185 Carly Mountain: Descent & Rising: Exploring the Embodiment of the Inanna Myth
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Monica: Welcome to the Revelation Project Podcast. I'm Monica Rogers, and this podcast is intended to disrupt the trance of unworthiness and to guide women to remember and reveal the truth of who we are. We say that life is a Revelation Project and what gets revealed, gets healed.

Monica: Hello dear listeners. Welcome to another episode of the revelation project podcast today. I'm with Carly mountain, who is a psychotherapist, a psychosexual somatic therapist, breath worker, and writer for the last 20 years, she has worked with sacred embodied practices. Her writing and work seeks to uncover.

Monica: What has been exiled or hidden within that is longing to be remembered and reconnected with. So you can already see why she is such a perfect guest. Her new book, descent and rising women's stories and the embodiment of anonymous. Explores women's real lived experiences of descent and rising and familiarizes us with a process of female psycho spiritual growth, often overlooked in patriarchal culture.

Monica: Carly stumbled across the Inanna story during her own descent to the underworld and was astonished by the symmetry it held with her own experience. Since then, she has devoted herself to working with the myth and specializes in beholding others as they traverse the depths of initiation, both in therapy.

Monica: Breath work and within courses that support women's awakening and unfolding. She lives in Sheffield, England with her husband and two daughters. Welcome Carly. 

Carly: Thank you so much. 

Monica: So this myth also has such a special place in my heart, Carly, because when I went through my own descent in 2008, 2009, I had no knowledge of the myth of Inanna.

Monica: It was really only in the last several years. And when. I really dove more deeply into the myth. I was in awe. I was like, this is what happened to me. This I have, I always talk about my own descent as this almost like mythical journey back home to myself, where I was having, I was. Almost nine months in bed, which is also a very interesting amount of time where I was practically crippled by a health issue.

Monica: And I was in the midst of divorce. I had lost my business. I mean, it was literally like a cataclysmic universal two by four, right? That kind of brought me to my knees. And I always think back to that time as how I learned to love myself and befriend myself. It was in that bed during those nine months and the astonishment, I mean, it's just, you cannot make this up.

Monica: It's like, there is a way that this truly is such a treasure for women. This mythology is. So symbiotic with a woman's experience, and I love how in the intro, it's like, this is not normalized in our patriarchal culture. In fact, when it happens to us, it feels like we're going crazy and we need to medicate, or maybe we just need to be put away.

Monica: Yeah. I feel like women really come to this place where there is something more wrong with me than I thought there ever was. Right. But it was, it's like this trance where then we kind of come to this place where we're just so unequipped to reach out because we've been trained by this culture to be.

Monica: Self insufficient. I call it. Yeah. So love for you to just talk more about your own, I guess, meeting a banana and what that looked like for you in the beginning. And then how that threaded into your vision for this work and working with women that that is now your life. 

Carly: Yeah, thank you for such a beautiful introduction, because I feel like you speak so powerfully and clearly to the way that it's not, this is not an idea, and when Inanna really speaks to you, when the myth really speaks to you, it's because of a lived experience.

Carly: Experience of it. It's like, Oh my gosh, this is my life. This is what's happening to me. And I think that's why it holds such power and medicine because I had a very similar experience. I had been walking through the underworld unknowingly. And when I discovered the myth through a book by Linda Hartley called Servants of the Sacred Dream.

Carly: And when I read it, it was just like all the lights switched on inside me, because... I couldn't believe that there was this ancient, over 4, 000 year old story that was essentially speaking to my experience here and now. 

Monica: Right, my modern life. 

Carly: Yeah, like how, how is that even possible? And the power inside of that too, it consecrated, I always use the word consecrated, it consecrated my experience, it immediately rooted me into some deep ancient knowing that I had never had.

Carly: I've never experienced that way before. 

Monica: Tell me more about that. Yeah. And tell me what the word consecrated means to you. 

Carly: So for me, it is to make sacred, but not only to make sacred, there's something about Thank you. the groundedness of consecration. That's the word that's coming in for me. It's like it puts down, put me into the roots of the very thing that creates and animates all things.

Carly: Because if someone can create, how did an Heduanna, this Ancient priestess, poet, Sumerian woman, create this story that is speaking to me now thousands of years later. That to me is consecration. It's speaking from something that's indestructible, that is constant. That is ancient and alive here and now, and is embodied in our experience, but is also, so it speaks to then the personal and the archetypal and the vastness at one and the same time, and brings them into communion.

Carly: How many things do that in life? 

Monica: None. I mean, very few, but as you're talking, I'm like feeling emotional because, you know, the words that you're using are so. Powerful and they're so true. And what comes to me is this way that we can, it's like a living transmission. It's like this living transmission that comes through.

Monica: It transcends time and space. And yet it. Um, lands in the here and now, so it's all of it in this glimpse, because there's this way that the aperture opens to the divine. And then, and I think, you know, the game I'm playing is how long can I keep the aperture open, but there's this way that everyday life closes the aperture again.

Monica: But what I'm hearing is that for you, there was this opening, there was this portal through this consecration, this knowing, like this communion where we talk about co-creating and then there's the co communion or the communion of understanding that we are both human and divine. And that, yes, there are these ancient stories that are being unearthed at this very powerful time in our human experience, in our human evolution.

Monica: So say more now, like, take us back to the story, back to what was happening. 

Carly: So I feel like there's such medicine inside of those moments of consecration and communion that you're naming so beautifully in that it allowed me to go deeper into the process. It was a witness, and a really key part of this myth is the witness.

