter, the darkness dominates.

I don’t usually mind the dark. My Goddesses are associated with the moon, and I have often found a deep sense of connection to myself and to their energy at night. Meditation and yoga under the stars is nothing short of transcendental for me.

However, there’s a different side to darkness. It’s the darkness of descending into the underworld. The darkness of shadows slinking forward, of monsters coming to visit, and of the judgment of a psychopathic god. It’s the darkness of my childhood, when the boogeyman existed and went by the name of my god.

It’s been five years since I left the cult, and approximately three since I left Christianity altogether. Yet I’ve developed a new (or probably more accurately, an old) fear of the dark. It crept into my heart as the days grew shorter this year. The connection and peace that I had come to associate with the night disappeared as my fears returned—the fears that “like a thief in the night” and “in the blink of an eye” life and love would be taken.

In the past, my underworld journeys have been somewhat deliberate . . . or at least identified, but this time, I only became aware that I was in the bowels of my psyche when I was standing, stripped and naked, before my Ereshkigal.

She was me. I was a child again, anxiously watching the clock grow later, praying that I would be reunited with my loved ones—that they hadn’t disappeared. I was a four year old afraid to close my eyes because I might die in my sleep and wake up in hell. I was a preteen, seeking out the company of others, not because I longed for company, but because I needed to know that humanity still existed. I was a teen listening for the sound of breathing still coming from my parents’ room so that I knew I hadn’t been left behind in the Rapture.

How appropriate that just before the longest night of the year, I find myself face to face with a fear so deep that it goes beyond my earliest memories and survives even my unbelief. I might as well be looking under my bed for Krampus for all the sense it makes to believe that the world is going to end with a trumpet blast and dead people will float up to heaven.

Yet here I am, afraid of being left behind.

But this is what I love about goddess spirituality—the underworld is not where I go after I’ve been damned by a vindictive deity; it’s where I go to find myself again. . . and this time, to rescue myself from that vindictive deity. Jehovah may throw me into the fiery pit where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, but that’s okay. Inanna is there to remind me, as Rilke said, “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

And when I look at my Underworld with that perspective, I find that there are no demons down there, just a frightened little girl who is tired of being forgotten in the darkness–scary only because I’ve been taught to fear her pain.

How equally appropriate then that as the physical light gets ready to grow again, I awake to find that it’s time to begin my upward journey back into myself, this time not leaving the shadow goddess behind but carrying her with me up into the world above, a world of sunlight . . . a world of a different kind of night—one where the light doesn’t completely leave but lingers in the stars and moon.

Halloween: Facing Fears and Breaking Taboos Part 2

I tried desperately to write more about my personal journey last week, but I just couldn’t manage to get it out. Some things were still too deep to be articulated. But after a week of continued meditation on my Halloween crafts, I think I’m to a place where I can express some of the personal symbolism. In a sense, I created a haunted house out of internal pain, picking decorations that held personal horrors in addition to general horror.

This is where the journey began, gently bringing myself to a meditative place with symbols of death and the underworld.

There’s something haunting about abandoned places that echoes my own fear of abandonment. That sense of something having been there, now gone, can be overwhelming. What isn’t there is just as haunting as what is there. And the attempt to sterilize and cover up the abandonment makes it even worse.

Although I still play the violin, I can’t bring myself to play this violin. It’s haunted with too much from the past. As my grandfather’s violin, it comes attached with all the expectations and dreams of my family. Even though violin wasn’t what I wanted to make a career out of, it was what they expected my career to entail. It went with me to Bob Jones University, where it picked up the negative energy of my teachers as they told me I might as well quit if I didn’t enjoy playing Mozart and that I was one of those people who just didn’t have what it takes to play. I think I shed more tears over that violin than anything else during my three years in that hell. And though I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of what I was choosing, the day I told my parents that I didn’t want to study violin anymore because I wasn’t interested in clinging to a safety net, I abandoned more than just their dreams and my hopes for graduating from BJU. It began my exodus from fundamentalism, but it was also the day I stopped abandoning myself.

This next one is complex. Originally I started creating this vampire scarecrow baby simply because I find babies slightly scary. They really are the closest to actual vampires that we have, living off the bodily fluids of another—that is after they’ve lived inside someone for 9 months like some sort of alien parasite. If some women find that idea appealing, that’s great. I find it repulsive.

