Prologue to the Descent

Long before we consciously choose the journey within, Life begins preparing us for it. The Divine orchestrating of this is delicious.

At first, the invitations may be gentle. A quiet dissatisfaction. A tiredness we cannot explain. Tears that seem to come from nowhere. Relationships that no longer fit. A growing sense that something about the way our life is organized is simply not working.

And because we do not yet understand the invitation, we try to repair the life we already have.

We change the circumstances. We move. We search for another relationship, another explanation, another diagnosis, another way to make ourselves function again. We try to become better at carrying the life that is becoming increasingly impossible to carry.

But sometimes Life has something else in mind.

And then the undressing begins.

Little by little, the things through which we have known ourselves are taken away.

The relationship.

The home.

The health.

The capacity to perform.

The identities we have built.

The strategies that once kept us moving.

From inside the experience, none of this necessarily feels sacred. It can feel deeply inconvenient. Cruel, even. We may experience it as failure, punishment, abandonment, or simply terrible luck.

Only much later might another possibility become visible: What if Life was not taking my life away from me?

What if Life was removing everything that prevented me from seeing my true Self?

There is a strange mercy in having nowhere left to run. And eventually, the outer world can no longer provide an answer to the question rising from within. Every road that leads away from ourselves becomes exhausted.

And slowly, kneeling becomes easier.

Not because we have been defeated by Life, but because we have exhausted our attempts to negotiate with it.

This is how Life prepares us for the most important journey we can take: the journey within.

Not by giving us a map, but by gradually removing the places where we have been hiding.

This is why I no longer think Inanna’s descent begins at the first gate.

Before she removes the crown, before the lapis beads, before every symbol of identity and power is stripped from her, something has already happened.

She has heard the call.

And our lives have their own ways of making that call impossible to ignore.

Illness was one of mine.

It was not the whole initiation. It was the last straw in a much larger dismantling. My life had been showing me, in increasingly unmistakable ways, that the structure I had built could not carry me where I needed to go.

Eventually the question was no longer:

How can I get my old life back? Or How can I keep going?

Something deeper was asking:

Am I willing to discover who I am when everything I thought I was has been taken away?

And there, before the first gate, the descent truly begins.

Not with losing everything.

With consenting to be undressed.

And so the invitation is finally accepted and the journey can begin..

..

(This picture is from 2021, right before I gave my consent to the undressing of my old ways, you can probably see the pain in my eyes)