Have you experienced an Underworld Journey? The answer is.. probably yes.
This isn’t some kind of cheerleading rah-rah post about the ‘hardships you experience are part of the journey and make you stronger.’ Or some kind of harmful notion like that.
Instead, this is an acknowledgment and invitation to honor what you’ve been through and how the community expands when you share.
I first learned about Underworld Journeys in my education with Mother Circle. We explore the story of Inanna. And while she experiences some dark times, many people focus on the journey down and how terrible it is. The circles I create and surround myself with are focused on the journey up to the overworld and what gems the experience left you with. And by no means do we shy away from the descent…oh no, that’s definitely part of the juice.
We make these connections to birth and through the transformative postpartum period. And something that’s deeply missing in our culture is the expression of gems from the labor process. If you’ve ever met a person obsessed with hearing birth stories (hello, that’s me.) you can feel the energy for the story, the learned experience, and the gifts to be returned to the community. We are people searching for the gems and marveling at the transformation.
You see when a mother goes into the birth space, she roars her baby into the world. She gets down deep in the moist, dark spaces of her soul to bring forth this babe. If you’ve experienced this, let me know. It’s where she witnesses her true strength and tenacity. The grit it takes to grow, nurture, and give to this life is no small feat. And if reading this makes you uncomfortable, there’s possibly a growth edge for you to explore. Birthing our baby is the most basic and natural experience where we connect to the animal kingdom. And let me be clear it doesn’t matter what type of birth experience you had, it takes all of this to get that baby here. And if you’re choosing not to birth babies, that’s okay too. You can also still marvel at the experience another goes through to be with what it takes to birth a baby.
To read poetry on this experience, check out my friend and poet, April Tierney.
The gifts. The gems. If you hear a mother very disconnected to her birth story (for ex, simply listing the highlights), she hasn’t integrated the gems. She hasn’t been heard and celebrated— and she should be. The power of witnessing is immense. I can’t tell you here what the gems are because every story, every underworld journey will bring forth different gifts to provide the community she is in.
Community. We need each other. We thrive when we’re connected and crave belonging. And the gifts from an Underworld Journey will apply to each community member differently.
From the younger maidens yet to birth. To the crones who’ve already walked that path and look back to witness, heal, and guide their own journey.
The gifts are for everyone, not only the birthing woman or the baby or the family. For everyone. You see, we’ve misconstrued our desire for independence and forgot how we actually help others and ourselves to heal is by sharing our story and our burden. It’s like when someone dies and the mourner desperately wants to speak the deceaseds’ name and no one wants to ‘upset them’ by mentioning their name. Ugh. Check in. Speak their name. Somewhere in their depths, they know they need share their story. They crave connection with their beloved through stories, memories, and pictures.
And Underworld Journeys are not limited to Birthing People. We have them in different times and places and some are small and some are large.
But they all deserve to have life and be brought back to the overworld as contribution to the greater gathering of people. Sometimes they are easy to spot: When you’re going through those life-shaking-fist pounding-on your knees-desperation, that’s an obvious Underworld Journey. And, they aren’t always that obvious.
Upon thinking about what an Underworld Journey could possibly be defined as, here’s what I created:
An event or concept that requires deep reflection on self.
A few examples could be:
- Loosing a job
- something deeply unexpected
- Grief
- death, divorce, birth– really any peak life experience
- The Winter
- The Menstrual phase
- Getting lost
In a world that is increasingly dividing and disconnecting from our physiology, its crucial we return to this practice of the Underworld Journey and returning with the gems to share with the community.
<Story Time> cw: brutal details as many myths go.
There’s a story of Remati. During her time, she was married to the evil King of Lanka. She was tasked with the duty of converting the evil king to Buddhism. She vowed that if she could not complete this task, she would end his reign as king. Eventually, she gave birth to a son who unfortunately, continued in his fathers footsteps by becoming evil and killing swaths of people. With no choice and remaining true to her dharma, she made the painful decision to kill her son. The story goes that she needed to know this evil would not continue so she ate his flesh and drank his blood from his skull.
As she escaped, her husband learned of the death of his son. He flew arrows her way as she departed. One of the arrows hit the rump of her horse. And her response was to heal the wound by transforming it to an eye and saying, “May the wound of my mount become an eye large enough to watch over the 24 regions, and may I myself be the one to extirpate the lineage of the malignant kings of Lanka.”
There’s more to the story but the message to take away is that the choices we make and the hardships we endure become our eyes. And what we see and what we know the most about. And when we can share our wisdom with others, we can transform both our life and those of us around us. We need each other. And we need our stories.