Carly: And so before Inana descends, she calls in Nins Sheba, who is her is Diane. Warstein speaks to, to her being the handmaiden of the feminine. Mm-hmm. And so she says to Nins Sheba, if I am not back, if I don't emerge, bang the drum for me, set up a lament in the assembly places. Call for my return. And I think that this is what this myth can offer to us in the depths of descent is that it's something that bangs the drum for us.

Carly: It's something that allows us to keep a rhythm with some aspect of what is alive in us in that moment. The place, the part of us that's in the upper world is banging the drum. Meanwhile, there's another part that is underworld and is being disassembled. And so, in a sense, We get to feel that communion, that union between some of the parts of ourselves that have been estranged so acutely through that, that upper world, underworld beingness in the acuteness of the descent.

Carly: I think we actually get to remember those parts. And by remember, I really love that word because it is really like remembering re. Incarnating in a very physical sense as well as in our psyche and in our spiritual, um, more etheric selves as well. It is a whole being that we are remembering and coming back into communion with.

Monica: And that the witness, to go back to what you were saying, that the witness is such a powerful. way for us to see ourselves through the eyes of the witness, through the one who calls us back through the one that bangs the drum and says, it's time to come back now. And so for my listeners, just to kind of, again, paint this picture for those of you that have not.

Monica: Yet encountered this story or this myth, the way that I really had my own experience of this and, and Carly, your, your book so accurately describes like what I went through, put words in ways that I could not. I had done all of the things that they say we women can do on the surface level of this life.

Monica: And yet I was so empty inside. I was even more confused. I was, I had been seeking out. I had been grasping for validation out there my whole life. Am I good now? Am I enough now? Am I worthy now? And there was this way that I could never get enough of the wrong thing. I just wanted more. I had this insatiable hunger to arrive somewhere.

Monica: A house of mirrors up here. I just, I couldn't. The more, the further I would go, the more confused I would become. And yet I had the pretty picture life. I call it, I had the life that everybody from the outside looking in thought, what do you have to complain about? But it was this poverty. In inside myself, because I was so deeply disconnected from any type of nourishment, any true ability to like see or be with these parts of myself that I had.

Monica: Kicked out of the garden. I call I like to call it. I had kicked them out of my life I had suppressed them and repressed them. And so those parts were in the underworld waiting for me Mm hmm. And and that is the thing there comes a time where we become so fractured in this surface level world That in order to be remembered we sometimes If not always, I'm learning, have to, you know, we have moments that bring us to our knees and those are the moments.

Monica: And I feel like there is this crying out very different from how I learned like prayer. It's more of this anguished crying out that, and I'll never forget the moment, you know, that I was brought to my knees and I was like crying out. And in that crying out, That was this really powerful marker, I'll call it, that so began this, there was just this instinctual, like everything just started to become heavy and very everything in my body just almost like I imagined like the way a bear might hibernate.

Monica: It was like I was going. Down and in, and I did not know how to explain this, how to express it, how to even, it was just all I could do, honestly, kind of stay alive through it. Like that's the way I felt because there's, I think, you know, as I've continued to do this work, I hear from so many women that there's this real truth to.

Monica: Being in this deep, dark void where you just are really facing your own, everything, everything that you actually. cast out. So just to bring more kind of a visual, what does this look like? What does this feel like for the listener? And I didn't know if you wanted to add anything. 

Carly: Well, I feel like there's the poem here that's in the book possibly speaks to the, what you are.

Carly: Illuminating for us, um. This is the place where all the paths you thought would bring you home converge and fall away. And you must stand still or step back or step off into an impossible wilderness where the only voice is your own voice or there is no voice at all. And the tide of habit draws you back to the path that is already pressed in the void.

Carly: that measures the dark and feels like home, but now you are homeless and crave the dark out of whose black clay words form that have never been spoken from flesh and breath that is only yours. There is no direction here and none allowed, only the steady throb of something wild and hungry inside you and the next breath.

Carly: And that's by Kim Rosen, and it's called Autobiography of 1994. Wow. I'm just so moved by that poem and the way that it describes that dark, heavy, directionless, rewilding place. Yeah. Where all of that stuff that's been going on above that you described so beautifully, the hall of mirrors, the emptiness in that.

Carly: That upper kind of seeking the thing that will never nourish the only place seemingly we can find it is by going, as you say, back down in and yeah. 

Monica: I love that so much. And what else, you know, comes up for me as I often talk about the trance of unworthiness, you know, this, this way that women. We disembody in order to survive what I call an emotionally uninhabitable world.

Monica: We go into our heads where we can logic everything out or where we can stay disconnected. In the trance, I got really great up until this point. Of being there in body, but I wasn't there. I was Houdini. I was an expert at making people believe that I was. There, and I wasn't there and, and so there's this way that what you're describing to is this return, right?

Monica: Somebody said, and maybe it was Rumi, maybe it was somebody else. I can't think of it at this moment, but that the longest journey is. Making your, our way from our head to our heart. And so again, it's kind of this coming back to the body and the embodiment. And of course, Inanna is all about that. You name the embodiment of the Inanna myth.

Monica: So I'm like curious, like, what does that mean? And then if you could, I'd love to also kind of get curious about the seven gates for our listeners. 

Carly: Yes, I would love that. This is one of my most favorite things in life because we are all embodied right to incarnate as a human being is to be embodied. But I love what you're pointing to in that, that kind of Houdini that you described in that we are such a dissociative culture in the West, we are a We are so headbound.

Carly: Logos has dominated Eros for so long. And so to come back down into the body, the whole myth begins with, from the great above, Inanna opened her ear to the great below. If we have been dissociated, which as you say, you know, for women in particular, Living in a world that does not honor women, you know, living and breathing misogyny is traumatic and often it's so normalized that we don't even realize that that's what's going on.