But I soon realized that this particular doll was so much more than just an expression of my aversion to children. The dress was made by my dad to put in my hope chest. It symbolizes yet another area where I fail to live up to my parents’ hopes as well as the expectations of fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christianity is not a nice place to women. This is essentially the extent of their “role” in so many teachings, and in that sense, I think children do more than just suck on their mothers—they suck the life away from them. Children are the chains that I as a Christian woman was taught to want, even when I didn’t want them.

Moving away from the living room, we enter the kitchen, which I transformed into a torture chamber and apothecary. The tools of the trade are all there for slicing and dicing. A shrunken head hangs drying from a hook. And closer to Halloween, the pumpkin will be receiving a lobotomy. The instruction book propped open is actually a Bible.

I can’t think of a more effective weapon within fundamentalism than brainwashing. First you scare someone shitless, then you convince them that the only way to be safe is by cutting themselves off from their thoughts and emotions. Once you have them mindlessly following you, you can shape their behavior into whatever you want. And fundamentalist Christianity is an expert at this.

Just for good measure, check out this video for how accurate the shrunken head symbol is.

Perhaps the most cathartic of all my creative enterprises was the desecration of family pictures. This is the one that felt the most taboo and the one that I wanted to hide, thus the one that I needed the most. It’s easy to acknowledge that BJU left emotional scars. It’s easy to see the loss and feel the anger towards the institutional abuse inherent in fundamentalism. What’s harder is allowing myself that much honesty with my family.

I have a feeling that desecrating my “ancestors” is taboo, even during Halloween. And I certainly didn’t start out with the idea of turning a family album into a blasphemous display. Part of me was horrified. Here I was tapping into and revealing something in me that made me uncomfortable, which really was the whole point of the underworld journey, right? Facing my shadow side, letting go of shame, letting something I was afraid of come to the surface.

The faces aren’t really blacked out in any of the physical pictures. I just prefer to keep faces off the Internet. The mouths are sewn shut because children are so completely and utterly silenced within fundamentalism, both by peer pressure and teachings.

Family pictures often look so happy, even if the family is so dysfunctional, the only time they ever stop trying to destroy each other is while the flash is going off. But underneath every happy smile, there’s always problems—problems that it’s natural for families to want to hide from the memory-making. And for some families, it probably runs deeper, with more sinister problems than others. But society tells us to pretend that families are happy, safe, blessed places. We’re not supposed to talk about or show that they’re not.

The needle I used to sew over the mouths is inserted in through the hand of this one because, sadly, no matter how good the intentions, it’s the adults who silence children.

I’ve got pretty select friends with whom I’ll discuss family problems, but for the most part, I succumb to the pressure of the photograph—the pressure to pretend that there are no problems when presenting a face to the world. I hadn’t even realized how deeply I was denying some of the anger towards my family until I began destroying pictures. There’s a lot that happened—a lot that was said—as I dug my way out of fundamentalism. There’s a lot that is left unsaid now after having come out as bi. We talk, but the conversations are about as real as the smiles. We’re so busy pretending things are okay that we can’t even get to the point of making them okay.

As with all Underworld journeys, the point isn’t to go down into the depths and stay. There’s a journey back up to the world, back to life. And I’m definitely on the upward swing. I’ve learned things about myself that I hadn’t yet realized. I’ve reminded myself of lessons it’s easy to forget about during the bloom of spring. But more than anything, I’ve discovered that life, even the painful parts (and yes even death as part of life) is beautiful and worth living.

Transformative Magic: Embracing my Dark Side

In a previous post, I gave a sneak peak into some of the things I would talk about, including one on how “negative emotions are good.” I’ve had requests from several people for more on that, so I thought now, with the approach of Samhain, would be a good time to approach this topic.

We live in a culture where certain emotions are viewed anywhere from simply “negative” to downright “wrong” or “sinful.” No matter where you go, the general consensus is that these emotions need to be resisted, “released” (one of my favorites of the coercive terms because it sounds so innocent. Right up there with “forgive” or “just get over it”), or not even felt if you’re a “good person.” The taboo on emotions is especially strong surrounding sadness for men and anger for women, but it’s pretty safe to say that, in general, “negative emotions” just aren’t considered good or healthy to experience.

