4. Navigating the Darkness

In this chapter:

• Safety First

• Facing Challenging Experiences

• Meditation and Other Psychedelics

• Opening the Channels

• Protectors, Guides, and Higher Powers

• Two-Way Communication

• Meaningfulness

• Experimentation and Innovation

• Microcosms

• Paranormal Abilities

• Emptying Your Vessel

• Establishing and Maintaining Boundaries

Having surveyed the layers of the Below in the previous chapter, let’s introduce some practices that can be useful for navigating this territory. This chapter intentionally provides more of a macro-level overview of a wide range of practices, rather than a step-by-step guide to any specific techniques. Moreover, while trying to be as broad as possible, the discussion here is by no means comprehensive. For these reasons, I want to again recommend some of the books listed at the end of Chapter 2. Many of those titles have step-by-step descriptions that fill in the details and complement the discussion here.

Safety First

I like the concept of “spiritual sovereignty,” which I got from my friend Misha, who got it from the spiritual teacher Adyashanti. This means that no one else can decide what spiritual path is right for you, but also implies that you must accept the consequences of your own choices. The bottom line is that if you decide to engage the Below using practices such as the ones I identify in this chapter, you must accept that there are dangers and take full responsibility for what happens.

Navigating the Below is a high-risk activity, and there are no guarantees of safety. This process will demand that you fully surrender to your worst fears — to madness and even to death itself. You may feel like most of the time you’re walking blindfolded on a tightrope over a chasm without a net. During the Descent, you will be working out a huge load of your past karma, traumas, and complexes. This is messy work that will give rise to mental agitation, emotional turbulence, and general instability.

One important way to attend to your safety and wellbeing is to reach out for help and support when you need it. That support might take any number of forms. It might be a knowledgeable teacher or guide who you meet with on a regular basis. It might be connecting on an ad hoc basis with someone who seems like they might have something helpful to say about what you are going through right at the moment. It might be a group of like-minded spiritual travelers who are going through the Descent together.

Whatever form of support is most helpful and feels nurturing is probably right for you. If you ask me, though, you should seek out people who are deeply familiar with the kinds of experiences we’re talking about in this book. It makes no sense if you need help with your motorcycle to call a plumber. Likewise, it makes no sense if you need help with the Below to seek advice from an Above-based priest, monastic, or spiritual teacher. At best, their advice could be off-base, at worst, quite harmful. Another thing I would suggest is to seek out a range of different guides or supporters. Since experiences of the Below are so variable from person to person, it is often beneficial to hear from a wide range of opinions and perspectives.

Even while I am encouraging you to establish a network of support that works for you, it is crucial to guard against over-reliance on other people. Always remember that any kind of supporter who undermines your autonomy, integrity, or freedom as an individual agent — even if unintentionally — is counterproductive. Any kind of supporter who makes you feel unworthy or ashamed — even if unintentionally — is potentially damaging your process. It is equally harmful to place a supporter or guide on a pedestal, to see them as infallible, or to become infatuated with them. Don’t give away your power, energy, autonomy, or wholeness to others under any circumstances. Doing so may completely derail your process.

Another important safety concern is the need to ground yourself. Being familiar with grounding practices is a critical skill. It means that you have a tool at your disposal whereby you can soothe your system physically, mentally, and energetically. If yours is an authentic Descent into the Below, you will undoubtedly encounter moments in your journey where things get extremely difficult, out of control, or even completely terrifying. When those moments come, it will be too late to start learning to ground yourself then. You will find it far easier if you already have several grounding practices that you have been doing daily all along. That being said, if you’re already traversing the Below, your only choice may be to develop or strengthen your grounding practices as soon as possible.

Grounding means your mind relaxes, your energy level settles down, and your body sensations connect with gravity and the earth. Common grounding exercises include qigong, martial arts, yoga, breathwork, visualization, and many other traditional spiritual practices. Physical exercise — ranging from going for a gentle walk to heart-pounding interval training — is nearly always grounding. A Kundalini teacher I know advocates gardening, making pottery, and eating meat and heavier foods. Other people I know are into playing music, creating art, masturbation, salt baths, making physical contact with the earth, or lying down on it and visualizing themselves melting into the ground. Whatever works for you that down-regulates your system and gets you back into your body (particularly the lower portion of it) is grounding for you.

As you become adjusted to the Descent, you’ll find that you can “turn up and down the volume,” so to speak, on the intensity of your experiences. All the other practices I outline in this chapter help you to enhance your connection with the Below, but grounding is what smooths the ride. If things start moving too quickly, you can slow them down a bit by increasing the percentage of grounding you are doing. If it still feels like it’s too much, you can switch to doing 100% grounding for a while.

Here’s a story from Misha about how a grounding practice helped her to turn the volume down on an overwhelming spiritual experience that arose at an inopportune time:

A few months ago, I was coming back over the mountains after having done a retreat. There was inclement weather, and I was going up into elevation on a twisty road that had pretty steep drop-offs. It was probably not a good idea to drive with such low visibility and a slick highway!

As I drove, I had to stop a couple times because there was something going on inside of me. It looked like I was driving up into a cloud. Everything was so magical, so divinely beautiful. I don’t think it could have been more awesome. I felt this pressure building in my cardiac heart area, which turned out to be Christ energy expanding. Eventually, I pulled over and spent maybe 45 minutes there in my car, twitching and moaning, and like, you know, being Christ.

Eventually, it calmed down enough that I could get back on the road. And so I’m driving carefully and slowly and really glad there’s no one coming behind me tailgating or whatever. Then when I was maybe 20 or 30 minutes away from the first town, and I just had a cringing feeling like, “I just can’t go there.” It was almost like I can’t be in that energy of civilization.

Earlier I had passed this place where there were signs for a nature area or campground or something. And I was like, “Let me go back and pull off there.” As I’m on a narrow mountain pass, I’m literally driving in the middle of the road because the drop-off is too close to where my lane is. And the snow is coming down, sticking on the road. By this time, I’m not in the Christ experience anymore, I’m in the God experience. Everything is magnificent, you know, the snow, the air, the mountains, the drop-off, everything. When I reached a safe enough place, I parked my vehicle and just let that experience overtake me for another 45 minutes or so.

Finally, I’m like, “Okay, I only have so much gas in the vehicle. And I’m really not good to be alone in a car that I’m not sure I can keep warm when it’s snowing. And it’s going to get colder tonight, so there is an actual real danger of freezing.”

Fortunately, there was cell service. So I called my Tibetan Buddhist temple, the local place. And I get their office manager administrative person. Now, a qualification for that position is that they have to be devoted to the rinpoche’s teachings and be skilled with all kinds of states, because she’s the point of contact when there’s in-person retreats, and people are going to be going through all kinds of stuff.

