The Medicine of the Underworld

The direction of the soul leads down and in.

Deeper than the day to day, the plans, the roles, the carefully crafted stories. The soul is what looks through you when you stop clinging to who you’ve been. It can see in the dark. It can see what is trying to become. The soul lives in deep relationship with not knowing.

Psychic capacity expands thinking to include imagination, and speaks the language of the world. It is a stretching of the soul, shaped by the ceaseless contractions and expansions of little deaths and rebirths.

Visionary gifts grow through this tended ecology, an organic web of ongoing relationship in which what happens moves through you, and your participation moves through it, creating something entirely new. These encounters reveal the path of the soul. They give us ears to hear the deep soul song calling us into being.

There is a profound difference between allowing an experience to reveal its medicine, apprenticing yourself to its wisdom, and rushing to extract it and translate it into preexisting concepts. One requires a willingness to encounter something whose meaning has yet to emerge. The other offers the comfort of recognition.

Although recognition can be incredibly seductive, soul work is less about fitting something new into the life we already have, and more about letting ourselves expand to meet the immensity of what is trying to emerge. The Underworld is full of these messages.

On this journey, we must stay aware of, and guard against, the ever-present pressure to turn everything into an opportunity for personal growth. Psychedelic experiences, sacred medicines, ritual encounters, rites of passage, initiations, vision quests, and all other maps to the Underwworld are not self-improvement programs.

In the over culture of capitalism and patriarchy, even the Underworld is recruited into a narrative of human improvement. Darkness becomes valuable because it contains something we can uncover. Destruction becomes meaningful because it prepares us for renewal. Death becomes another metaphor for rebirth. The terrifying, incomprehensible, painful dimensions of existence are bypassed, branded, priced, and marketed as the next wellness retreat.

The steady, lifelong work of decolonizing the mind includes realizing that not every encounter has to lead somewhere, yield something of value, or justify its happening through whatever transformation it produces. There are entire cosmologies in which the Underworld is the domain of the dead, a place of ancestral relation, a realm of divine powers, or a dimension of existence operating according to its own conditions. These traditions carry their own histories and understandings, yet contemporary spiritual discourse keeps flattening this extraordinary multiplicity into the same psychological itinerary.

Embrace the Dark
Beneath this limited view lies an assumption about darkness itself: that it exists to be worked through, illuminated, integrated, or transcended. That it is the “negative” part of life, befalling us only when we have something to gain from the suffering it brings. We must overcome the compulsive need to assign meaning to darkness, to explain what it wants from us, what it represents, and what we are supposed to become through encountering it.

In my many years of apprenticeship to the Underworld, I have learned that the territory remains vastly stranger and far wilder than our descriptions of it. To approach something vast, ancient, and deeply other, armed with our psychological frameworks and sharp scalpel of constructed narratives, and then shape it to fit what we already know, defeats the whole purpose.

Sometimes we must let what is dying, die. We have been taught to stand over the corpse and demand to know what beautiful new version is supposed to rise from the ash. But cycles take time if they are to be fruitful. And more than that, grief, devastation, and finality have their own important reality.

Yes, there are maps to these deep places. The invitation is to arrive with open hands, to let the territory reveal itself on its own terms, and to be willing to be surprised. Do not mistake the map for the territory. We must not endeavor to solve the mystery of existence, but to experience existence as a mystery.

This work is not about interpreting, analyzing, or understanding everything we encounter. It is about being met more deeply by life. About actually encountering it, rather than trying to fix it, optimize it, or harness it. Meaning is made in the alchemy of an encounter. It is the risk of entering into relationship with the unknown. To stand in awe. To be moved. To go all the way down and in, into the place where you merge with the mystery itself.

This season is a potent time to engage this profound work. The Underworld is blowing her kiss across the land, and we stand on the threshold of the dark season of winter. The Earth is showing us the way, and we are invited to follow her.