The Mythology As Our Map
The heroine’s journey looks different from the hero’s. We do not set out to conquer.
Our path asks us to strip away, to unlearn, to descend. To feel what we have spent a lifetime outrunning.
It is in the depths of ourselves that we learn true alchemy, transforming pain into wisdom, coming into deepest wholeness within ourselves.
An Ancient Story That Has Always Been Yours
Every woman who has ever lost something, a relationship, a sense of self, a version of the life she thought she was living, has walked an ancient path without knowing it. The heroines of mythology show us two ways into the underworld.
Persephone is taken.
Daughter of Demeter, Goddess of the harvest, she is gathering flowers in a meadow when the earth splits open and Hades, god of the underworld, pulls her below. She does not choose the dark. She is seized by it, ripped from the world she knew, from the mother who loved her, from the life that was hers, and finds herself in a realm she never asked to enter. This is the path of circumstance. Of being cracked open by what could not be controlled, the loss that arrives without warning, the grief that rewrites everything, the rupture that makes the life before it feel like another woman's story.
Inanna goes willingly.
Queen of Heaven and Earth, at the height of her power, she hears something rising from below, the wail of her exiled sister, and chooses to descend toward it. She unhooks herself from everything she has built and walks toward what she does not yet know, surrendering at each gate until she stands at the root of herself, stripped of everything she used to define her. This is the path of conscious descent. Of choosing to feel what has never been felt. To integrate what was never integrated.
Both paths lead to the same place: contact with the whole of who you are.
Three Ways To See The Story
The Myth
A Story Older Than Memory
Written in cuneiform on clay tablets around 2300 BC by Enheduanna, the world’s first named poet, the myth of Inanna is one of the oldest stories on earth. It was already ancient when it was written down.
What makes it live until today is not that it is about a Goddess. It is because it is about every woman who has ever felt the pull of something unmet in herself, something calling her to go where it is dark, where she cannot see the end, where she must surrender what she knows of herself to find what is more true. The story holds the whole arc: descent, death, waiting, and return. Nothing skipped. Nothing resolved too soon.
The retreat is a living walk through this myth, gate by gate.
The Psychology
The Two Sisters Are One Woman
Inanna and Ereshkigal were not always separate. In the beginning they were one, two aspects of the same wholeness. The split happened when the world chose Inanna and cast Ereshkigal into the dark.
Every woman carries both sisters within her.
Inanna is the self that was permitted to remain in the light: capable, radiant, the version of a woman the upper world celebrated.
Ereshkigal is everything that was sent underground: the grief, the rage, the wildness, the need, the desire, all the parts deemed too much, or not enough, to stay above.
The psychological work of this retreat is the journey of their reunion: the moment Inanna, stripped of everything, finally meets her sister face to face and recognizes herself. This is the work of reclaiming the exiled self and becoming whole.
The Body
Seven Gates, Seven Centres, Living inside of us
The ancient Sumerians mapped the descent through seven gates. The chakra tradition maps seven centres of living energy through the body. These maps, separated by centuries and cultures, describe the same territory.
At each gate, Inanna surrenders something, crown to crown chakra, earrings to third eye, necklace to throat, breastplate to heart, rod to solar plexus, hip girdle to sacral, robe to root. The body already knows this descent. It has been living it, in smaller and larger ways, all through a woman’s life.
The retreat moves through the body from crown to root, releasing what has been held there: the tension in the shoulders that is also a story, the constriction in the throat that is also a silenced truth, the weight in the belly that is also an unexpressed fire.
Somatic practice, journaling, movement, ceremony, and EFT work each gate from the inside.
The Journey
DAY 1 · Arrival
Arrival · Opening Ceremony · The Myth
We gather, we orient, we begin. The opening ceremony marks the threshold — the moment the descent becomes real.
The myth is introduced as a living map, not an intellectual exercise. The circle forms.
DAY 2 · The Upper Gates
Pattern & Belief Work · The First Gate (Control) · Somatic Practice · Sound Healing
We begin where every descent begins: with what we have constructed above ground. The beliefs, the patterns, the strategies that kept us safe. The first gate asks for the crown — what we have placed at the top of ourselves to feel sovereign, to feel in control. We feel the body’s response. Sound holds what words cannot.
DAY 3 · The Middle Gates
The Second Gate (Story & Illusion) · Breathwork · The Third Gate (False Voice) · The Fourth Gate (Armour)
We move deeper. The stories that shaped us. The voice that learned to speak only what was safe. The armour that formed, layer by layer, around the heart. Breathwork opens what the mind cannot reach. Each gate surrendered is something that was never truly ours to carry.
DAY 4 · The Lowest Gates
The Fifth Gate (Suppressed Emotions) · The Sixth Gate (False Identity) · Sunset Ceremony · The Seventh Gate (Self)
The deepest work. We reach the floor of the descent — the place where what was most exiled waits. The seventh gate asks for everything. The sunset ceremony holds the turning point: the moment the sisters finally stand in the same room. What happens here cannot be fully described. It needs to be met.
DAY 5 · The Return
Integration · Closing Ritual · Return
She does not rush back. The return is as sacred as the descent. We integrate — in the body, in the circle, in ceremony. The closing ritual marks the threshold of return. She walks out not as the woman who descended, but as the one who survived it.
A journey into the underworld is a journey into the self.
21st – 25th October 2026 · Viluz, Marbella, Spain