So I told her, “I’m having some kind of awakening experience, very blissful, but still, I’m not able to be functional, to do what I need to do. I’m in the mountains, it’s snowing, I need to get myself home.” And so what she suggested I do was to breathe in and out of the hara. And she asked, “Do you have a chant?” I said, “White Tara always works for me.” And she’s like, “Great, do that.”

So that’s what I did, and I was able to get home in one shot. I practiced this intensive grounding continuously for like another 50-60 minutes while driving. And I didn’t get hijacked either by bliss or by cringing. It kept me present and focused and grounded in my body and in ordinary reality. I wasn’t overtaken either by the blissful God experience or being unable to navigate through the places that energetically felt yucky. It gave me some space from the awakening process that was happening, which I needed because I wasn’t in a setting where it was safe to just surrender to that completely.

To me, Misha’s drive home from the retreat is a good metaphor for the whole journey through the Below. You’re headed off into the unknown along a treacherous mountain road with steep drop-offs. There will be tremendous ups and downs, intensely blissful and unpleasant experiences at every turn. You’ll probably find yourself to be overwhelmed, and even incapacitated at times. There’s a real chance you won’t make it back home in one piece unless you can ground yourself when you need to.

In Misha’s case, she was lucky to have cell service and the presence of mind to call for help when she needed it. But what if her phone didn’t work? It would be much better to already have that grounding practice in your toolbox, part of your regular repertoire of practices, wouldn’t you agree?

Facing Challenging Experiences

The Descent into the Below is a descent into the unconscious portions of the psyche. Or rather, it’s an explosion of the unconscious portions of the psyche out into consciousness. It’s as if Pandora’s Box were opened and all the hidden contents of the mind — the sublime, the beautiful, the shadows, and the nightmares — all came flooding out. Among these contents, be prepared for difficult memories and traumas of all kinds to emerge. Some of these traumas will be expected. If you are entirely honest with yourself, you knew they were hidden away in there all along. Others will take you completely by surprise — memories that were completely repressed, or that you thought you had already worked through. The point is that every last vestige of unconscious pain simply must be reckoned with.

When challenges arise in the process of Descent, there are two different approaches one may take, which I refer to as the masculine and the feminine. (I know that these binary gendered terms are going to be off-putting for some people. If they are bothersome to you, please just replace them as you read with yang and yin, or any other terms you like. In my case, as a cisgendered heterosexual male who is deeply in love with a whole retinue of goddesses and other feminine spirit guides, it feels natural and important to refer to my approach in feminine terms.)

What I call the masculine approach represents the typical advice given in Buddhist and Advaita circles (Above-based traditions not coincidentally dominated by male spiritual heroes and teachers). This is to hold difficult experiences in one’s awareness until they dissolve or resolve. In the Theravada Buddhist meditation retreats where I spent much of my 20s, the instructions were phrased more or less as follows: “These afflictions are simply unpleasant body sensations; they are impermanent. Observe them with equanimity and they will pass away.” Advaita teachers I have heard, on the other hand, have tended to give an inquiry question like “To whom are these unpleasant experiences arising anyway?” or an instruction like “Experience yourself as the awareness that contains all experiences.”

These kinds of approaches are paradigmatic of Above-style spirituality: by holding the mind steady in a state of higher consciousness, all Maras can be vanquished. One’s mind is purified of these “defilements,” as they put it in Buddhism, or purified of “sin” as the Christians say.

On the other hand, the feminine approach is for difficult memories, traumas, and other challenges to be seen, recognized, and eventually even welcomed into the wholeness of your being. In order to start to do this, you must surrender to them, sink down into them, and deeply feel them. On the surface, it may look like the practitioner is doing the same thing as in the masculine approach: sitting with the experience and waiting for it to resolve itself. However, the attitude is completely different. Rather than objectifying the negative experience, disidentifying from it, reframing it, staying aloof from it, or observing it dispassionately, the feminine approach is to fully invite it in without any resistance and allow it to totally eviscerate you.

Think back to the two versions of the Buddha myth with which I started this book. In the traditional story, the Buddha is the archetypal masculine spiritual hero. He is strong, resolute, equanimous, determined, unshakable, and in control. In my recasting of the story, however, I replaced these attributes with their feminine counterparts. I made the Buddha vulnerable, emotional, relational, and surrendering. I made that change for this book because, while masculine approaches to spirituality can be quite effective in the Above, I have learned that the best way to navigate an Awakening from Below is to totally and utterly embrace the feminine.

To illustrate how this principle applies in real life, let me tell you a story about something that happened to me when I was somewhat early in my own journey into the Below. One of my kids was having a surgery to correct a congenital condition. It was not a life-threatening situation, but it was a major procedure. Although up to that point in my awakening process I had been very comfortably ensconced in the Above, with a high degree of equanimity and very little emotion arising other than tranquility, I noticed that I was feeling some trepidation about her safety and wellbeing when undergoing such a procedure. As she was wheeled into the operating room to go under the knife, I closed my eyes and tuned into my body sensations. A tremendous amount of anxiety suddenly welled up in the form of sharp little waves of sensation fluttering about in my body. These sensations were surprising and uncomfortable, and I noticed an impulse to recoil away from them.

Now, my years of mindfulness training had prepared me for precisely this moment. I knew that the “proper” thing to do with this kind of conditioning (or, as we dismissively called it in my Buddhist circles, “attachment”) was to dispassionately and analytically dissect the sensations that were appearing. To observe where they began and where they finished, their temperature, the speed of their oscillation, how they changed over time, and other details. I knew the teaching was to neutrally note these qualities as they were arising, seeing that all of it was an impermanent cloud of impersonal, transitory phenomena. I had done that many times in the past, and that’s what I “should” have done now.

But, as I sat there, something led me to just surrender instead of trying to observe, and to let the sensations completely take over my being. Among the sharp and prickly feelings of anxiety and the impulse to recoil, I now also felt my displeasure at the whole experience, my frustration with having to feel these sensations, and a tension in my chest that felt like sadness or like I wanted to cry. All of this swelled and churned like waves in the ocean during a storm. I felt gutted, like I was completely falling apart.

This went on for a while — perhaps 20 or 30 minutes — and somehow I just sat there surrendering to what was happening and sinking down into all of it. After a time, though, I noticed the sensations changing. The sharpness and prickliness seemed to give way to something more gentle. Just then, in a surprisingly sudden shift, it was like the ocean of sensation that was so uncomfortable in my chest area suddenly dissolved into a warm glow. It was precisely the feeling that I remembered from when my daughter was a toddler years ago, and I used to pick her up and hold her to my chest to comfort her when she was crying. I could feel her little warm body pressed against mine, and at the same time, a kind of outward extension of bittersweet tenderness from my heart area.

