My Journey to the Underworld with Inanna

As my divorce court date approached, I decided I needed something to look forward to afterward. Ideally, something restorative. Something beautiful. Something that would help me believe pleasure still existed on the other side of paperwork, grief, and whatever fresh humiliations the legal system had waiting for me in fluorescent lighting.

I wanted a retreat. A pleasure retreat, specifically.

I had also been texting with a man I’d known since high school who liked to tell me he wanted to see me, mostly for one very specific reason involving my mouth. I was willing to overlook this for one very specific reason involving another part of my body. The problem was that every time we got close to making actual plans, he disappeared. I felt like Charlie Brown with the football if the football occasionally texted, “You up?”

So I did what any newly divorced woman trying to reclaim pleasure would do: I searched the internet for salvation. I looked at Aphrodite retreats in Greece. Tantric retreats in Portugal. Kripalu. Omega. Any place that might help me become whole again, preferably somewhere with wooded running paths, emotional breakthroughs, and access to herbal tea.

While scrolling through Omega’s offerings, I happened upon a retreat about Inanna. I had never heard of Inanna before, but her name planted a little seed in my mind. Then I started seeing her everywhere. Other retreats, books, random mentions. The universe had apparently decided to run a targeted ad campaign for an ancient Sumerian goddess.

So I looked her up. Inanna, I learned, is the Sumerian goddess of love, sex, fertility, political power, heaven, earth, and, apparently, making questionable travel decisions. Her most famous myth is her descent into the underworld.

In the story, Inanna leaves her throne and descends into the depths to visit her dark sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. No one is entirely sure why she goes. There are theories. There are scholarly interpretations. There may have been a very good reason.

But descend she did.

At each gate of the underworld, she is stripped of something: her crown, her jewelry, her garments—every symbol of her power and identity. By the time she arrives before her sister, she is naked, exposed, and powerless. Then she is killed. And hung on a meat hook to rot.

Naturally, in my earnest quest to reclaim pleasure, I thought, "Yep. This is the one."

So I went back to the first place I had seen Inanna’s name and booked a retreat at the Omega Institute.

The facilitator was a Jungian psychologist witch with a PhD. This felt like an important combination, because instead of going to therapy once a week and maintaining a regular meditation practice, I did neither of those things and saved all of my repetitive loops, sexual confusion, spiritual yearning, and existential angst for a single four-day weekend.

When I arrived at Omega, I was late. I had driven straight from filming my show, The Passion Witch Project, so I was not dressed in the soft, breathable, emotionally regulated fabrics one might expect at a healing retreat. Instead, I was wearing a snake-print blazer, spiky black heels, and a low-cut black shirt to match the darkness of my soul and aspirations of my…other parts.

Omega, in contrast, was all trees, paths, fresh air, soft lighting, and people who looked like they had remembered to stretch that morning. I asked someone where my retreat was, because the institute hosts several programs at the same time. Then I wandered across the grounds, click-clacking through the serene natural landscape like a witch who had taken a wrong turn on her way to court.

Eventually, I walked into a large room full of people and immediately knew something was wrong. There were gauzy dresses, flowing linen, kaftans, bare feet, gentle faces, an atmosphere of profound acceptance. Meanwhile, I was dressed like I had come to collect a debt from the underworld. It turned out I had walked into a conference for death doulas.

I very sheepishly approached the person checking people in and said, “I don’t think I belong here.”

He looked at me with the calm compassion of someone who had probably witnessed many souls cross thresholds and said, “Maybe you do.”

I looked into his earnest face and then down at the cleavage popping out of my shiny black blouse and said, “I really don’t.”

To his credit, he tried to help me find where I was actually supposed to go, though he did not seem to know the property much better than I did. So I continued click-clacking around Omega in my heels, searching for the witchy women.

When I finally found them, I made an entrance. Not on purpose. But I was late, overdressed, mildly panicked, and audibly approaching. The only open spot, of course, was right next to the facilitator, Roxanne. So I sat down as quietly as I could and practiced one of my strongest feminine superpowers: disappearing.

