Welcome to the Descent & Rising Online Retreat

A free series of intimate conversations on the heroine’s journey.

You’re In! Welcome!

Thankyou for joining me. I am delighted to have you with us for this free conversation series, where we will explore the personal & archetypal nature of descent & rising. A rite of passage that when honoured, recognised & supported, can be a catalyst for change for both ourselves & the world we live in. The retreat happened 4-11 April 2023 but the talks will remain available here indefinately as a resource to go with my book, Descent & Rising: Women’s Stories & the Embodiment of the Inanna Myth. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will find the latest guest conversation. A new conversation will be added to this welcome page on new moon each month. I give huge gratitude to the people who offered their wisdom and time to these conversations. You can access their work via the links in each of their profiles.

Together we can honour our descents and dare to RISE.

Carly Mountain - Carly Mountain writer, psychotherapist and women's initiatory guide

Scroll down to access the recordings.
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Descent & Rising Online Retreat with Carly Mountain

ORIGINAL CONVERSATIONS

Each conversation has a different theme and I chose the archetypal experiences that are a part of ALL descents and rising. Whatever the particular configuration of your life’s unfolding, rites of passage, grief, being stripped to reveal what is emerging, reckoning with power, unleashing creativity, moving with rage, hopelessness and desire and rising are a part of all heroine’s journeys. I hope that these conversations can be on some level a witness for your journey and help you trust the process as it unfolds.

Journalling Prompts

To help you move with some of your own material in relationship to these conversations at the end of each retreat talk I offer some optional journalling prompts to move with. Free writing is a great somatic practice that can allow Ereshkigal to be heard. Allow your pen to move freely and see what emerges from within you.

After The Retreat….Ongoing Conversations from May 2023 onwards

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page you can watch the latest conversation in the series. With a new guest and new theme appearing each new moon.

Your retreat schedule:

Descent & Rising Course with Carly Mountain

dAY ONE

with Jane Hardwicke Collings, teacher, former midwife & creatrix of the School of Shamanic Womancraft.

Jane offers wisdom and insight into the four life stages as initiatory thresholds and the costs that are incurred when we are not honoured and held in these transitions. She delves into the embodied impact of cultural narratives and we look at how our heroine’s journey’s have the power to disrupt narratives that no longer serve us. We explore Inanna’s choice to descend, as a choice that we can all make: a choice to remember another way, for the benefit of not only our own lives, but also for the sake of the collective and the Mother Earth.

Day Two

with Avni Trivedi, women’s health and paediatric osteopath, birth doula, zero balancer and non-linear movement teacher.

In this gentle conversation, Avni and Carly look at grief as a fundamental part of all heroine’s journey’s. And how grief can be an alchemical process that can invocate the most creative endeavours of our lives. Avni shares wisdom on the somatic nature of grief and the way that her own grief has deepened her connection to nature, spirituality and the preciousness of life. And we examine how Inanna traverses grief through the hearts gate, and touch upon symbolism and the medicine of poetry and story, as languages that can speak to unspeakable griefs.

Day Three

with Kim Rosen, teacher and author of Saved By A Poem: the Transformative Power of Words and founder of the S.H.E College Fund.

Kim shares generously about the importance of the beholder in our heroine’s journey’s and how poetry, therapy, books and other forms, can all be sacred containers for our descents and rising. We look at the process Kim calls Undressing the Voice and how this mirrors the stripping of Inanna as she descends through the seven gates. Kim describes the descent as a painful and yet necessary path: a path that when embraced, can bring us into deeper intimacy with who we truly are.

Day Four

with Lucy H.Pearce, author of ten life-changing non-fiction books for women and founder of Womancraft Publishing – creating life-changing, paradigm-shifting books by women, for women.

In this enlivening conversation, Lucy and Carly explore how our descents and rising call us to reckon with power and in doing so unleash our creativity. This is a fiery path that Lucy has walked, in her life, through her writing and in the creation of Womancraft Publishing (who are also the publishers of Descent & Rising). She shares vibrant insight into her own reckoning with the Sky Gods, and some of the things we may have to face when we step into our authority and forage for different ways of being creative and more authentic in the world.

Day Five

with Chameli Ardagh, visionary and CEO of the Awakening Women Institute.