Feeling like I was actually holding her in my arms right that moment, I sensed a deep connection with her, like I was somehow sharing the trauma her unconscious body was undergoing in the operating room. I understood then that the anxiety I had felt earlier — while it may have felt cold, sharp, and unpleasant — was really just a form of love in disguise. I also understood that my vulnerability to be able to suffer so deeply out of love was not a problem — it was actually one of the most beautiful and important parts of my humanness. Pain, suffering, and vulnerability can be welcomed as part of the whole.

Do you recognize the similarities between the story I just told and my revised version of the Buddha myth in the preface? That shift from masculine to feminine is precisely the way to access the elixirs of the Below, no matter which Mara we are facing. I could never have discovered these elixirs if I had approached my experience using the techniques my mindfulness training had taught me. If I had exercised a detached posture toward my experience of anxiety, I could certainly have strengthened my equanimity, my appreciation of impermanence, and my resolve in the face of suffering. However, by surrendering to the anxiety instead, I found the blessings of vulnerability, connection, love, and tenderness lying at the core of an unpleasant yet entirely human experience. Different approaches, different elixirs.

The realization I had on that day was highly impactful for me, and from that point onwards, I applied that same feminine response to all of my weird and difficult experiences as I Descended further and further into the Below. Rather than observing these experiences with Above-based techniques, I relaxed, let go, and let them into my being. Sooner or later (sometimes much later!), I always got similar results. Some of these experiences took longer than others to sit with and fully digest; a few I had to come back to again and again for months or even years. But if there ever were any challenges or difficulties in my process of Descent, it was always only because I hadn’t yet managed to fully surrender.

Now, the advice I would have been given by my Above-based teachers about all of those experiences would have been that they are just clusters of impermanent phenomena, which I should equanimously observe and allow to pass away. Such things are distractions or delusions, they would have said; don’t get involved. If you have a lot of training in the techniques of Above-based spirituality, your ego will probably try to establish a sense of normalcy by falling back on that kind of advice. However, if you are encountering difficulties in the process of Descent, retreating into the aloofness and equanimity of Above is simply not going to work for you in the long run.

That being said, you can’t retreat into the Middle either. Don’t cling to the tools of conventional psychology, biology, neuroscience, or other knowledge systems of the Middle to try to explain the Below in a linear way. Undoubtedly, again, your ego will attempt to do this in order to tell itself that everything is okay. But, don’t allow your mind to settle on straightforward explanations or fixed notions of reality. When the ego struggles to explain what’s happening, just drop the effort to understand and surrender to fully feeling the experience instead. Sink down into experiencing whatever is going on, up close and intimately, in all of its gory detail.

Suspending your attempts to explain or understand, as well as your familiar tools and techniques, will likely make you feel naked, alone, vulnerable, or terrified. Surrender to those feelings as well, feeling them fully as they arise. If you need help with surrendering, try a surrender prayer or mantra. I wrote this one spontaneously one day, and used it daily for many months as I circled around the Abyss:

Divine Mother,
I surrender to your grace.
Embrace me, keep me safe, teach me.
I am yours.

I found that these words helped ease my mind. One of the reasons that I think this mantra worked well for me is that it set up a situation that I call “surrender by proxy.” For me, the Descent was at many points so harrowing that it seemed impossible for me to surrender to it directly. Instead, I decided to place my trust and faith in the hands of the divine mother in all of her forms (María, Quan Yin, Sol, Bachué, and all the rest). Whereas I could not manage to surrender myself to the Abyss, I found that I could surrender totally to her, trusting that she would guide and protect me. Of course, as I mentioned in the Abyss section of the previous chapter, you eventually have to let go of all crutches and pass through the Abyss naked and alone. But, I found that surrender by proxy eased my approach and gave me more confidence as I came near.

While I will present a lot of other practices in this chapter, I would say that, ultimately, the only thing you need to do to successfully navigate the challenges of the Below is simply this attitude of surrender. If you’re encountering the effects of trauma lurking in your body or your energy system is ravaged and battered, surrender to whatever is happening. If you see visions of dark threatening entities or find yourself in the underworld being torn into pieces, surrender to the experience. Faced with existential terror, madness, or the fear of annihilation, surrender to all of it, without exception. If you fully surrender to the Below, it will eventually reveal its gifts.

(That being the case, remember what I said above about grounding, specifically how it can provide a counterbalance to surrender. Learning how to pendulate between the acceleration of surrender and the self-care of grounding is a crucial skill that will ensure your safety throughout the Descent.)

Meditation and Other Psychedelics

The chief way that we can court the Descent, invite the Below to become more manifest in our lives, deepen our experience of it, and eventually discover its elixirs, is to break down the protective wall built by the ego-self in an attempt to keep us safe. I imagine that most readers of this book have already entered into an awakening process of some kind or another, or at least have tasted enough to know that those walls the ego perpetually keeps us ensconced in can at times be lowered. Sometimes this happens spontaneously, sometimes intentionally; sometimes it’s over in a flash, sometimes it lasts for a long time.

However it happens, the lowering of the ego’s reality-walls opens up an infinite number of possibilities for how reality is experienced or how it manifests. You might already be quite familiar with practices that can reliably drop the wall and allow you to experience the Above — perhaps techniques that elicit awareness, spaciousness, emptiness, bliss, tranquility, or something similar. One of the most significant lessons in one’s Descent is discovering what kinds of tools or practices allow the Below to manifest.

I like to refer to such ego-wall-lowering techniques as psychedelic. Etymologically speaking, this word includes the Greek for “mind” or “soul” (psyche) and for “visible” or “manifest” (dêlos). So, a psychedelic could be anything that makes the deeper aspects of the psyche visible or manifest. Everyone will, of course, think of psychedelic drugs first. Personally, I have only done psychedelic drugs a few times — in college and for recreational purposes — and I quickly decided that it wasn’t for me. But, my studies of the use of hallucinogenics among shamanic cultures and conversations with some psychonaut friends has led me to have an appreciation for how powerfully these substances can knock down that reality-wall and evoke profoundly imaginal experiences.

However, while psychedelic drugs can reliably breach the ego’s defenses, I would strongly urge caution because these drugs are potentially unreliable in what kind of experience they plunge you into on the other side of that wall. As a beginner using such drugs, there’s often no telling what will happen. You might be thrust into an experience of the Above or the Below, you might experience extreme bliss or terror, you might experience sublime spiritual states or hellish nightmares. Drug-induced psychedelic states can potentially be therapeutic, but they can also cause irreparable psychological trauma to the journeyer.

