Soul Wandering in Hades
The hero’s journey is such a common motif in myth, and so widely referred to these days that it needs little explaining. As part of the spiritual awakening process, it’s the mechanism by which Spirit/soul/our Higher Selves initiates us into psychological and spiritual maturity. Pretty much anyone worth their spiritual salt has had to go through a phase like this in one shape or another.
That’s not to say you can’t get far from daily prayer and devotional practice, as many do across the world. Or from a life in an ashram. Or from studying sacred texts and going to meditation retreats in and around family commitments. You absolutely can and all those things matter.
But at some point something else happens and it might be in this lifetime, it might not be. It doesn’t matter. It happens in perfect timing for what your soul needs. And what that ‘else’ is, is an activation of deeper spiritual energies that changes the rules of your reality to the point where your daily routine is no longer feasible. It’s chaos entering the system to enable the upgrade. It’s the leaving the Shire, going down the rabbit hole, entering Hades... And it’s the end of life as you know it.
When someone in a reading is in this territory I can smell it. It’s not uncommon because I think that’s part of why people are drawn to work with me. It’s one of the bullets on my cosmic calling card. They’re usually terrified and don’t realise it – to them it feels like confusion, things not working out, things going wrong and not sure why. That’s why.
What it’s like
We can often get a few practice runs at this. Any period of crisis or transition in our lives carries this kind of quality to some extent or another. The death and rebirth. Shedding of an old identity and the gradual emergence of another. I had about 4 of them before the big one in my late thirties. There may be more, who knows. But no doubt you’ve been through it yourself and already know the score to some degree – the disorientation, the not-knowing. Having to let go of something that costs you. A job, marriage, a dream. There’s grief in it. There’s crisis. There’s a whole lot of time where it feels like nothing’s happening and it’s really uncomfortable. This is the format – the whole nigredo, albedo, rubedo arc of alchemy that has us severing our attachments, sorting out what’s ‘pure’, and reforming into something more whole on the other end.
When the big wave hits, you can either try and surf it, or resist. Of course it’s easy to sit in a chair and see the sense of trying to surf but in practice we have many parts of us that want none of it. How many unconscious blind spots we carry that will make excuses for why we can't take the trip or do the thing. I hear it too often. ‘My cat needs me’, ‘I have to finish this project at work’, ‘I don’t have the money’. All the lines we use to keep us safe and small.
I had enough of my own. It was covid, I’d lost my teaching work, my online eco-wellbeing business was picking up but would need a lot to make it financially viable, and the pressure was mounting. I played it cool but underneath I was panicking. I needed a radical shift. I/Spirit created a fork in the road: I was accepted to do a Masters in Environmental Policy at King’s College. That was my opt-out. I was dating an activist who lived in a van and showed me it was a feasible option to pack it all in and hit the road. That was my test. I’m glad I don’t know what the opt-out life was like. I don’t think I would have liked it very much. What soul wandering is like is choices like these. Not just once. Over and over. It’s seeing somewhere on the horizon that looks interesting and scary and deciding to jump the fence anyway.
The soul path is full of challenges and surprises both practical and emotional. It’s watching yourself in disbelief as you smash old limitations and come up against ones you never knew you had. Learning to drive a massive truck to the point where you can park it with finesse. But worrying about the weirdo with the black leather gloves parked overnight next to you and whether he might be a serial killer.
The point is it’s individual. Everyone’s journey is different and we’ll all have our own curriculum here. You don’t need a van. You don’t need to visit the places I, or anyone else, have written about. And you don’t need to drink ayahausca. When people get inspired or want to copy what I’m sharing with them a part of me winces on the inside. That’s missing the point. It’s about following your own path. That’s the way you open to the magic.
And it is indeed experiencing the genuine magic of existence rather than watching it on Netflix or thinking you’re having a good time because a magazine said you would. It’s the satisfaction of knowing your life is truly yours as much as it’s sitting on your own in a hotel room missing your best friend’s wedding, eating a takeout while you cry about your childhood. It will bring up the whole range of your emotional spectrum because that’s what’s necessary to bring you into wholeness. That’s what the process does.
What made it survivable
I wouldn’t have been ready for it before it happened. I needed a certain degree of maturity. I needed to have played out various things in my life – the life where I had all the luxury I wanted and wasn’t fulfilled, the successful career, the yoga teacher work that got more instagram likes than it ticked my spiritual boxes – those were the milestones I personally needed to hit in this life and they’re also the ones that prepared me for the journey.
My spiritual practice also made it survivable. Thousands of hours of training and practice in yoga and meditation had given me a way to relate to my emotions that was more empowered and skillful. I’d been reading a lot of depth psychology for the year preceding it as well, and that framework helped a lot. The tarot was also a huge support for me, and it also holds this journey within its structure.
The other thing a spiritual practice gives you that’s absolutely necessary is faith. It doesn’t need to be total faith. It certainly shouldn’t be blind. But there does need to be enough to get you started in the first place and to keep you going through the hard times. That’s faith in something greater, faith in yourself, faith in the process. The faith is something that builds over time. I’d say that’s a big part of what the process is doing – cultivating that very quality. By encountering the tests and seeing what’s on the other side, your faith becomes more and more unshakeable, which gives you a greater capacity to face greater tests. The willingness to engage is the point. Cultivating the courage. The rest is taken care of for you if you surrender and trust it.
Most practically, it was the vision quest work with Bell Selkie and Rebecca Card in the UK, reading Bill Plotkin’s books on Soul Initiation and managing the ‘Wild Mind’, and the follow up mentorship from Bell that really helped me stay on track. Trying to do that work alone is hard and you just don’t see your own blind spots. You need someone who gets it and has your back.
What to do if you’re in it
Read Plotkin, Hillman, and if you’ve got the time, Jung. Immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the work and study the map. Then get support. I’d say a soul mentor like the ones on Plotkin’s animasvalley.org website are great. Or a Jungian psychotherapist would hold that well. Get to know your parts and how they operate.
Find a spiritual practice and guide that works for you as well. At the very least steady mindfulness practice if you don’t already have one is a must just from a mental sanity point of view. If you’re not sure where to find one ask Spirit and that can be one of the things you’re guided to. It gives you something to orientate to as it’s a spiritual process not just a psychological one, which is why I include it here.
What I would caution is to be really mindful of its dictates: a lot of spiritual systems including yogic, Buddhist and Christian, or at least the way they are commonly taught, are deeply misaligned with their esoteric authenticity. That’s not to judge them or say they’re wrong for everyone. But it does mean they will be at odds with what the energy is trying to do in you. The force of evolution doesn’t give a shit about what some teacher in your local Buddhist center thinks – usually based on some adaptations that were introduced for social control in the 12th century, new age mis-interpretation, or whatever other distortions have crept in. If you tune in, you’ll be given the teacher/teachings you need for a while or for a certain thing without needing to give them too much of your overall spiritual bandwidth. Or you may be more like me and prefer to learn directly from the spirits.
And finally, I can support you through this as well — through readings, through energy and shamanic healing, and through my Guided Magick Work as the lotus of your path opens and blossoms.
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