In front of me was a whimsical spread of flowers and artifacts arranged in a circle on the floor. I later learned this was called the 4D wheel. The idea was that we would each place concrete objects into different quadrants of the wheel—earth/body, air/mind, fire/spirit, water/heart—to represent something we were working through internally. Over the course of the weekend, we would move the objects around the wheel as we moved the belief, wound, desire, or pattern through our own bodies and psyches. It was a sort of external reflection of the internal pathway we were navigating. I did not know any of this when I sat down.

The first thing Roxanne asked was whether we had all done the assigned reading. Everyone raised their hands. I raised mine halfway. I had read half of it.

I did some mental accounting: I was late, I was dressed weird, I had accidentally visited the death doulas, and now I was the kid in class who had not finished the homework. Not off to a great start, babe.

Then Roxanne asked whether we had brought our two objects.

Objects? I had absolutely no idea we were supposed to bring objects.

Around the room, women began reaching into canvas bags and carefully lifting out what appeared to be sacred heirlooms. Objects with weight. Objects with lineage. Objects that had clearly been selected with intention, possibly under moonlight.

I reached into my purse.

There is a particular kind of humility that comes from looking for sacred symbols at the bottom of a snakeskin handbag.

Roxanne, very graciously, said, “You could go back to your room. Do you have something in your suitcase?”

And knowing the odds of me finding something in a much larger bag were probably worse rather than better, I said, “Nope, I’m sure I’ve got something in here.” I dug around until I found a tube of lipstick and an apple. And honestly? if it was good enough for the fall of man, it was good enough for me.

When it came time to share what our objects represented, the other women offered beautiful, thoughtful reflections. A glass pyramid representing strong foundations and inner clarity. An heirloom figurine representing ancestral wisdom and trauma. A blue ribbon representing the chains of perfectionism and performance.

I had Maybelline and a Honeycrisp.

But I committed. I shared that the lipstick represented my sense of agency over what I did with my mouth. This felt particularly aligned, given the shenanigans I had been involved in with the Lucy-and-the-football man. But it was more than that. The lipstick was also about words. Voice. Choice. The right to decide what came out of my mouth… and what went in.

The apple represented pleasure. Not just sex, though certainly sex had sent me to the internet in search of Aphrodite and tantra. The apple was the forbidden fruit I had been chasing my whole life while also convincing myself I did not deserve to taste it. Pleasure, rest, beauty, ease, desire, delight. All the things I had postponed while I climbed ladders, collected degrees, burned myself out, behaved myself, made good choices, and waited for someone else to tell me I had finally earned a bite.

Feeling pleased with myself for my folk magick on the fly, we moved into the next activity: the descent into the underworld.

To prepare us for our symbolic descent, Roxanne had us lie down on our mats and cover ourselves with blankets. Then she told us we were going to connect with Pussy. She said this like the word deserved to be capitalized.

I could not help laughing to myself. Of course Pussy is the underworld. This must have been in the book I didn’t read.

Because we were covered with blankets, Roxanne explained, we could connect with Pussy not only in the energetic or spiritual realm, but in the physical realm too, if we felt called. I opened my eyes and looked at her. I swear she gave me a wink.

So I closed my eyes again and thought: this is a far cry from Joseph Campbell, but here we are. Let’s go for gold.

In a room full of earnest women hoping to heal, Roxanne guided us into meditation. Her voice was slow and steady. The room softened. Bodies settled. Blankets rustled. Breath deepened.

And I entered my hidden temple. Both spiritually and, with great commitment to the assignment, physically.

When I arrived in Pussy, what I saw was troubling. It was not a lush garden. It was not a velvet chamber. It was not anything Georgia O’Keeffe would have wanted to paint.

It was a scorched, barren landscape. A volcanic wasteland. The inside of Mount Doom, if Mount Doom had been specifically designed by generations of sexual shame, religious programming, people-pleasing, and clinical overachievement. The sky was dark and fiery. The air was hot. Dragons circled overhead. And there, in the middle of the volcano, was my dark sister.