Thankfully, with the clinical usage of these compounds in therapeutic environments, we have found that the nature and intensity of psychedelic experiences can be much better controlled with careful attention to “set and setting.” Even so, in speaking with friends who engage regularly with psilocybin, ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, MDMA, and related substances to periodically propel themselves beyond the reality-wall for purposes of spiritual growth, they invariably tell me that their psychedelic sessions are unpredictable and that they need to do a ton of other practices in between sessions in order to integrate their experiences.

If after careful considerations of the risks you decide to use psychedelic drugs to enhance your experience of the Below, then that’s your own choice. Remember the principle of spiritual sovereignty. Fortunately, however, there are plenty of psychedelic practices (to use the more expansive definition of the term) that don’t involve drugs of any kind. Many of these practices are long-established parts of certain religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions, and many of them are already well known in contemporary Western spiritual circles.

On the more intensive end of the spectrum are practices that normally take place within retreat settings, including fasting, vision quests, meditation retreats, long-term sensory deprivation (e.g., so-called “dark retreats”), and so forth. Such intensive experiences can produce visions, revelations, and mystical experiences that are every bit as powerful as any drug. These also have the same downsides of being potentially unpredictable and overwhelming. Again, if you decide to engage in intensive practice in retreat settings, do so with discretion, under skillful supervision, and paying close attention to grounding and integration.

However, there are also many highly psychoactive techniques that can be practiced more regularly as part of your daily routine, which means that, on the whole, they will be more easily integrated. I’m thinking here of all sorts of different meditations, breathwork, mantras, yoga, qigong, visualization, prayer, active imagination, automatic writing, dream journaling, lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, drumming, dance, ecstatic movement, and other trance-inducing techniques. When practiced in high daily doses, these can be every bit as psychedelic as drugs or retreats, and your experiences can also be just as powerful. When practiced in more moderate “dosages,” these can be safer and easier to integrate than the more intensive options. If your daily dosage drops even lower, these practices may become inert, devoid of any kind of psychedelic power at all. In my view, this flexibility is a great advantage. Particularly when combined with grounding practices, this gives you some power to control the intensity of the experiences you are cultivating.

During my three-year Awakening from Below process (which, again, should not be thought of as normative), I figured out which practices worked for me personally and administered them at the maximum dose that I could handle in order to maintain a high psychedelic intensity. In general, I practiced about 4.5 to 5 hours per day of a blend of seated meditation, walking meditation, yoga, qigong, and drumming-assisted visualization. This schedule allowed me to immerse myself in the Below while also maintaining healthy integration with the everyday life of family, work, and other obligations. I continually tweaked the blend of practices as my experiences shifted, and occasionally backed off when I wanted to more carefully navigate difficult territory.

What works for you, no doubt, will be different than what worked for me. My main advice is to always prioritize integration and balance. If you’re ever feeling like things are unsafe or unsustainable, back off and increase your practice of grounding. In a pinch, it is always a good idea to take a break from all psychedelic practices altogether, and to prioritize grounding until you get your footing back.

Opening the Channels

Whatever psychedelic practices you are using, if you wish to enhance and deepen your experiences of the Below, my advice is to work on opening up as many of your sensory channels to it as you can. For whatever reason, different people seem to have natural aptitudes for engaging with certain kinds of sensory stimuli while others remain relatively underdeveloped. In my case, my sense of vision and body sensations were naturally my strongest channels. For me, that meant that the whole range of imaginal experiences, energy flows, spirit visitations, and other aspects of the Below manifested most clearly as visionary and tactile experiences.

My visions began spontaneously. As I lay in bed before sleep one night, I started to have what I can only describe as a dream-like experience while I was still awake. The imagery was extremely vivid: I saw my body surrounded by an energetic egg of white light, which in turn was lying in the coils of a black snake. I could see the eyes of the snake, and the details of the coils quite clearly with eyes closed, although it would disappear if I opened my eyelids. From this initial event, I went on to have a great number of vividly real and profoundly meaningful visions — several per day — throughout the rest of my sojourn in the Below.

Almost all of these visions were accompanied by body sensations. These could be subtle, such as a general feeling of warmth or safety, or quite strong, such as a rush of fear or sexual energy. Over time, I realized that certain configurations of body sensations were associated with certain spirits, guides, or other imaginal entities I was seeing in my visions. For example, there was the spirit of an old indigenous South American woman that appeared to me visually, always accompanied by a feeling of weight on my back like I was carrying a backpack. There was the black jaguar spirit that felt like a rush of fear up the left back side of my body that sprang out in front of me from my left shoulder. There was a blonde angelic feminine figure whose presence I could feel walking alongside my right side, and whose hair sometimes would glance my cheek.

What I didn’t experience with any clarity was auditory signals. Only twice did I hear a voice clearly saying something to me. But other people are different, reporting frequent auditory communications in words or celestial music or other sounds. Here is how Jack, for example, talks about his interactions with his guides:

In terms of connecting with guides or spiritual beings, it started when I was asking myself questions, and I noticed that my head was either nodding or shaking in response to those questions. And then I realized that my body was being used by higher beings to answer the questions of my mind. I asked, “Are these my guides?” And then my head starts nodding. My mind was blown.

And then I asked a question, “What is the purpose of my life?” And the answer came through. I would say it was the auditory sense, but I wouldn’t even describe it as words. It was a felt sense, which could be interpreted into words. And the words were “You are to be a teacher and leader of man. You’re here to save humanity.” And it came from this place of utter peace, and truth and sincerity. There was no hint of ego or anything; it was just pure.

As time went on, I developed these auditory connections with spiritual beings where I would hear their voice inside my mind. You know, people talk about their mind’s eye; it was like my mind’s ear. Sometimes they’ll send me images, or I’ll close my eyes. And it’s like I’m watching a movie; I’ll just be experiencing all this stuff. And they’ll just explain things to me through that.

And on rare occasions, maybe only two or three times, I’ve heard an actual auditory sound in the room. And every time it’s the Morrigan. And there’ll be her talking to me, you know, I’ll hear her saying my name in the room.

But it’s mostly a feeling sense that could be interpreted into words. And that’s a fascinating form of communication. It’s almost like it’s 10 times the speed of speaking. So it’s like these waves of energy moving back and forth. And so you can have these like massive resolutions and insights and all sorts of stuff, in a super short period of time.

The main advice I want to share here is to start with the sensory channels that naturally seem to be the most open, and take steps to enhance those. If you naturally start to see visions, then perhaps you should move your practice time into a darkened environment where you can more readily see them. (I moved my morning practice from the back deck to my dark basement for exactly this reason.) If you naturally are prone to bodily sensations, then perhaps do some kind of practice that will enhance your receptivity to them. (For me, I discovered that repetitive movement practice such as qigong or ecstatic dancing was most effective.) If you are receiving auditory messages, then maybe you need to work more with sound. (That may perhaps mean moving to a totally silent practice space, or chanting out loud, or singing bowls, or some other kind of sound-based practice.)

