The Descent & Rising Retreat
Come and delve into the mystery and medicine of the Inanna myth. Together with a community of sisterhood we will dive into the realms of our embodied underworld to commune with places that have been calling for our attention.
REMEMBER. RECLAIM. RECONNECT.
“From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below
From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below
From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below”
– Wolkstein and Kramer
“The new wave of feminism is embodied. It is not just an ideology, it’s a physical reality. We want to feel safe when we walk down the street, we want to be heard when we say no, we want pleasure, we want to allow our rage, we want to open to all the feelings we have not admitted. We don’t just want change, we are changing. Not only in our thoughts, in our body.”
– Descent & Rising
Sign Up Here And Book Your Place
Early bird £95 if you sign up before 12th April 2023. After that £108.
Descent & Rising is an Initiation
Descent & Rising is an initiatory process that sanctions us into deeper intimacy with who we are and have always been.
Now is the time to remember, reclaim and reconnect with your deep self. She who has been buried under layers of conditioning and expectation – she who is connected to the fecundity of all things.
This is the forgotten rite of passage of death and rebirth that is synonymous with the wild feminine. A path that is so often, forgotten, shamed and ignored in patriarchal capitalist culture.
These initiations can show up in many forms, the end of a relationship or role, the end of a relationship, baby longing, baby loss, abortion or miscarriage, matresence, bereavement, divorce, menopause, and often a combination of these (and this list is not exhaustive). Whatever the particular catalyst for our descents, they plummet us into unknown territory and challenge us to our core.
“As the caterpillar enters the cocoon to dissolve, so too does the heroine experience a sort of dissolution of her known self, through which she enters the process of transformation.”
– Descent & Rising
So often the difficulties we experience in life are coated in shame and we do not always give credence to these initiatory processes or recognise them as the rites of passage that they are. This is not only a loss to the individual it is a loss to us all.
“A culture that cannot descend is a culture that is not rooted in the earth. A culture that fears and suppresses the nature that it is, eventually destroys the nature that it is and this is exactly what is happening. We are living in a time of mass extinction, species of plants, insects and animals are being lost daily. We are all being called to descend into the shadows that brought us here. It is complex, frightening and at times, overwhelming. My feeling is that we need the old stories to help us traverse this unknown territory.”
– Descent & Rising
This personal transformation also serves the
times in which we are living.
The dominant myth of Western capitalist culture is that we must work harder and continually strive to achieve and accumulate more. It is the paradigm of power over, be that power over our bodies, each other or the Earth. This is unsustainable and is driving us headlong into our own destruction.
We need ancient wisdom to help us traverse this unknown territory.
No one person or solution will provide the answer – we’re all needed. You have an important part to play – big or small, public or private.
It’s time reawaken our mythic imagination and
return to a deeper knowing.
Can we dare to follow in Inanna’s footsteps and open our ears to the great below of our personal and collective lives?
So that we can be re-sourced and reignited to dare to follow the sacred map of our desire – home.
So that we can recognise our life’s challenges as rites of passage that have the power to awaken us to more authority, purpose and belonging.
“The heroine is one who has started to see the ways that she has colluded with narratives that no longer serve her, or that maybe never served her…We are not arriving somewhere new, we are remembering something old, we are rebirthing the heroine from within.”
Together we can honour our descents and dare to rise.
How does the course work?
Each session runs 6-8pm BST on zoom and will be a sacred embodied process that will facilitate you to enter the landscape of your inner world and become more intimate with the Inanna within you.
She helps us to reveal the sacred anatomy of our lives unfolding, invokes our wisdom, tends to our pain and
awakens the fire of our desire.
The heroine’s journey does not happen only in our head, it is a somatic, felt experience. The sessions will reflect this. Please note: recordings of sessions will be available throughout the course until 8th June 2023. Participants will also have access to a private facebook group for sharing throughout the course.
Session One: The Story
We will begin with the story. In this first session, we will move, breathe, orientate, become acquainted with this sacred space and settle into the arms of the myth. There is so much medicine in story-telling. So come and gather round the fire of our intimate assembly and invite myth and mystery into your heart.
