The Descent & Rising Retreat

Awaken the magic, mystery and power within you.

A free series of intimate conversations on the heroine’s journey
with Carly Mountain and special guests.

The Descent & Rising Retreat & Ongoing Conversations

When our lives fall apart we often feel broken, ashamed and deeply alone. But what if you knew, as you experienced this descent, that it was mapped out in a myth thousands of years old? What if, despite the uniqueness of your own life and experiences, each stage of the process was universal?

The Inanna Myth is the map that so many of us are craving to help us traverse the complexity of our lives and times.

New book Descent & Rising By writer Carly Mountain

Through this retreat you will be invited to explore the personal and archetypal nature of descent & rising. We will delve into themes and experiences that we may encounter in our heroine’s journey’s and uncover why this ancient myth has such wisdom and medicine for our modern times. And Carly is continuing these conversations through the year. Sign up to gain access to all the conversations so far FREE today.

The heroine is one who is foraging for another way

My guests are a group of inspiring authors, creatives, teachers and changemakers including, visionary and CEO of the Awakening Women Institute Chameli Ardagh, TEDx speaker and leading teacher of sexual sovereignty and succulence Dr Saida Desilets, and award winning author and founder of Womancraft Publishing, Lucy H. Pearce. These conversations are an invitation to find solidarity in your experiences, tend to your longing and unveil the wisdom inside of you.

Recieve access to a new conversation each new moon

Due the the overwhelmingly positive response to the original conversations, I have decided to continue with them throughout the rest of 2023. Each month I will be speaking to a NEW guest that will bring insights into the themes we encounter in descent & rising such as working with the inner predator, the mythic masculine, astrology and Inanna and more….

This month my special guest is creator of The Black Girls Guide to Menopause, Omisade Burney-Scott. You can sign up FREE to listen to this and all the original retreat content today.

Together we can honour our descents and dare to rise

Register here:

By signing up to this event you agree to receive future emails and offers from Carly Mountain. You are welcome to unsubscribe at anytime.

How the Descent & Rising Online Retreat & Conversations Work

Once you sign up you will gain access to all our original retreat content, including seven in-depth, honest conversations between Carly Mountain and special guests, who share a wealth of insight and embodied experience of key facets of the heroine’s journey. Along with the recording of the LIVE call INVOKING INANNA with Carly that closed the retreat. And the ongoing conversations with a new guest shared each month throughout 2023.

Together we can begin to reveal what’s possible (individually and collectively) when our descents are beheld, honoured and consecrated as essential initiations that can inspire us to rise rooted.

OLD STORY

NEW STORY

What is Descent & Rising?

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.

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.

I am really passionate about women, men and gender diverse people being able to recieve the medicine of this myth and these conversations so all are welcome to take part in this online retreat. However, I am also devoted to creating sanctuaries and sacred spaces for women. So the online course that follows in May is a women only space.

Your retreat schedule:

Descent & Rising Course with Carly Mountain

dAY ONE

Initiation & the Importance of Remembering our Rites of Passage

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

The Alchemy of Grief – How our Losses can Break Us Open to the World

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

Revealing Pain & Beauty – the Importance of the Beholder and the Courage to Embrace our Pain

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

Reckoning with Power & Unleashing Our Creativity

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

Coming To Our Senses – Moving with Rage, Hopelessness and Desire

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

The Emergent and Evolutionary Nature of Desire

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

Woman Rising: Sacrifice, Compassion and Embracing Sisterhood

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.

About Your Host

Carly Mountain is a psychotherapist, a psychosexual somatic therapist, breathworker and writer. 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.

More About Carly

Author of Descent and Rising Carly Mountain

Together we can honour our descents and dare to rise

Register here:

By signing up to this event you agree to receive future emails and offers from Carly Mountain. You are welcome to unsubscribe at anytime.

The Descent & Rising Retreat

Awaken the magic, mystery and power within you.