Once you have figured out how to maximize the channels that come to you naturally, you can then turn to developing the ones that don’t. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to how to enhance sensory channels. For me, I found that I could enhance my auditory channel by ringing a bell and listening to shamanic drumming as part of my daily practice. I also found that the smell of burning tobacco, perfume, and other aromatic offerings had an evocative sensory effect. I am not telling you what to do specifically, but rather suggesting that you consciously pay attention to how the practices you are engaged in affect the sensory channels, and see if you can find a combination of set, setting, and technique that enhances the clarity and quality of the messages you are receiving. Whatever the specific details, the goal is to create imaginal experiences that you tangibly see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. Immersive multi-sensory experiences that are manifesting across as many sensory dimensions as you can manage will have a notable effect on strengthening and deepening your experience of the Below.

Over time you’ll create strong associations between certain sensory cues and certain experiences of the Below. Here’s Misha talking about the benefits of a multisensory immersive practice:

My primary, low hanging fruit sense modes are tactile — which is the whole body, not just surface — and I tend to get a lot of visuals. And then there’s felt sense stuff, which I’m not sure if that’s exactly just body or energy or what. Into that, I have introduced scent. I have medicine objects like specific stones, little bear fetishes, a twig from my ash tree outside. Of course, there is music, instrumentals, songs, and chants. On the more tactile end, a teddy bear that’s soft, so my system is like, “Ohhh… soothing… soft…” and that’s combined with my image of Bear as protector. And then darkness and posture.

And, if I’m wanting to enrich things, I also pay attention to multi-modality: using thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, desires, and actions. The more immersive my experiences, the more richness. When processes show up spontaneously at a low level of intensity, it can be much easier for me to just disregard them and not actively engage. However, more active engagement enriches the experiences. And the more full and intense they are, and the more any particular element is repeatedly included, then there’s this wonderful byproduct or associated effect of cueing the nervous system to a pay attention to that kind of information in the future. Even if there’s not conscious attention being paid, the nervous system is paying attention to things in the environment.

The more you enrich it and the longer it lasts, the more it installs, the more deeply the system is sinking into the experience. The nervous system learns this, and then these specific sensory elements can later act as cues to prep the system to say, “I’m going into this state, or I’m doing this kind of work, or I’m going to engage in whatever.”

Protectors, Guides, and Higher Powers

I was lucky that, when my Descent began, I was almost immediately introduced to Bachué. Thus, my journey into the Below began with a positive and empowering encounter. The fact that I was having such a vivid vision of this goddess was bizarre, and her half-demonic appearance was disconcerting to be sure. But, I had no doubt that the content of the vision was beneficent and supportive, and that allowed me to more easily accept and embrace what was happening.

My friend Lisa also experienced a spontaneous encounter with the beneficent and helpful masculine presences of God and Jesus right at the beginning of her process:

I think that my whole life I felt very misunderstood. That’s been a big theme for me. Once, I felt like everyone was watching me and laughing at me, and I was feeling so horribly embarrassed. I lay in my bed and I was just feeling really small, and all of a sudden, it was just immediate that God and Jesus were here. It was a knowing with my whole experience, an emotional knowing where everything just clicked in. I knew it was them, and I knew that we were all merged. Everything couldn’t be more perfect, you know, just amazing.

I felt it physically that there was this masculine energy just coming behind me and holding me, supporting me, comforting me, and offering me this soothing newness when I felt so alone. It felt completely real. Actually, it kind of scared me a little bit because it literally felt like a physical person by me, like actual physical touch.

I was never raised religious or anything like that, but I feel that energy all the time now. And I feel them a lot when I walk, like somebody next to me. Towards the end, Jesus has been coming in and teaching me different things. And then, recently, he told me to see all men as him. And, he’s been giving me like hints and clues about how to open myself more or how to go deeper into the awakening. It’s been a communication for myself only, just the opening of energetic space. It’s passive, but it’s also active. It’s a total allowance, opening and just allowing. That’s how I kind of describe it.

Other people are not so fortunate as Lisa and I, and may spend time struggling alone in the Below without any helpful beings who can provide guidance. For this reason, I think that finding a beneficial higher power is a top priority. The Below is a dark and fearsome place, but a powerful and compassionate being can hold your hand and light the way as you traverse the underworld.

If you don’t currently have a guide, who can you call upon to be one? There is no one right answer, no single highest being that is a good fit for everyone’s unique imaginal configuration. The right answer is to reach out to whoever will work for you. If you’re unsure, one exercise I sometimes suggest people do is what I call the “crashing plane thought experiment.” Imagine or visualize that you are flying in a plane when suddenly both engines fail. You start plummeting to the ground, and there is no chance of survival. If this were to actually happen to you, in that minute or so that you have left to live before the plane meets its fiery end, who would your desperate heart spontaneously call out to for help? Who might possibly have the power to perform a miracle? Who would you wish to hold your hand as you die?

If there’s someone who comes to mind while doing this thought experiment, then try calling out to that being for help in the Below. If it’s not a particular entity, but an abstract quality such as Truth, Love, or Compassion, then go ahead and use that. However, if nothing in particular comes to mind, then you can also just make a general call. In one of your practice sessions, when you have built up some psychedelic momentum and your sensory channels feel particularly open, try asking for a higher power to make themselves available to you.

Who will hear your call and emerge as your helper(s) may not be possible to guess beforehand. Remember the story I told about how I automatically assumed that my guides would be Asian deities, and how I initially rejected outright the idea of working with María? Since that time, I have also developed a close relationship with the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Quan Yin. But I also am very intimate with the radiant Pagan sun goddess Sol, who I had never even heard of before she appeared to me. A whole panoply of other guides, including angelic feminine goddess figures as well as power animals, have all become a regular part of my imaginal world, but I would never have guessed that they would play such a central role. Remember also Jack’s story about initially misunderstanding Kali’s intentions to nourish him due to her frightful appearance. My point is simply that help may come in the form you least expect, so don’t reject whatever guidance comes to you just because it doesn’t fit with your expectations.

That being said, you don’t want to just jump into a relationship with a powerful being willy nilly. My suggestion is to make the call for a higher power and see who shows up. When they do, if they are a being of light that is universally recognized as beneficial — a Buddha or bodhisattva, Jesus, Virgin Mary, a Hindu deity, Ramana Maharshi, etc. — then you can trust them.