In this depthful and immensely moving conversation Chameli shares her experience of Inanna and the initiatory, unswerving energy of Ereshkigal that she experienced through the pandemic, menopause, divorce and the recent death of her son. She explores the beingness of rage, beyond the mind, beyond what is rational, as the felt sense of what is. The acute experience of hopelessness – and the relief. The experience of losing the Goddess and her identity. And finally, the holy fecundity of desire and the natural movement of rising.

Day Six

with Saida Desilets, a counter-culture creatrix who is passionately devoted to normalizing healthy, embodied, sexuality as a means to optimize one’s vitality, relationships, and genius in the world.

Saida embodies the succlence that she is such an advocate for in her work. In this talk, she frames the descent as a deep love affair with our body, a reclamation of trust and a revelation of the home base within our soma and pelvis, that then supports our rising. She illuminates the ancient nature of desire and how the Inanna journey is an uncovering of the true compass of our desire, that is so often highjacked and mishaped by culture and conditioning. This conversation is an invitation to follow the emergent and evolutionary current of your desire into relationship with the fullest most juicy expression of your unique aliveness.

Day Seven

with Tamara Albanna, artist and author of Inanna’s Ascent: Reclaiming Female Power and Trista Hendren, creatrix of Girl God Books.

Tamara and Trista are passionate about our ability to rise. In this talk we explore the possibilities of rising and the need for sacrifice, collaboration, compassion and creativity to help us ascend. As a daughter of Iraq, where the Inanna myth originated, Tamara speaks to how her Iraqi sisters have been held in the underworld by external forces, but also speaks to the strength and resolve of Middle Eastern women, even in the face of adversity. This conversation has a warmth and joy that can be cultivated inside of sisterhood. A sisterhood that is embodied in the myth and that we can hopefully create inside of ourselves and our lives as we rise.

Day Eight

Invoking Inanna was the LIVE call that happened on 11th April at the close of the retreat. You can access the recording below.

You are invited to enter a process of movement and creative reflection with Carly who will bang the drum for you as you begin to digest what has been stirred by opening up these conversations. The heroine’s journey does not happen only in our heads, it happens in our flesh and bones. This call will offer an embodied process of invocation, that can help you root down into the Inanna within.

Want to have the book to travel with as a part of your retreat?

You can purchase you copy of Descent & Rising today.

buy the book

New book Descent & Rising By writer Carly Mountain

READY FOR MORE?

You can access ongoing conversations here with new talk released on new moon each month throughout 2023.

DECEMBER 2023

With Omisade Burney-Scott, a Black southern 7th generation native North Carolinian feminist, mother and healer with decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, philanthrophy, and social justice. Omisade is the creator of The Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of Black women and femmes over 50. She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, the proud mother of two sons, and resides in Durham. Find out more via blackgirlsguidetosurvivingmenopause.com/

In this conversation, Omisade explores the impact of stories, community, listening and how these themes are moving in her life and work. She explores the story of Baba Yaga and what we can learn when we re-story and restore these crone archetypes own voice and perpectives. We speak about menopause and the importance of recognising each indiviudals menopause experience, the relational dynamics of being an elder and her work creating and curating The Black Girls Guide to Menopause. blackgirlsguidetosurvivingmenopause.com

November 2023

With Mary Reynolds Thompson, Founder of Live Your Wild Soul Story, is an award-winning author, internationally recognized speaker, and a facilitator of poetry and journal therapy. A pioneer in the spiritual ecology movement, her focus is on the transformative power of landscape archetypes and nature metaphors to reveal our true purpose and right relationship with the planet. Author of A Wild Soul Woman (Findhorn Press, 2024) and Reclaiming the Wild Soul, a 2015 Nautilus Award-winner, Mary’s writings have also appeared in numerous other publications and anthologies. She can be reached via her website: maryreynoldsthompson.com.

In this conversation, Mary explores the archetypes of the Wild Soul Woman (Desert Woman, Forest Woman, Ocean and River Woman, Mountain Woman and Grassland Woman) and how a remembering of these can help us bridge the false divide between outer and inner nature, Earth and Soul. maryreynoldsthompson.com

October 2023

With Lucy Jones who is an award-winning journalist and the author of four books including the best-selling Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild, a Times and Telegraph Book of the Year, and most recently Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood. Her writing on science, health and ecology has been published in BBC Earth, The Sunday Times, GQ, the Daily Telegraph and the New Statesman.