SESSION TWO: COMING TO OUR SENSES
In session two we will delve into the Inanna myth as an ancient map of trauma healing that can guide us back down into our body and the earth. We will feel into the ways that the myth holds in it’s structure a map of relationship and communion. And how it’s sacred anatomy can support us to down-regulate when the upperworld has taken us to high, too far, too soon. This session will give space for listening to the body, coming home to our senses and feeling into divine somatic experience.
SESSION THREE: RECLAIMING OUR SACRED RAGE
In session three we will journey into our relationship with rage and the vitality hidden inside our fierce feminine. Think of a lioness protecting her cubs, a wolf mama bearing her teeth, this is an aspect of Ereshkigal’s energy that we need to invoke. Can we unveil the sacred fire hidden inside of our anger and take more and more responsibility for it’s shadow?
SESSION FOUR: EROS RISING
In session four we will ride with the power of the pelvis and it’s vital role in rising rooted. We will dance, move, journal and breathe our way down into the ground and up towards the light. Invoking our fire, creativity, juice and desire. This is not the end…it is only the beginning. A pathway into communion with the sacred thread that is emerging and dancing us, as we caress and are carried by the waves of our desire towards sensuous aliveness.
Meet Your Beholder & Guide Carly Mountain
Carly Mountain is a psychotherapist, a psychosexual somatic therapist, women’s initiatory guide, yoga teacher, breathworker and writer. She brings twenty years of holding and exploring sacred embodied practices. Her new book Descent & Rising: Women’s Stories & the Embodiment of the Inanna Myth explores women’s real lived experiences of descent and rising, and familiarises us with a process of female psycho-spiritual growth often overlooked in patriarchal culture.
Carly specialises in beholding people as they traverse the depths of initiation; both in therapy, breathwork and within courses that support women to remember, reclaim and reconnect with the wisdom encoded in their flesh and bones – the wisdom of the Earth incarnated inside of us. So that we can live a sensual, naturally abundant, erotically inspired life.
Sign Up Here And Book Your Place
Early bird £95 if you sign up before 12th April 2023. After that £108.
Please note: this is not a therapy group. Though Carly is a qualified therapist she is not acting as therapist in this role. She is holding the course as a beholder and sacred space holder. Because the course is embodied in nature, some of the material is designed to stir the pot of your inner life. By signing up to this course you agree that you are in a safe and stable enough place to take responsibility for anything that arises within you. If in doubt please check in with Carly via email before signing up.
FAQs
For those who can’t join live, all sessions will be recorded and available for you to watch until June 7th 2023.
At the moment, this is the only course planned. If there is demand I will run it again and you will have lifetime access for future rounds and will not have to pay again.
The sessions are 2 hours long weekly. The recordings will be available for the whole of May and for a week after we finish the course (Thursday 8th June).
No. Though I am a qualified psychotherapist, I will not be acting in the role of therapist in this course. In this course I am a beholder and sacred space holder. If you feel you need therapy, it would be better to seek out 1:1 support from a qualified practitioner.
Unfortunately, I cannot operate in a dual role for my clients. This is to promote clean boundaries and honour the therapy process. Therefore, if you are currently in therapy with me, or have only recently finished a therapy relationship with me this course is not suitable for you. If you are on my waiting list for therapy you are welcome to join the course. If in doubt please do contact me via email to discuss.
If you are currently struggling with your mental health I do not recommend this course. The nature of this course material is embodied and some of the exercises are designed to stir the cauldron of your inner life. If you are already in a very unstable place it would not be a good time to disturb any latent material from within you. Please note that if you sign up to this course, you are agreeing that you are in a supported enough place in your life to take responsibility for what arises in you.
There will be an online private facebook group where you can post reflections and any inspirational material you may find along the journey. I will interact on this group when I have time, but I may not always be able to respond to all posts.
You don’t. However, we will be working with the book and the course is designed to support an embodied enquiry that accompanies the book beautifully. So if you can get hold of a copy I would obviously say, yes buy one! But it is not a pre-requisite for joining the course.