PERSEPHONE’S JOURNEY

Dear Friends,

The second talk, The Return, in the Demeter and Persephone series is this Friday, May 19th, 10 - 11am PST!

I hope you come and listen live or treat yourself to the recording. It will be good to take the opportunity to go inward, before the long out breath of summer.

In the first talk, we focused on the path of the Mother, of Demeter in the myth. In this next talk, we will focus on the path of the Daughter, of Persephone.

She is the one who is taken from the land of the living and travels to the land of the dead. She is the one who goes into the underworld and learns to live there. She is the one who eats the pomegranate seeds and weds herself forever to the underworld. Her journey is full of darkness, vulnerability, intuition, and knowing. It is difficult to be in the underworld. And yet, it is also the place of feeling and mystery as well as deep nourishment. This is one of the age-old and essential teachings of the Sacred Feminine that I want us to feel and know for ourselves.

In the ethos of the ancient ones for whom this story was sacred, Persephone and Demeter were two sides of the same woman, we could say. They represented a whole. How can we have life without death? How can there be spring without winter? How can we fall into the dark periods of our own lives and know that the time spent below are the very roots of what must grow?

It is deeply healing to follow the path of this daughter, not only because each of us is a daughter to a mother, but also because each of us is walking this life with this archetype in us—we are weaving between the two worlds, above and below; we are learning how to live and breath in the dark; and we are also learning what it means to come up from the depths of the earth and blossom.

Come and join us in this talk, and experience for yourself the strength and brilliance of Persephone. She is, after all, the Queen of the Underworld.

Here are some guiding thoughts that have been alive in me as I prepare to teach this work.

Can I source the courage and strength and patience to surrender to the stickiness of the underworld while also following the impulses that urge me both even deeper down and also those that urge me upward?

And when we go underground, into the underworld, what brings us up?

What is this that we call spring?

What of the dark do we carry with us as we emerge?

And lastly, and this is so poignant for us as women, once we are standing in the upper world, in the field of flowers the Great Mother has prepared in the joy of our arrival, can we dance among the field of beauty and know it as inseparable from our own exquisite blossoming?

Let’s see what this myth, this ancient wisdom - and our own deep knowing - show us.

Much love to each of you and hope to see you on Friday.

Jenny xxx

THE RECORDING OF THE FIRST TALK

Last month I told the beautiful, pre-hellenic, matrifocal story of Demeter and Persephone in a talk titled Leaving the Underworld. We had a wonderful group who participated live and others who listened to the recording.

One of the women said to me, “The myth is everything.” And it does feel this way to me too. This myth story has a magic way of meeting you exactly where you are. No matter where we are in our lives, we can find ourselves in the story. Myth as mirror.

This particular myth—with the lost daughter, the searching mother, the deep underworld journey for both women, one that ends in the jubilance of spring—contains the central archetypes for a woman’s on-going individuation process. Meaning, that embedded in this story are needed symbols and aspects of ourselves that can guide us into wholeness through the recovery of the sacred feminine in our lives. This is the ancient imprint of thousands of years of Feminine Wisdom, just as relevant now as it was then.

What is new and fresh about my telling is that we oriented the reading from the seat of Demeter, of the mother. We explored the gifts and insights that this myth has to offer us as modern women traversing our own underworlds: holding our grief, exploring our mother line, discovering the depths of our strength.

If you are interested in exploring this work with us, Leaving the Underworld was recorded. It’s one hour long, and the cost is $40 for the recording. As always, sliding scale option are available.

Sometimes it’s difficult for me to capture the essence of the work in emails like this. But below you will find women’s words and hear their voices and experiences with the myth. They were so kind to let me share here. Receiving their reflections over email these last weeks has been such a rich part of teaching this material, so personal, right to the heart. I continue to be deeply inspired by this work and all of you!

WOMEN’S WORDS

“Thank you for this dear Jenny. It was especially powerful/poignant to listen here, in the land where I grew up, literally in my brother's house. I have been wandering through places of my childhood, looking for traces of my mother, wanting to see her beyond the child of myself, remembering that I called for her and she didn't come, so I stopped calling. And now knowing that this silence held back the ripening of the mother inside me. And so it goes. She loved daffodils, and they are in bloom here now, even though the weather is unseasonably chilly. And I do feel something, some new understanding, blooming inside my heart, maybe not too late. No, never too late.”

"I was drawn to the exploration of the myth of the Underworld because of my longtime affinity with the part Persephone plays. But when I heard Jenny say that we were going to focus this time on the mother, Demeter, everything in my being said, "Yes." I had truthfully never considered what this figure had to offer and how I, now a mother myself, could relate so instinctively to her courage, unstoppable capacity to love, and desire to align myself and my daughter with the light.. What Jenny shared was so rich and reminds me how deep our lineage is as mothers... as old as the Goddess, herself."

“The workshop was transformational! Jenny's poetic retelling of this ancient myth made it more relevant and contemporary. Jenny is a true story teller, and healer. With her as a lifeline, I was able to travel down into the underworld of my own psyche, where I gathered a deeper understanding of me as mother, woman and daughter. What work could be more important!"

"These past few weeks I have experienced a growing sadness around my relationship with my Mother and a story has woven itself from what I have felt which is intrinsically intertwined with a memory and with this myth. When you spoke about the owls: "Then there was one dream where Persephone was that owl high in the tree calling for her mother.…I gasped for air. This is the place in your telling that tore at my heart. I have been that owl these past weeks, calling for my mother. But she does not hear me."

“I feel like we're touching upon the sacred feminine and exploring her darker sides in the midst of all that growth. I wanted to say thank you for such an inspiring workshop Jenny! I am so so grateful.”

“Today, as a mother, I do get most of the time with the boys, but I feel something akin to what my own mother felt when they spend their week with their dad. I worry about them, feel at a loss. I do feel the Demeter—mother archetype so embedded in my being.”

"I was not familiar with the story of Demeter and Persephone. I am not a writer. As Jenny guided us through the story, I was surprised to have my own mother forefront in my mind. She was not looking at me and my daughter, but I was looking through her eyes at us. What I realized is that her journey is my journey, is my daughter's journey…passing trauma, but also strength, through us.”