She was beautiful. Fierce. Alive, but barely. She looked at me like someone who had been waiting a very long time for an explanation. I have many hypotheses about why she appeared to me the way she did, and all of them are disturbing, but what I knew in that moment was this: She was my exiled sexuality. My desire. My hunger. The part of me I had banished because I did not know how to make a home for her in the good-girl life I had been so busy building.

Roxanne guided us to ask our dark sister what she needed.

I asked, and she did not hesitate. “Water.”

Not a lover. Not a body. Not a husband. Not approval. Not permission.

Water.

So I offered her water. And as I did, the landscape began to change. The scorched ground softened. the air cooled, green pushed through blackened earth, vines unfurled, leaves opened. The volcano became a jungle, verdant, lush, alive. The sky cleared. The dragons did not leave, exactly, but they no longer looked like threats. They looked like guardians.

And my dark sister no longer looked at me as though I had cast her into the basement of my identity and forgotten her there. She was standing in the center of this new world, beautiful and free. And all she had needed was a little hospitality.

Over the rest of the weekend, there were other moments like this, and not just with my own dark sister, but with the sisters sitting beside me too. Tender, strange, human moments. Women held each other. We stroked each other’s hair. We cackled over cacao. We gave each other the gifts of tarot card readings and undivided attention. We witnessed each other in joy, grief, rage, tenderness, longing, and confusion.

I came away with an appreciation that there is something quietly radical about being in a room where women are allowed to tell the truth without immediately apologizing for it, allowed to ask for what they need with impunity.

By the time I left Omega, I felt like maybe I could find pleasure again. Maybe I could even love again. Or maybe, before any of that, I could love myself. Even this dark part, the part I had relegated to the deepest recesses of who I was. Maybe I could become someone who knew how to ask for water before I became a desert.

When I arrived home and looked at my missed texts from the weekend, there was one from the football boy, and I thought about responding. Then I got norovirus.

Because the universe has range.

I woke up in the middle of the night and, like the volcano I had seen in my nether regions, I erupted. But from both ends, not just one. For twelve hours, every half hour, I was compelled to return to the bathroom, which I came to understand not as a room, but as a realm. A lower realm, a place of reckoning. A place where the body says, “You wanted release? Wonderful. I have prepared a curriculum.”

I had descended into the underworld at Omega, but apparently my body wanted to make sure I understood the assignment. With every exhausted heave, I released the sludge of decades of unworthiness. I purged the man who had toyed with me for months. I purged every old story that told me pleasure was dangerous, shameful, frivolous, selfish, or something I had to earn by being very, very good.

At some point, collapsed on the bathroom floor, emptied of dignity and possibly several internal organs, I called out to the universe, to Inanna, to Ereshkigal, and to the gods of plungers and toothbrushes: “I don’t want to suffer anymore. I choose pleasure.”

Then I fell asleep with my face on the toilet. Not every initiation is glamorous.

I do not know whether it was the wisdom of being held by compassionate and brave women, the guidance of a brilliant Jungian psychologist witch, or the fact that my body had apparently interpreted “release what no longer serves you” with alarming literalness, but something shifted.

The following weekend, I went to my friend’s fortieth birthday party, and I met a Scorpio man. Even for the Universe, the appearance of an aquatic Zodiac sign a week after my very specific and deeply profound self-insight felt a little on-the-nose…but I have no complaints.

He was not the love of my life. That is not the point. The point is that I was no longer waiting for Lucy to hand me the football. I was no longer outsourcing pleasure to someone who could pick it up and walk away.

And after one well-wielded feather, a silky black blindfold, and some naughty whispers in an apartment full of dirty fish tanks—which is a story for another day—I discovered that my curse had been lifted.

It turns out pleasure wasn't waiting for me in Greece, or Portugal, or inside another person's desire. She'd been waiting in the underworld all along.

Thirsty.

And all she'd asked for was water.

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