But, what if the being who answers your call is not one you recognize? In this case, I would advise that you spend some time asking them questions. Who are they? What kinds of energy do they embody? What kinds of values do they stand for? Is there another being standing behind them that is even more powerful? If so, what are their qualities? Also an important question to ask any being is will you be able to “break up” with them if things don’t work out? (The answer better be yes — no truly beneficial being will require vows of fidelity or other kinds of obligations.)

Take a few days and do some research, or return to ask them more questions and get an increasingly better feel for who this being is. Only when you’ve fully vetted them and feel very confident should you let them into your life and let them advise you on your journey. And, once you do, remember you are spiritually sovereign and don’t ever let anyone — no matter who they are — force you into something that isn’t right for you. Your relationship with a higher power guide or protector should always feel beneficial, supportive, and empowering. You should never feel like you have taken on the inferior role in an asymmetrical relationship, or like you have lost any of your autonomy. A true guide or protector strengthens and nourishes your boundaries and personal power, never depletes or diminishes them.

As you dwell in the Below, you will continue to meet more and more beneficial beings who can serve different types of functions in your journey. Some of these will be more powerful than others. In my case, María, Quan Yin, and Sol are at the apex. For me, they are all actually manifestations of different facets of the Mother, by which I mean the absolute highest, most sacred and holy goodness in the cosmos. In addition to them, various ancestral and animal spirits provide specific types of assistance. The jaguar helps with journeys into the underworld; the owl with death and ghosts; one ancestral guide with absorbing troubles and generating blessings; another with enhancing my perception of the imaginal; and many others. Each one of these beings has their own particular potencies, and are called forth to meet particular circumstances. Bachué, my body deva, is the overall container or embodiment for all of these beneficial powers, the vehicle by which their blessings come out into the world. Of course, your pantheon and how you see them fitting together will be totally different than mine. As it should be. Since no two of us are exactly the same, no two imaginal worlds will line up perfectly eye-to-eye!

Once you’ve worked with your guides for a while and have developed deeper trust in them, it may be symbolically and emotionally significant to make a commitment to them in some way. Here’s Jack’s story of how he got a tattoo as an act of commitment to his dragon guides:

This tattoo was kind of like a blessing and imbuing of the quality of the Dragon into me, into my skin. It was like a sign of my commitment to the dragons.

I’ll often channel them and they’ll say things to me like “Our greatest obstacle in supporting you is you. You know, it’s humans resisting us and preventing us from being able to support them because humans subconsciously believe that they have to do everything by themselves, and don’t realize that they’re part of this cosmos, which is a single living being. We can do a lot of the work for you, if you allow us to, and us doing it for you is the cosmos doing it for itself.”

And I’d share those ideas with others and the words would flow through me, and it would feel so right and so true. But then when it came down to it in my life, I wasn’t letting the dragons do that; I resisted them; I assumed I have to do everything by myself and that I couldn’t call on them to support me. So even I didn’t actually fully trust them and wasn’t fully committed to our relationship.

So I got this tattoo as a symbol of my commitment. And now I can feel the connection growing stronger. I can kind of feel it on my skin, almost like the dragon energy is moving through me. And the dragons have told me how they are like arteries that flow the Kundalini, the lifeblood of the cosmos, through your body. And the dragon looks like he’s made of ink that’s flowing up my arm in that way. So, getting the tattoo made us come closer, and it was meaningful on many different levels.

Two-Way Communication

The Below is inviting you into a two-way relationship. Images, symbols, energies, and entities are communicating messages to you, but the Descent is not a passive process where you kick back and watch it unfold like a movie; it’s an immersive world where you are invited (and, indeed, sometimes forced) to fully participate.

There are a number of tips I can give you to help you to engage in two-way dialogue in order to enrich your immersion and deepen your communication. First and foremost, I’ll say that you should avoid interacting with the imaginal in ways that attempt to immediately interpret the mystery or collapse it into some kind of explanation. Note the difference between the following two scenarios:

First, an example of how to shut down or stifle the imaginal by leaping to conclusions. Imagine an angelic feminine form made of radiant light emerges to you in a vision. She exudes joy, safety, and warmth, and you feel an intense attraction to her. When you emerge from your session, you jump online and do image searches for blonde goddesses. You discover a Norse goddess named Freyja who is said to be the goddess of love, and conclude that your vision must be a premonition of a new romantic adventure on the horizon.

Here’s the second scenario, which is what actually happened when this feminine form appeared to me. The first time she visited, I spent a good amount of time just basking in her presence, feeling the emotions and the body sensations she elicited in me. At the end of the session, I thanked her for coming to me and invited her to return if she wished to. And she did. At one point, after she had appeared to me a few times, I did some preliminary internet research, and I noted a number different goddesses blonde hair. While I thought that she might be Freyja, because of the sensations of love and attraction, I didn’t want to settle on that interpretation without more evidence.

Over time, this anonymous angelic figure appeared to me more often. I found her incredibly alluring, and wanted to engage with her more directly. So, in one drumming and spontaneous movement session, I opened up my visual and body-sensation channels and invited her into the space. I then stood silently, listening, watching, and feeling for a response. When I felt her presence emerge, I decided I would ask her for her name. I spoke out loud into the darkness of the practice area in my basement: “Freyja.” I didn’t feel anything change or shift. I repeated again, “Freyja.” Still nothing.

I guessed that her name wasn’t Freyja after all. Undaunted, I decided to go through the names of some of the other goddess names I had researched:

“Frija”… nothing.
“Figg”… nothing.
“Ēostre”… nothing.
“Olwen”… nothing.
“Sunne”… nothing.
“Sol” …

I kid you not, the instant I spoke that name (which means “sun” in Latin), a bright sun ray suddenly pierced through the single tiny window in my basement and streamed into the practice space. Whereas the whole place had been dark just a second ago, the rug I was standing on was now lit up with this sunbeam. I felt the goddess’s presence fill my body more strongly than ever, an almost orgasmic sensation of bliss. Then, I heard her speak to me:

“Sol,” she said… “Sol. Sol. Soul.”

At that moment, the full meaning of her identity dawned on me (pun intended). She was a vision of the radiant light of my own soul, appearing to me in the shape of Sol, the Pagan goddess of the sun. My life was never the same after this revelation, and she has been a constant companion and reminder of my own divine essence.

I hope that these two scenarios clearly illustrate the difference between the kinds of actions that collapse the meaning of an imaginal event into a simplistic conclusion, versus those that invite more intimacy and relationality. I also hope to somehow convey the richness of the relationship you can have with the imaginal world if you focus on developing the two-way conversation instead of on “solving the mystery” or “figuring out what it all means” in a linear way. I never could have arrived at the complexity of this vision of Sol by simply jumping to my own conclusions. I needed to let this imaginal being in, to get to know her by feel, to invite her into a conversation, and to allow a powerful synchronicity to take place in order for the full symbolic and emotional power of this imaginal vision to unfold. It required patience, time, curiosity, and presence to come to fruition.