Carly: So the dissociation becomes normal. It becomes a normal way of existing. For me, I dissociated for the first time when I came out through, was dragged out of the birth canal with forceps. And it took so much descending to remember that that had been, therefore, my default nervous system patterning. And so, for years, I would have this feedback from, I danced for a long time, and I would have this feedback from All of my teachers saying, oh, you really need to do some tai chi or some yoga, you know, you really need to ground your energy back down into your body.

Carly: And I would be thinking, well, I'm dancing all day long. I'm working with my body. I'm doing a full time done. What do you mean? I didn't, I couldn't feel what they meant. But I did know that there was a rigidity inside my body. I did know that there was a, yeah. A disconnect that I was craving there was this craving to come back into the body, which was why I was doing all this physical stuff and yet nothing really brought me back in until I started doing a yoga practice and then gradually.

Carly: Things opened. I love the way that you were talking about that portal because the literal root of my body, that portal began to reopen and I dropped back down and in over many, many, many years. So when the cultural norm is to an extent to be dissociated. It's a really radical act to come back down into the body.

Carly: And I use the word radical very purposefully in the sense that it means, as you, you're nodding, it means the root. It means to root. And so, yeah, what, going back to what you were saying much earlier in the conversation, very beginning where you were saying that many people who go into the descent think that they are going mad.

Carly: I think it's because the cultural narratives. are so driven towards ascendance, productivity, keeping going. To be dissociative is, is kind of normal. And when we actually come back down and in and feel what we've been doing to ourselves and what has been done to us in the name of whatever it is driving all of this, it's really painful.

Carly: It's really painful. And I feel like this is what's astonishing to me, really. As I've gone on to do therapy training and learn more about my own trauma. and work with others, that this myth, to me, is like the most ancient map of trauma that we have. But we had no, and Hedwana, I wouldn't imagine, had any knowledge like the scientific knowledge we have of trauma now.

Carly: And yet, this seems to be a map of what it means to literally down regulate back down into our felt sense and touch everything that we find there that we haven't. Had the capacity or the safety to feel until now. 

Monica: I mean, what comes up for me is

Monica: to reinhabit ourselves is there are so, this is where I say, I say it over and over and over again. You say. Yes, to the mass because of the emotions, the grief, the things that there are to feel and to face and to be with is wildly uncomfortable. 

Carly: Absolutely. 

Monica: It's wildly uncomfortable. And to associate again.

Monica: To associate with these parts of ourselves, it's like, I even remember growing up. It was not only unbecoming to sit like that. It was also like who I hung out with was also who I associated with was also somehow a reflection on my character. Uh huh. Hm. And so, you see, we learn these lessons, like they're covert.

Monica: Yeah. But they're clear, she's a bad girl, you don't want to be associated with her. Until you become the bad girl.

Monica: It's like we, we get the opportunity here to be in everybody's shoes. It's so beautiful, but it's also to go back to the wild discomfort. What. I learned about myself. It's like, I have a joke with a few friends who've been to the darkest, grittiest places. And there's this way you talked about earlier, you talked about being consecrated, but there's also like a forging within that consecration where when you come back, not right away, because for a while you have to like, You're like a toddler.

Monica: You're like learning how to walk again. Talk again. Like when you come back from the underworld, you're like a fawn, you know, like on wobbly legs, like, whoa. 

Monica: And I'm like, bring it. Right? Like, I have, I have seen, I have known the darkest dark. There's this way that you just come back with so fully resourced, like, again, not all at once, but what you come to find as you come back in that ascension process, it's like, Whoa, I never knew that when all parts of me get to belong.

Monica: Yes. I am a force to be reckoned with. When no one has the power to shame me or blame me or guilt me or project upon me anymore. It's like when I know my own sufficiency, when I know my own worthiness, nobody has power over me anymore. And so, Inanna. Like you said, becomes this map for this unapologetic embodiment for this, for the greatest love of, of ourselves.

Monica: If we allow ourselves to be brought to where she wants to take us. 

Carly: And I feel like, in a sense, it's through meeting our shame and our unworthiness, right? So it's not that we're coming out and emerging going, you can't shame me because I know that I'm better than that, or I have no dark parts, or I am above it now in some way. It's because I have been to the parts of me that feel. Like that, no, that in certain places, I'm not going to be enough.

Carly: Yes. And I've met that pain of not being enough and the way it made me feel, or I've been to the place where I know my own violence and I have felt my own cruelty and therefore you can't shame that part of me because not because it doesn't exist in me, but because. I'm associated with it now. 

Monica: Yes, thank you.

Carly: And I feel like that is such an important repeated lesson for me, that will be forevermore, because this, as part of the dissociative culture, I think there's also this sense of a real wanting to get away from some of that in some of the New Age spiritual. You know, that sort of, if I just am a good enough girl, I will be able to manifest anything that I want.

Carly: And if I don't, I'm failing because it's because I'm not thinking right or doing enough or being good enough. Whereas I feel like Inanna is the antidote to that. She asks us, and Ereshkigal demands in fact, that we get up close and personal with all of the most difficult, most shamed. Most pained parts of ourselves so that we no longer have to dissociate from them anymore or pretend that they don't exist.

Carly: And I feel like that unbecoming that you, that word that you so beautifully use in your work is really about that. It's like. Well, have unbecome. So here I am. 

Monica: Yes. Right. And what is unbecoming about me? I can look at it, right? Right. I can, I can be with it. 

Carly: It's not going to kill me. 

Monica: So there's this honesty to self and other, you know, that becomes this guiding principle where we're no longer.

Monica: deflecting or hiding or defending. I mean, part of the, I think the biggest relief that I have found now is not needing to defend myself. It's like, it's so freeing. If my and our kids are the best teachers for us in this way, it's like, Mom, you know, I've noticed that you do X. It's like, Yeah. You know what?

