The Descent is Sacred.
This is a living initiation into the heart of my work. It’s where I first gave voice to Dark Goddess Rising—an online gathering born from my own descent into the underworld and my devotion to making that path less lonely for others. What began as a seasonal event has become a spiritual framework I return to again and again.
If you’re here, something in you already knows:
The descent is not failure.
The dark is not wrong.
And you don’t have to do this alone.
In this conversation, I share how the story of Inanna—and the archetype of the Dark Goddess—shapes every layer of my work. More than just metaphor, this is a blueprint for embodied spiritual transformation.
"This is an astonishingly deep and wise message that I hope will spread far and wide. Noraleen articulates the dark places of initiation with profound understanding, wisdom and compassion. Anyone struggling at any level - whether physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional - will benefit by taking in these stories, both personal and mythic. Thank you for telling us your journey to the dark places of ancient and modern wisdom, and for creating this summit to expand on the support you are offering to a wide audience."
-Tayria Ward, Ph. D., Dreamweaver and Depth Psychologist
Descent as Disruption
The descent isn’t just a personal spiral. It’s a political act. A spiritual rebellion. A reclamation.
Because systems of oppression don’t live in the abstract. They live in us—in the parts of ourselves we’ve disowned to survive. In the patterns we repeat without knowing why. In the fear of our own power, rage, desire, grief. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy aren't structures “out there.” They’re perpetuated every time we bypass our pain, suppress our bodies, or shame our own needs to be “good” or “successful” or “safe.”
Radical devotion disrupts this.
Not the performative kind. Not the kind that looks holy but still hinges on proving and perfecting. I mean the messy, embodied kind. The kind that stays present when everything in you wants to run. That meets your resistance without trying to conquer it. That chooses to love what’s been deemed unlovable—not as a performance, but as a prayer.
That’s what this work is.
Shadow work that doesn’t bypass reality. That doesn’t chase transcendence or try to manifest its way out of the underworld. That understands we are the microcosm of the macrocosm—and every time we stop outsourcing our worth, every time we meet a part of ourselves with compassion instead of control, we’re shifting the collective field.
This is why descent matters.
Because wholeness is not neutral.
It’s dangerous to systems that rely on our fragmentation.
The Dark Goddess isn’t here to punish you—she’s here to return you to yourself. To remind you that nothing you feel is too much. That you don’t need to be cleaned up to be sacred. That your despair, your pleasure, your rage, your numbness—all of it is part of the revolution.
This is how we rise:
Not by bypassing the darkness.
But by becoming the ones who know how to walk through it—with tenderness, with truth, and with each other.
In The Sacred Spiral: A Mystical Map for Healing After Abuse, I speak to the truth many of us sense but rarely name—that healing isn’t a straight line upward. It’s a spiral descent, a passage through shadow and rupture, where the very feelings we’re taught to fear become the doorway back to ourselves. This is the work of embodiment over analysis, devotion over fixing, descent as initiation.
“When we are willing to face our own darkness, the places that we hide those stories that tell us that we deserve to feel bad for what we’ve done or that we are bad, then we find that those stories were given to us by people who couldn’t hold their own pain—so they passed it on to us. But that’s not the truth of who we are.” -Noraleen Adele