Actually, though, the underlying principle is not all that complicated. Perhaps we could just say that the best advice is to simply to treat imaginal beings as you would human people you encounter in ordinary life. If you met someone new that you were intrigued by, would you turn away from them in order to Google them on your phone and then make up your mind about who they are, or would you spend a little time chatting face to face in order to get to know them?

In the previous example, I had a two-way conversation with an imaginal being using words. But another really effective way of creating bidirectional communication with the imaginal world is to engage in physical acts of exchange. For me, the most effective way of doing that is to give offerings to specific entities, or groups of them, and to ask for blessings or other messages in return. But what do you offer to spirits?

When I first started out, I only gave two kinds of offerings: lighting candles and burning incense. This was because these two are extremely common offerings used in virtually all Asian religions (and quite a few non-Asian ones as well), and it seemed to me like the most logical place to start. However, once I began to get a bit more familiar with the Below, I began to branch out into more specific (and often, more spontaneous) gifts. I do sometimes look up traditional offerings to deities (e.g., marigolds for Virgin Mary), and do that if it feels right to me. However, for the most part, I just ask them what kinds of offerings they prefer.

This was yet another arena in which I had to learn to listen with an open mind to what was being said, instead of imposing my own thoughts and opinions onto the Below. One time, for example, I had a particularly vivid vision of a spirit I call “La Vieja,” an elderly indigenous South American woman who advised me on how to make connections with my indigenous ancestors. In this vision, I visited her in her home in the underworld. Sitting in a rocking chair, she puffed on a huge cigar, the smoke encircling her head and filling the room. She tapped the ashes out into the smiling mouth of a skull, which clacked its teeth like it was enjoying eating the spent tobacco. The scene then changed to an image of me, carrying a tobacco pouch at my waist. It was clear to me that the message La Vieja was imparting was that I should use tobacco offerings for my ancestors.

To be honest, my first reaction to this idea was that I must be making things up! It felt like I must be mixing my own subconsciously stereotyped ideas about Indigenous people using ceremonial tobacco into my visions. Plus, I had no interest in smoking or even having tobacco in my home. But, as I had done in the past, I decided to not reject the message outright before sitting with the idea for a bit. So I did. I also started doing some research, and I soon realized that, while I had always associated tobacco offerings with Indigenous North Americans, the tobacco plant is actually native to Mesoamerica, and is/was used widely by all kinds of indigenous healers and ritualists in most parts of South America, including in the areas where my ancestors are from. Upon further reflection, I also remembered three facts that tied tobacco to my own ancestral bloodlines: (1) there was an ancestor on my maternal grandmother’s side who worked as a cigar roller, (2) my maternal grandfather worked for a cigarette company for almost his whole life, and (3) my father was a nicotine addict and died of emphysema.

Adding all of this together, in the end, I concluded that La Vieja was right: tobacco was actually the perfect offering for my ancestors! Once I had this realization, I purchased pure, natural tobacco leaves and began burning a small amount in a bowl on my home altar as part of the closing of my daily ritual. I immediately felt that my ancestors were quite happy with this, and it made me feel more connected to them. The point of my story is that I never would have thought of tobacco offerings myself; this insight could only have come from a two-way dialogue with the Below.

Aside from directly addressing them by making offerings, another way of enhancing two-way communication that I have found works well for me is to use oracle decks. I’ve never been into Tarot or other commercially available cards myself because their symbolism doesn’t have any deep meaning for me. However, as I continued to have highly meaningful encounters with different entities and energies during my Descent, I began to create 3×3 printed cards with names and images I felt were evocative of my own personal imaginal lexicon. I made a card each for Bachué, María, Quan Yin, Sol, La Vieja, the jaguar, other animal and angelic spirits, ancestral guides, the four elements, and others — about 60 in total.

While I continued to engage with this whole range of entities through my visions, journeys, offerings, and other ritual practices, I now had an additional method of receiving messages — another channel aside from the sensory ones I had been working with — that could also enrich my communication. I incorporated using the deck into my morning practice. After burning the tobacco, I would shuffle the deck and draw a card. Sometimes I would ask a specific question first. Usually I considered the card I drew to be a message about something I needed to focus on or attend to that day. Each of the cards had a wide range of symbolic meanings, emotional connotations, and other associations built up from my experiences in visions and rituals in addition to the specific visual details in the images. This meant that the messages received from the cards could come through in a wide variety of ways.

My point, again, is to use tools that open up the possibilities for conversation, connection, and relationship instead of shutting down or collapsing the conversation. I’m not saying that you have to use oracle cards specifically. Friends of mine use mandalas, paintings, natural objects, homemade ritual implements, or all kinds of other things. Think about what kinds of tools youcan employ to bring in additional sensory domains and material objects in order to enrich your communications with the Below.

In the long run, the goal is to establish meaningful reciprocal relationships with our imaginal interlocutors. In time, these relationships can be every bit as rich and as real as those between humans. Listen to how Misha made one of the most important connections in her life with the spirit tree outside her home:

In the middle of the night, there was some kind of real emotional need happening for me, and I just felt called to go out to be with this Arizona ash tree outside my house. This one is the first tree I planted on this land. And, I had put in a lot of effort to make a really good home for this tree to root into. At some point, I figured out that even though it has flowers, it’s male. I didn’t know its sex before that.

Anyway, on that moonlit night I go out to the tree. And you know, I’m just following my sense of whatever needs to happen. So, I’m hugging him and I’ve got some low branches that are trimmed in ways so birds can sit without having foliage in their way. And I put my hands on some of these low branches and it feels very supportive. I don’t remember exactly the specifics, but I was asking him for help ‭ in‬‭ a‬‭ very‬‭ heartfelt,‬‭ vulnerable‬‭ way. And I felt like he volunteered — or I don’t know the right languaging for it — but, somehow we got married that night. He became my spirit husband.

And, a name came to me through some kind of audible inner hearing — as if it were sound but I just knew the name. It said “Ashleigh.” And I was like, “Oh, of course. Right.”

And, when I go out and hug him sometimes now, I have the front of my body toward his trunk, and then his energy comes around behind and then into my heart center, and it’s like, he’s hugging me through me. Anyway, it feels really strange to talk about my husband the ash tree. It feels that there’s something non-ordinary and very sacred about that. And the whole connecting process was spontaneous; I was just following what was needed and where I intuited to position my body.