Monica: I can see where you're seeing that in me, you know, and just to be able to have a conversation about some of the grittier parts of me that I might think I'm fooling them in the moment, you know, as a mom, like just, but being able to really be transparent. With the people around us, and also without though, abandoning myself, without going into this shame spiral.

Monica: It's like, yeah, I see that part of myself too. Isn't that interesting? Like, let me get curious. You know, it's like turning to a part of myself and saying like, tell me more, show me more. 

Carly: Yeah. 

Monica: Yeah. Cause we, yeah. 

Carly: Well, I'm just so glad that you brought mothering into it because I've had a lot of emails and from mothers since the book came out, kind of saying, oh, that mothers that are either beholding their own children in the underworld journey in some way, or.

Carly: A feeling that pull of, Oh, I'm in the underworld and I'm trying to parent at the same time. And is this okay. Yeah. And I really feel like the process of being a mother is part. That was one of the catalysts for my underworld journey. It was as though. When that portal of birth opened up my cervix, literally the gateway of the underworld to birth another human being, it also opened up in me.

Carly: It opened me up to my own underworld and then the clear out mission began, you know, over many, many years. And I think there's sometimes a real fear in people and, and particularly mothers of is it okay that I'm going through this and I'm trying to raise my child at the same time. And I kind of feel like for many, many women, it's part of it.

Carly: It's part of that matrescent rite of passage. 

Monica: Yeah, I totally see that. And I. Yeah, I mean, it is. We're also, I think in a collective descent. And so there's also this way that those of us, I think, that have a familiarity with this journey, we also can hold be the witness, you know, to and kind of in this holding of Not a holding, not a bracing, but a, but an embracing or a holding of this energy while it's happening collectively, because there is a lot that is falling apart for people, gender binaries.

Monica: Educational systems, financial institutions, government, I mean, it is happening everywhere. And it's every time you turn around, there's a disaster. And it's like, again, this really realizing that this is a trustworthy time, you unbecoming.

Monica: So when, you know, you experienced these gates, I would love for you to, whether it's kind of coming back to the birth and like your journey, or if you want to talk about these thresholds or these seven gates, I would love to kind of keep leaning into that. 

Carly: So I feel like the seven gates are so helpful in the sense of providing us with some kind of map or structure for an understanding of the process.

Carly: Having said that, and what I really highlight in the book is that even though we are moving down, even though Inanna moves down through seven gates, that it's not a linear process. And In the myth, so, um, Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Pereira likened these seven gates to the seven chakra points in the body, which really appealed to me and really helped me to feel into the energetic, visceral experience.

Carly: of the descent. So moving from the crown through the third eye, through the throat voice, through the heart, through the solar plexus and the fire of the solar plexus and all of our relationships with personal power into the womb space and our creativity and emotions and That watery flow, but also how uniquely in women's embodiment to how the womb that that 6th, 7th chakra point is.

Carly: It's kind of the water and the mud coming together in the womb, and Umadin's Motuli talks about yonistana, which is like that in between place between the base two chakras that the womb has this uniqueness, this unique kind of muddy, earthy nature to it, as well as the water that the earth is there and that they intermingle, which I, I just find such a rich, yeah, I can really feel that in my body.

Carly: When I read it and when I talk about it, and then down to our roots, our grassroots, our base, our connection to community, to family, to sex, to earth, basically. And so, often the chakras are spoken about from the base up to the top, and are numbered in that way, but in the book I reversed that. So, chakra one.

Carly: Being the crown this in this book and going all the way down to the base to seven and there's something inside my body that just really went for that reversal it, it feels so alive and juicy to do that there's something subversive in it in a way, I suppose, that gets me going, but it, it also, yeah, it's really It's the opposite of what I was taught, 

Monica: Right? It's like coming back to earth. 

Carly: Yes. 

Monica: It's literally this. I'm getting this visual of like, yeah, like I'm disembodied. I'm out here. I'm in my, and you start with the crown. It's like, I might as well start where I am, right? And then make my way in, make my way down, make my way through, make my way home. 

Carly: Make my way home and home to earth.

Carly: And when you were speaking about the disasters earlier, you know, this time we're living in. With the ecosystem collapse that's happening, I don't think there could be a more poignant or important time to be remembering how to come back down to Earth. I mean, we're, this is the only home we have, and we're destroying it.

Carly: So, It's, it's now and every single one of us, the beauty of, of the seven gates being embodied in my body, in your body, in the listeners bodies is that we have the power to make this journey here and now, inside of us, we have the keys to the cage and I am really all for Thank you. I really bow to all of the activism that's happening in the world to take action out there.

Carly: I really bow to that. And there's, I count this as a form of activism in here, in my flesh, in my bones, in my body, in what I... I'm willing to turn towards and be with that needs to be unveiled, revealed inside of me so that I can take more responsibility for how I tread and what footprint I'm leaving. 

Monica: Yeah.

Monica: You know, what's coming up for me too, is it truly is, it's a radical act to love yourself in a world that has conditioned you not to. And so I think, you know, sometimes coming back to the body and becoming full of ourselves is, it, it feels so foreign. This is why I think, as you so beautifully state in your book, this is why we come back to circle as women.

Monica: And so we'll get there in a minute too, but I wanted to share with our listeners that This, I would have, I remember, you know, going through this dark night and feeling like I had no resources available to me. I was, I became so hungry. I ended up, I had. Thank goddess. I had Pema Chodron's book when things fall apart, and it was so helpful to me when I was going through that, but I feel like there's so many amazing resources.

Monica: And one of the resources that I feel is so available to so many women, like truly are just Just. Women's circles where women are practicing this work, where we're practicing just being the witness for each other, where we collectively come together and tell our stories, where we are sharing, where we are being fully transparent, where we are not trying to fix each other, you know, where we're simply just coming together to be in the practice of what is it to be embodied and.