In this conversation, Lucy and I explore some of the themes in Lucy’s newest book, “Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood”. Lucy speaks to the meaning of the word matresence and why she felt inspired to write a book about it, the way that matrescence is, and largely isn’t, recognised and held in modern western culture and the impact on mothers, and maternal ambivalence, shame and traversing all of the feelings and experiences we may encounter when we become mothers and more. lucyfjones.com/

September 2023

With Pallavi Barnwal who is a sexuality educator and intimacy coach who helps couples and individuals free themselves from sexual shame and find joy in their sexuality. She is the founder of India’s leading online sex and intimacy platform Get Intimacy, that seeks to facilitate people move from conflict to connection. GetIntimacy.com

In this conversation we speak about the impact that being enslaved in the past has had on Indian people’s emotional and sexual lives. Pallavi speaks to the perception of women’s sexuality in Indian culture and the risks of doing this work as a woman in India. She also talks about the personal sacrifices that she has had to make to rise up and do this work. We also speak about working with sexual “dysfunction” and the importance of taking a somatic approach to sex education and much more.

August 2023

with Riane Eisler who is internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, and cultural historian. She is author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57 th US printing and 27 foreigneditions, and The Real Wealth of Nations, hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking”. Eisler is also President of the Center for Partnership Systems. rianeeisler.com

In this conversation we explore power and the difference between domination and partnership societies and how this relates to the Inanna myth. Riane illuminates the four cornerstones that impact real social change and illuminates the importance of awakening from the dominator trance. She explains how dominator economics impacts all of us, but particularly women and children, and how this effects us at an embodied level.

July 2023

With Ian MacKenzie a new paradigm artist who currently resides on Vancouver Island with his partner and young son. For over 15 years, he’s been tracking the global emergence of imaginal culture. From the desert of Burning Man to the heart of Occupy Wall St, he has sought and amplified the voices of visionaries, artists and activists who have been working toward planetary system change. He is the co-director of The Village of Lovers, as well as the host of The Mythic Masculine podcast and co-founder of The School of Mythopoetics. ianmack.com

In this conversation, we discuss the changing nature of the mythic masculine and how our relationship with masculinity, regardless of gender, needs to change. Ian speaks to the necessary failure of the hero, the challenges that can arise in heterosexual relationships when males reveal their vulnerability and the way that men need other men to truly work with their emotional wounding.

JuNE 2023

With astrologer, scholar and poet, Cristina Farella. Cristina is the creatrix of Eighth House Astrology, where she offers astro-education, creative approaches to ritual, and astrological consultation. She holds an MA from the CUNY Graduate Center in Western Intellectual Traditions. Her practice blends her interests of modernist art history, classical and Renaissance drama, and the occult. www.cristinafarella.com/

In this conversation Cristina speaks to the relationship between Venus and Inanna. She illuminates the ways that mythology can bring astrology to life and speaks about the influence of Demetra George, who helped bring feminine mythological figures into astrology. She also discusses how Pluto may influence our underworld journeys and how astrology can provide insight in our lives.

Decsent and Rising Conversations with Carly Mountain

May 2023

With writer, mythologist, and educator, Maria Souza. Maria is the author of Wild Daughters and is a member of the Joseph Campbell Foundation Myth Maker Network. She is the host of the podcast Women and Mythology, in which she shares and interprets myths and fairy tales. womenandmythology.com/

In this conversation Maria tells the story of Bluebeard and we explore the nature of the predator archetype that is indigenous to all human beings. We talk about how this energy might appear in our lives. What is your relationship with the predator? In the Inanna myth, predatory energy is embodied by Ereshkigal and we look at how the way that different stories express the predator, might affect how we relate to this energy. We discuss the shedding of naivety, the awakening of our authority and instinct, and how working with our inner predator is vital, so that it can begin to support rather than thwart our creative aliveness.

Winter Solstice special 2023

Clark Strand and Perdita Finn are co-founders of The Way of the Rose, an inclusive fellowship of rosary friends dedicated to the Earth and to the Lady “by any name we wish to call Her.” Strand is the author of numerous books and articles on spiritual practices, including Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey and Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Finn teaches workshops on collaborating with the ancestors and is the author The Reluctant Psychic and Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World. The next book Strand and Finn are working on is Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Empire. They live with their family in the Catskill Mountains. wayoftherose.org/

I was so greatful to sit with Perdita and Clark and the wisdom they embody. In this conversation the speak about their work with “the dirt, the dark and the dead”, the dark passages and journey of the soul we walk through in a life time, ascension as a return to embodiment not an transcendence from being embodied, the Hamsa symbol, touch, eros and stories as a way of relating to and understanding our planetary ecology and more.