But what if we have it all wrong?

A little fairy once told me, “Changing your perspective gives you the power to change your world.” And as many pagans and witches know, the highest magic comes not with transforming the world around you but with transforming your thoughts.

So let’s try some transformative magic.

It’s easy to recognize how a world of continuous darkness would be bad. Life would die because life cannot function without light. It’s easy to see how a world of continuous rainfall would be bad. I’ve seen the floods and destruction that come with a few too many days of rain. But I rarely question the destruction that would surely follow a world that was always sunny. There are times where there is too much sun; it’s called a drought. But I never think about droughts when thinking about excesses of something!

Growing up, I remember hearing preachers disdain the philosophy that “life’s purpose is happiness.” In their minds, such a wasted life was a life spent pursuing happiness. And as much as I would disagree with the reasons for that statement, I find that I actually agree with the statement itself.

Pursuing happiness is a pursuit doomed to failure.

Does that mean I don’t have the right to be happy? Should I be miserable, as those preachers seemed to want?

No, I think I have every right, even a destiny, to be happy! But I am coming to see life’s purpose as wholeness, not happiness. And there’s a big difference. While wholeness certainly involves happiness, it also involves the ability to feel sadness. While wholeness involves peace, it also involves the ability to feel anger or fear.

They’ve been labeled “negative emotions.” They’re portrayed as something I shouldn’t have, something to avoid, something I must drive out when I feel them. But imagine if you could not feel sadness or anger or fear? I’ve thought of these emotions as out of place, but that’s only because I didn’t recognize their purpose. Something would be terribly wrong with me if I could not feel anger when I saw a child abused. Something would be terribly wrong with me if I could not feel fear when I got too close to danger. Something would be terribly wrong with me if I could not feel sadness when I lost a loved one, or guilt when I hurt someone.

Without them, I would die just as surely as I would die without hope or joy or courage.

A tree requires both sunlight and darkness. Its branches reach for the sky while its roots tunnel into the ground. If the roots are not cared for or fed, if they’re cut off, the top of the tree will quickly die as well. In the same way, I have a shadow side, a side that is buried away from view, that isn’t fun to look at, that doesn’t feel good, that has the potential to make others and myself uncomfortable. But if I don’t embrace that side of myself and accept it as part of myself, I doom it to rot and fester until it destroys that bright side of me too.

Wholeness isn’t about cutting myself off from the shadow side of life. It’s about recognizing the purpose for that shadow side—the purpose for those emotions and experiences—and melding it together with the light side into a single whole. I have so much duality in me. I have light and darkness, reason and intuition, “femininity” and “masculinity”. Heck, my life card is the Sun and my Spirit card is Death. You can’t get much more dual than that. And the amazing thing is, each side, each facet, has a freaking purpose! They all work together to create me! And just as I’ve given up so many other things with fundamentalism, I’ve also given up the idea that there is anything inherently in me that is wrong.

Which means my emotions, by themselves, can’t be wrong.

None of them.

So what is it that makes these shadow emotions seem “bad”? Outside of a general inability to tolerate discomfort and do messy soul work, I think we’ve mistaken the emotions themselves for specific scripts surrounding them. It’s a kind of confirmation bias. When we think of anger, we think of when someone became violent in their anger. We don’t remember the times that anger was constructive or creative or protective. Once you get to the point where you associate the emotion itself with the negative behavior, then you get so busy fighting the emotion that there’s no chance to fight the script that you’ve adopted about it.

As part of my spiritual practice, I’m learning to become comfortable with my dark side. I’m throwing away the scripts I’ve been taught and searching for a new, transformative perspective about the shadow emotions. I’ve come to appreciate this time of year, when the Goddess traditionally takes a journey down into the underworld for a few months until spring, because it reminds me that I also need underworld journeys, as tough as they are. It’s not easy to sit with an emotion. It’s much easier to go back to my scripts. But sitting in discomfort is essential to my emotional transformation as much as it is to my spiritual transformation. The ability to sit with uncertainty and discomfort is, I think, one of the key aspects to true freedom.

And as I take this journey, I smile to myself because I recognize what I never could have from within Christiantiy—that Jesus, too, got angry, felt grief and despair, and considered bailing out from fear.