Monica: What is it to feel what we feel and know what we know? These are things that come with practice. It's not, Carly said, it's not like you come out from the underworld and it's all. In fact, sometimes in the beginning, it feels more messy than anything else because you are trying to renegotiate and reacclimate and reorient yourself to the world in a way to it reminds me of like, we have to retrain people how to be in relationship with us as we're training ourselves how to be in relationship with this new version of us.

Carly: Cause the world hasn't changed, but we have, 

Monica: But we have,

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Monica: So I would love to talk about. For our listener and just reclaiming our sacred rage and some of the other things that I think are also such a part of this. Journey. And this conversation, I always like to say, Carly, that all of the places we've been taught not to go are what is required in the unbecoming.

Carly: I love that. And that's what Ereshkigal demands, you know, she says when she hears that Inanna is coming to the Underworld, her response is Inanna will come naked and bow low, and the laws of the Underworld really require That we are stripped, and at each gate that Inanna descends down, she says to the gatekeeper, because the gatekeeper takes the crown, the gatekeeper takes the lapis beads, the gatekeeper takes, ultimately in the end, the robe.

Carly: And at each gate, she says, what is this? And the reply repeatedly comes, Quiet Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect, they may not be questioned. And so for me, one of those Ultimately, the laws of the underworld that must not be questioned, Ereshkigal's laws, are the natural laws. And the natural laws require us to come into contact with our own humanity and humility, I think.

Carly: And there's been so much in our Western culture, our Western patriarchal culture really has. Tried to get power over the body to kind of overcome our humanity in a way, you know, that we can, I mean, we flout those laws all of the time, all the time, and it feels like, to me, I really had this picture as I came towards the Eriskigal part of the book and towards the end of.

Carly: You know, it's like the earth is showing us her trauma right now. Like Ereshkigal is enraged because she is in pain. She is, she's been exiled and not heard and alone. And so she is all of the parts of us that have been exiled and left alone. intended to, but also for me, that's the way that we've been treating the earth.

Carly: We've been treating her as a resource to be exploited rather than as a mother. To be in relationship with, and so if we think about the stories that the earth is telling right now, I feel like there is rage. The weather systems are starting to show dysregulation, fire, uncontrollable winds, you know, flooding.

Carly: It's like that dysregulation that we experience in ourselves, the mess. That you named so clearly, the earth's showing us that too. And it feels like Ereshkigal takes off the veils of illusion about any of that and just shows the raw truth of the pain. And it's so deeply uncomfortable to be with that. I know in myself that part that wants to not go there.

Carly: In those moments and, and resisted going there and there is something that happens inside of us, a transformation that happens inside of us that, that I couldn't have got any other way than going there. So I'm also very grateful and interestingly, what happens to Ereshkigal. She, when she sees Inanna, she acts out her rage, she stakes Inanna, and there's this sense of, there is a part of that that we could say is acting out our rage, but I think actually there is also the sacredness of that rage, that sort of truly expressing that yang, forceful, force of nature energy that is inside all of our emotions erotic beingness, 

Monica: Right? Like it's got that passion also to it. And there's like a, uh, there's so much there, I think in the meeting of the dark sister, where it's like, she's saying like, you can't just have this pretty picture life up there without remembering me. That in order for you or us to be real,

Monica: we have to unite these, we have to come into wholeness. We have to remember, we have to face what there is to face. And in that. Face. I'd like, it's funny because the word disgrace is coming up, but then there is grace. Then there's this grace that happens, which is this transformative. Turning, the going through the eye of the needle, the dying to be reborn, the coming, you know, we came in naked, we go out naked, but there's this way that the ego has to strip itself bare to and just come bowed low.

Monica: We still need the ego, but it's about putting the ego in its proper place. That it's no longer driving the bus. 

Carly: It's no longer driving the bus. And in a sense, I think what Ereshkigal embodies is the primal energy that will express beyond the rational that the ego can hold on to. Yes. It's the place where the ego can't hold on anymore and something just happens like birth, right?

Carly: It's like, we're not, we're not even the force, the force of nature. And I think for many women, I know for myself, certainly in the current of rage, because I hadn't realized I had an unknown freeze around my own rage. And I think that, I love the work of Kimberly Ann Johnson on this, because she talks about how when we come back down into the body and have down regulated and Reincarnated what's been frozen that, that we need to then upregulate into what she calls healthy aggression.

Carly: And I feel like this has been such an important piece in my own journey to reincarnate the, the aggression that I have inside of me, because I think that I have for women who've experienced trauma. Or for women living in this culture where violence against women is such a normalized part of the culture, it's not always safe for us to be.

Carly: That raw Eriska girl, because if you're in with someone bigger and stronger than you, you cannot allow those parts of you to fly because it may be it's not safe to and our nervous system knows that. So I think so many of us as women opts towards dissociation and accommodation. Because that's the survival strategy that's worked and so dissociation and accommodation are like female superpowers as far as I'm concerned.

Carly: Having said that, when it becomes our default programming, we lose the ability to protect ourselves. And for me, where I started to uncover these lost currents inside of myself was in the breastwork. Um, that I practice and that was taught to me by Kim Rosen, because when I had breathed and breathed and breathed, the breath took me into the underworld, when you're breathing as fully as that you can't, it opens up the parts of the energy system that have not, that have got clogged up, if you like, and over time, what started to happen was This spontaneous rage, animal rage, baring teeth, kind of snarling, growling, Ereshkigal esque rage wouldn't spontaneously come up through my system.

Carly: Hmm. And? It was actually has been tremendously alive for me, but it's something that I've had to very slowly integrate into my life because in normal life to touch those currents had been quite frightening for me. And it's taken a lot of time, a lot of health spaces. A lot of, I mean, it's amazing when we talk about titration in, um, trauma work and which is a term that Peter Levine uses about titrating, because if we go to these big Erishkigal currents too soon, it can be really overwhelming for the nervous system.

Carly: But what I found in my breathwork journey is that. My system organically started to move towards those currents when my system was ready and it's been so amazingly life affirming and life full to reincarnate those more raw aggression, rage currents of my energy system, which in turn, then in my life has really helped me, you know, that that one in you that says, bring it on.

Carly: It's like it's strengthened that part of my nervous system. That can go, I have a robustness in me that I'd never met before because it had to be shut down for so long because it wasn't safe to meet it. 

Monica: I love that, Carly. I also really appreciate what you're bringing in here, which is this. It's like when we've lost our way, the body has this beautiful way of showing us.

Monica: And. There's this way that we can really trust. It's like if, if anger is not here yet, it's like, well, am I doing this right? It's like, right, we can tend to kind of be like, well, this must not be, it's like just trusting that our body knows, right? When, when it's time. And this is part of the revelation project for me, because the revelation project is very much, it's both an inward and an outward journey, but it's this, but it's an inward journey first.

Monica: And it's this way that like, what gets revealed to us, whether it's the next gate, there's these ways that I think our journey within, it's trustworthy, like we can trust that where wherever it's taking us is exactly where we're supposed to go. And that what you've said, it's nonlinear, it's like, there's no way to screw this up in a way, you know, like there's just your way and there's finding your way.

Monica: And so. Giving ourselves permission over and over and over again that, you know, when, when it's time, my body will know I've just come to really look to my body for all of the answers, because if I don't know, then it's not time yet. There's some ways that I just have learned to be with and to go this way, because that's.

Monica: Like I can feel it now. I can feel the way right. And if I don't feel it, then it's not the way yet, or I'm in a pause, or there's a way of just kind of learned how to attune myself to the language of my own body. And so, and I think this is a lifelong journey. It's like we just we come into These awarenesses about ourselves, like you just said, like, I had no idea I had this in me and yet part of you having it in you was first having to have right this fracturing to begin with.

Monica: So there's this way to that. I think we come to these realizations that it's all perfect. That it's all exactly right and it doesn't have to be this hard up here on the surface. Like it's, it's, there's a, there's also this way that I think we are also, I'm sure this was a whole nother episode, but there's this way that I believe we're kind of going through these seven gates out here.

Monica: Two on this outside journey, you know, where we're everything we're seeing and experiencing as we, you know, it's like, what does our, what is our culture going to look like hanging on the meat hook? Right. But I have a feeling it's going to be coming, it's going that way. But I think, you know, that's where something amazing is possible.

Monica: So meeting our anger and then, of course, the fierce feminine is what I think so many of us start to become acquainted with. What does that mean? The fierce feminine. What does that mean to you?

Carly: So I always think of the lioness with her cubs because I love nature examples because it takes the, the right and wrong out of it.

Carly: Again, it's the raw, it's the primal, it's that, it's that deeper, natural expression of something that is, is part of a humanness as well. So yeah, for me, the first feminine. Is that raw inside, but also it has a shadow. And I really loved Lucy Pierce's edit for me in the book about this, because she said, you know, I feel like sometimes we can go towards the.

Carly: real criticism of the darker aspects of the masculine, but when it comes to the darker aspects of the feminine, we're like, yeah, it's all great. And we don't acknowledge the destructive vengeance side of the feminine. And I feel like the fierce feminine has got a really dark current inside of it that needs to.

Carly: Be respected and named as part of the conversation in a way. And what I love about as Inanna rises is that in this dynamic she has where she, she has to basically, she can't emerge from the underworld unless she offers a sacrifice in her place. And I feel like this is where we really get to learn more, how to assert our authority as we rise.

Carly: And assert the lesson that that Ereshkigal energy, like the staking is an act of asserting our own energy, asserting our own fierceness, and with that, for me, comes great responsibility. And I, in the book, I speak about the story of Kali and Shiva. Which I really love because I tell a very, very quick insert of it, but Kali is incarnated to basically stop the, the world is taken over by demons and Durga creates this And even fiercer form of the feminine to basically try to defeat these demons.

Carly: But the problem is, is that each time that she cuts the demons, more blood drops. And as soon as the blood hits the earth, another demon sprouts. So Kali uses her long tongue to catch the blood and slay the demons simultaneously. But then she gets drunk on this. Blood, she's intoxicated by the violence and the things that wakes her up, brings her back to her own in a witness of her own consciousness is that Shiva, the masculine element lays down and reveals his soft belly to her.

Carly: And she's just about to stamp on him as well. And his vulnerability awakens her. And the way I feel this shows up in the anonymous is that. When she meets her husband, Dumuzi, who is the form of the masculine in that part of the story, he is arrogant, he is on her throne, he has not even really noticed she's been gone, and this is how she knows that he's the one that must be sacrificed.

Carly: But if she does that from vengeance, If she slays him from that dark part of the Fierce Feminine, then the mission will be aborted. Because if we lose that Shiva Consciousness, it's as bad as if she'd sacrificed. 

Monica: Right, it's, it's revenge. 

Carly: It's revenge instead of initiation. And the final piece of the puzzle is that Geshe Nana, who is Dumuzi's sister, who is like a bodhisattva, she's an embodiment of compassion, she appeals to Inanna.

Carly: She is the part of us, our compassionate self, and she allows Inanna to make the sacrifice of Dumuzi from a conscious place. Yes, she steps into her authority. Yes, he is still sacrificed. But in doing so from that position, she uses that Erishkigal energy and she becomes the initiatress. Of Dumuzi, of the masculine, and so it allows us to continue to rise and not then be lost because again, we've lost consciousness and it feels like such an important, important piece of rising to really be with that shadow side of the fierce feminine and embody the fierce feminine at the same time.

Monica: Yeah, I mean, whoa, I'm just. Like really soaking in your words here, as I kind of just think about, it's like, even today it's, there's this almost like caricatured version of this. It's like we come out of the underworld and we can see clearly what is happening. And it is like seeing Dumuzi on the throne, just carelessly, just.

Monica: And so there's this real reckoning, I think, happening between men and women, where the initiated women are saying, it's your turn now, it's time to do your work, and whatever that means for kind of our masculine counterparts. Yeah. Journey of initiation right where that we come back from this place of full, like sufficiency where we are saying, that's enough of that now.

Carly: That's enough. 

Monica: Because we do get what we tolerate, but part of the trance of unworthiness is to get us in the trance so that we just tolerate everything that is going on. And it's like, how, wait, if I have known the fierce feminine, how is this possible? It's like, Oh, because more women need. We need to hold more space for more women to become initiated so that we can then initiate more men.

Monica: So it starts to all make sense from this deeper wisdom. But man, when Trying to pull those threads and see how, what this divine plan in so many ways is, is calling for, is inviting us to, but it's, you know, I go to this place of like, well, that's trustworthy too. There's a timing to that too. I love that.

Carly: And I love that you're speaking about trust, but I think that often when we have, when we speak to trust, we think of trust as. I trust you to do what I want you to do instead of I trust what's here, which is a very different thing, isn't it? 

Monica: Well, and I trust that more will be revealed. Yes. Yeah. Because more always is.

Monica: But if we're in that place of desperation, control, fear, grasping, it's just like there is a process here. There is a plan here. Yeah. Like, he has a God and it's not me. There's just this way of like doing my own revelation project and knowing that that is what where my attention is required and to trust that when the time comes, I'll know it.

Monica: When the time comes to do or say something different, we'll know when that time is. There's something there with that, I think. So tell me more about just this, because we've kind of, I love when we pull in the masculine and the male aspects of this journey, because, you know, there's this way, I think we are all recognizing the system of patriarchy hiding in plain sight and all of the ways that.

Monica: The distortion of power has created a dynamic of incredible imbalance and, and I always say, you know, we live in the upside down, which is interesting because when you think about the more women that go in this, into this descent and come back, it's like more kind of like writing this imbalance. It's like it's happening, whether it's over.

Monica: Many, many years, who knows, but it is happening at that much I feel, but there is this, there is such an importance of our male co partners are male allies. And I would love for you to just, I know that you'd shared about Kali and Shiva. Is there anything more that you want to say about, you know, just Even in partnership with our men as we're going through this, anything that you want to add?

Carly: Yeah, again, I mean, I feel like patriarchy has become like a dirty word, certainly in my world and the circles that I moved in. And I really love the work that Ian McKenzie and some of his peers are speaking to. What do we want patriarchy to look like? What, what form of the father are we? Living with right now and what actually can the father be and what I love about this myth and the masculine archetypes in this myth is that there is Enki and Enki is.

Carly: A Sky God, but he is not the kind of Sky God that cannot get his hands dirty. He's a gardener, he's soulful, and he wants to help Inanna. And he is the one who sends his emissaries to the Underworld to empathize with Ereshkigal and allows those waters. of life to flow again. And so for me, I've been sitting with what is, what is, where is the Enki in our world right now?

Carly: Where is the creative masculine, the empathic masculine, the, the masculine who is willing to descend? And I'm so fortunate that I'm married to one of those and it's life changing as a woman to be in partnership with a man who can go to the underworld himself, but can also be beside me on my underworld journey and trust it.

Carly: Because together we co create a different narrative of how the male, how males and females can be together and what we can create together. And I'm constantly moved by the journey that I'm on with my husband because it takes me to places I never imagined I would go with a partner. So I feel like, you know, living in this very narrow monoculture of masculine that we have here, UK.

Carly: Certainly in the US. It's not serving anyone. It's not serving anyone, and I work with, I work mainly with women, but I work with lots of men as well, who really do want to live a different expression of the masculine and feminine within. and want to and are resurrecting their sacred feminine as well. And so I really feel like, even though my book is obviously very focused on women and women's stories, I did have a number of men contact me and say, you know, do you think I should read this too?

Carly: And I was like, yes, please, please, please read it. Because, yes, there is so much in here for all genders. There is so much, there is so much in the underworld journey. And it isn't only women that need to make it. It is all of us as a collective. We all need to be initiated and come back home. 

Monica: That's absolutely right.

Monica: And that's, I think for our last question, Carly, like maybe a beautiful place to end would be just really why desire is an important part of. What you speak of here, 

Carly: I feel like desire is an inherent part of our aliveness and part of what calls an honor to the underworld in the first place is a longing for more for deeper intimacy, deeper relationship, even if she's going to have to go through hell and high water to get to it, she's going and so our desire is Inherently trustworthy, and I think that that's not the same as the false desires that society constantly sells us as part of a capitalist world, you know, we are told that we need this and that and the other, not that kind of desire, 

Monica: Right? Like not the desire for a new pair of sandals for summer. 

Carly: No, no. If we have nothing left, what do we desire? If we have no money? What do we desire? If we knew that these were going to be our last breaths, what would we desire? It's not going to be something material like that, is it? It's going to be something so much deeper.

Carly: And I feel like Inanna, as a goddess of sexuality, what, what she is the embodiment of is that erotic life force inside of us. That is the purest, most innocent expression of desire. that we may ever encounter. And I think we've been sold this narrative that innocence and desire are different things, are separate things.

Carly: For me, they are intimately connected with each other because ultimately it's our desire for life, our inherent creativity that brings us Back into rising in the descent and rising online retreat. Sharmilee Arder spoke to it so beautifully when she said, you know, when I'm aligned with my desire, I am the shoot that's pushing out of the earth towards the sun.

Carly: I am that earthly embodiment of desire and that that will take us on a journey. It will take us to places we never. Expected to go, but in my experience, it brings such richness and learning to trust our desire because we've been taught to mistrust it. We've been told it will get us into trouble. We have been told, yeah, all sorts of bad things about desire.

Carly: I, in my experience, it's not true. 

Monica: No, in fact, getting in touch with. My desires are, it's, it's such a rewarding, it's again, such a muscle that now that I've exercised that muscle, it is so fun, you know, to actually come from that place of like, literally come to the Ideas to create, what do I desire? What do I desire?

Monica: And even as women, you know, to co labor, co partner with women in this way. It's like you're coming together and it's to offer something or to create something. And it's like, let's start with some desires. What do you desire? What do I desire? Right? It's like you. It's like suddenly we're getting visuals and feelings and, you know, suddenly there's this chemistry, this palpable creation happening and you can almost feel the shoots, right?

Monica: And then, and then also to water each other's desires, you know, to, to really nurture each other's desires. It's this other way of being of, of experiencing intimacy. Right. Is to know somebody's desires. Like, what is it that makes their heart or their, you know, that inner spark come alive in them? And so again, it's like, even in women in business, I see this being used and it's just such a beautiful way to, yeah, you know, it's like, I'm calling it embodied feminine leadership.

Monica: You know, it's just a very different way of being in relationship to each other, being in relationship to our businesses, being in a different relationship with the world around us. It's coming from that place of pleasure and desire and really focusing on being full of myself because then there's just this ease that comes with creation where it's just like There's an overflow, you know, that, that comes over time and it's just been like a beautiful thing to, to transform right in my own world first.

Monica: Is there anything that I haven't asked that you want to bring into our conversation that you want to leave our listener with? And of course, I also want to invite you to tell our listeners where to find you or anything else that you're up to. But anything else that you just feel is important that you don't want to leave?

Carly: I feel like I want to share a poem about being full of yourself. It's very light, but I like it. Yeah, I love that. So, that might be a nice place to end. It's called Full of Yourself. The young girl shone in the sun, and then the voice came. Don't be so full of yourself. What else should she be full of? I imagined him picking the petals off a tulip and sticking on the petals of a daffodil with sellotape.

Carly: Or telling the dog that it should behave more like the cat. The cat would just turn its tail and exit the room. Maybe we should be more like a cat.

Carly: It's kind of a fun poem to end with, but I, I wrote it. And I just think, you know, when you are full of yourself, you take far less. shit off people and you can just turn your tail and exit the room and I feel like being full of ourselves is a beautiful thing to become as we rise. As we rise. As we rise. 

Monica: Oh my goodness. Okay. I'm just like, thank you so much. It's been amazing. So where can we find you? What are you up to? How can the listeners become engaged or get, I know you said you just finished one retreat. Maybe you've got another coming up. Feel free to invite. 

Carly: Sure. Um, so, I held a Descent and Rising online retreat as part of the book launch, and access to those conversations are still available via my website.

Carly: They're beautiful. I had eight wonderful guests. Um, and you can access that as well as the closing recording, the call, the online call. We did an invoking Inanna call. to finish the retreat, and that's all available via my website carlymountain. com. You just need to sign up to the mailing list on there and you'll get access.

Carly: And those conversations are going to be carrying on until March 2024. So I've got some lovely, very wise, rich conversations with very wise guests coming up through the year, which I'm really excited about. Um, and I'm holding a four part live online course. in May. Um, there will be recordings provided if you can't make it.

Carly: It starts on the 10th of May and that is Descent and Rising and it's really going to focus on embodiment and the embodiment of the Inanna myth and that course is for women only. So it's going to be a beautiful circle, I think, to explore this and we'll be doing embodied exercises in relationship to the myth and some of the themes, and there'll also be time for sharing and reflection in community, which I just think is so valuable for pulling out the threads of, of the work.

Carly: And you can buy the book. The book is published by WomanCraft Publishing, so you can buy direct from them, and that would be to support an independent publisher, which would be great. Um, but otherwise you can buy it from wherever you buy your books from online, and I'm really hoping that that can be a resource for anyone who wants to work with the myth and go deeper with some of the things we've been talking about.

Monica: Well, I highly recommend it. It is so well written and it's just so relatable. And so, I mean, you really, you really did such a beautiful job. And I had the opportunity to catch some of the speakers in the series and just, yes, plan on going back. Because it's so true. There is so, this myth is so rich. I mean, you could just talk about this myth daily, every day.

Monica: There's just so much here. So thank you so much for being with us today. It was so powerful. It was so beautiful to meet you. It was so wonderful to hear just everything that you have to offer and all of what you're up to. I'm just thrilled to have had you. Thank you. Thank you. 

Carly: Oh, Monica, you're so welcome.

Carly: Thank you for having me and thank you for all the work you're doing because there's such resonance in, in what you're bringing. And it's just a delight to have been able to have this time with you. 

Monica: Thank you. It really is. Thank you. And for my listeners, I'll be sure to put all of Carly. I love your name.

Monica: Carly Mountain. Come on. Be sure to put all of her links in the show notes and until next time. More to be revealed. We hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information, please visit us@jointherevelation.com and be sure to download our free gift, subscribe to our mailing list or leave us a review on iTunes.

Monica: We thank you for your generous listening and as always, more to be revealed.