One part of it that is really touching for me is that it was almost like a form of reciprocity, but not as in a transactional way. He was like, “You put in all this energy, you gave me a home, a place to be. You’ve cared for me all these decades. Now, I can care for you.” I guess I feel like he sensed what kind of need I was expressing when I was asking for help. That was kind of like a call into the void. It was an undifferentiated kind of a call. So it’s as if he stepped forward, you know, and just knew deeply what was needed.

And, another piece of it was that I felt called to cut off a couple of smaller branches. The sense was that I could carve wooden beads from one of them, so that I would have a rosary or a mala that’s beads from his wood that he gave to me. Then that would become a new ritual object that’s infused with all this meaning and context and relationality. With the other branch, I could carve pieces to give out to individuals who I do healing work for. In this way, his healing presence could move out more broadly into the world and extend the web of relationship.

Meaningfulness

In some forms of spirituality, the mind is demonized and blamed for all of our suffering. But, as I’ve stated throughout this book, the process of Descent into the Below is the process of liberating every part of you to fully be itself. The mind is no different than any other autonomous component of your sacred wholeness. Thinking is a natural capacity of the brain, and its activities are pretty much beyond our control. As such, there is no need to silence thoughts, any more than there is a need to silence sounds or visions or other sensory phenomena.

It might be useful to tamp down the mind and the senses for a time, while on retreat for example, in order to achieve certain psychedelic effects or rarified states of consciousness. But, sooner or later, thinking returns, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where there is a problem, however, is in believing that thinking is the whole picture. Rational thinking offers one perspective on things, but we should never imagine that is the final word. This is particularly important when engaging with the Below.

The mind is constantly taking in the raw data of our experience, and weaving it together into webs of connotations, implications, memories, and plans for the future. Because it is constantly doing this, it is unavoidable that your mind will have a lot to say about the entities, energies, and events you encounter in the Below. The mind will want to know what’s going on and why, how to categorize and label it, how what’s happening now connects with the past and what it means for the future, and so on and so forth. The mind might try to explain away imaginal phenomena, try to attenuate your Descent, or even shut down the process entirely. Or, if it is really taken aback by an experience it can’t figure out, the mind can kick up a lot of fear, rumination, doubt, and other thought-loops that can be experienced as negative or troubling. At the far end of this spectrum, panic, paranoia, and existential terror are all products of a mind that can’t find its familiar footing.

In order to survive the Descent, part of what we need to learn to do is to live in the ambiguous liminal space of not knowing. That is not to say, however, that the mind has no role to play in engaging with the Below. The mind is actually a very important tool when used properly: not to explain, but to create meaningfulness.

What’s the difference? Explanation is reductive and linear while meaning-making is associative and opens up possibilities. As an example of how each kind of thinking changes your experience, take the following imaginal event that happened to me:

For several weeks I had been seeing in visions an image of myself, riding on the back of my jaguar guide, carrying a little red bag on the end of a stick. In each hand I wielded a sword made of quartz crystals. The two glowed brightly and lit my way through the darkness of the underworld.

One day, I was looking through some old possessions of mine, and I came across a little red “mojo bag” full of magical implements that my late grandmother had given me when I was a teenager. Inside, there was a small sword-shaped quartz crystal. A few weeks later, I was cleaning out the incense pot I was using for altar offerings, taking out the rocks and rinsing them with water. There, among the rocks, I found a second, identical quartz sword. I have no idea where it came from or how it got there.

Those are the facts. Now, let’s see how two different kinds of thinking can weave radically different interpretations out of them. First, let’s use linear thinking to explain these events. One line of linear reasoning is that I must have subconsciously remembered the quartz crystals being in those locations, and then those memories must have influenced my vision. Another linear explanation might be that my grandmother must have sent me the crystals to use in my practice. This kind of thinking is reductionistic: its purpose is to decide on an answer to the question of why something happened. It wants to choose which explanation is the right one. That is to say, its purpose is to limit the possibilities of the thing being explained, to eliminate the mystery and to come to a firm conclusion about “what’s really going on.”

In contrast, let’s see how associative thinking would unpack the same events. Here, for example, I might reflect upon the connection between my vision and the crystals I found and allow my thoughts to wander a bit. There might be a lot of thoughts running through my mind about this, but I don’t have to give too much credence to any one of them. Amidst that mental noise, there may be some gems that I feel like cogitating on for a bit. For example, I may realize that red bag my grandmother gave me decades ago, in addition to the crystal, also contained a number of other magical implements related to guidance and protection. It included, for example, a miniature compass and pocket knife, as well as a tiny Buddha image. Perhaps, I think, the quartz crystal in my vision could be associated with these other objects and their meanings, thus not only with lighting my way, but also giving me guidance, strength, and protection?

Another thought perhaps arises that the grandmother who gave me this crystal “sword” was herself a practitioner of Chinese martial arts — and sometimes used a sword in her own daily practice. Maybe there’s something important here about continuity between the generations in our practice of Asian spiritual traditions. Come to think of it, she died within a few months of me rediscovering the mojo bag. Could the quartz have represented a “passing of the baton” from her to me? An invitation for her to guide and mentor me in my spiritual questing from the afterlife? Speaking of batons, I’ve never used a sword, staff, or similar tool in my own movement practice. What would that be like?

Now, what about the other crystal, the one from the incense pot? I’ve burned incense in offerings for ancestral spirits many times, so that’s reinforcing the ancestral connection. But, I’ve also used it for other purposes, such as honoring Quan Yin and the other goddesses I pray to. Speaking of Quan Yin, I remember that my wife has a protective quartz amulet of Quan Yin that was given to her while we were traveling in Asia. Is there a special connection between Quan Yin and quartz crystals?

I hop online to research this question, and start delving deeper into the associations of quartz crystals in other traditions around the world. Again, I’m not glomming onto any particular piece of information, but just gathering more associations. I read that quartzes are widely used by spiritual practitioners for their empowering and cleansing properties. I discover that they are said to be the strongest crystals in certain shamanic traditions. I read more about their traditional and modern uses in order to further inform myself about the powers my imaginal sword might possess.

Notice that the point here isn’t to figure out “what’s really going on” or even to dwell on whether or not these associated ideas I am collecting are true. The goal is to generate more and more potentials, more and more layers of connotations, which in turn can pack the event with richer and richer meaningfulness. Far from landing on a single explanation, as my linear mind wanted to me to, through this process of association, the one event now comes to be entangled in a web of associations having to do with my childhood, ancestors, goddesses, spiritual practices, and a global web of symbols of protection, illumination, enlightenment, and connection.

Best of all, because the mind is a meaning-making machine running essentially automatically, all this associative thinking happened with minimal effort. All I had to do was steer my mind away from jumping to linear explanatory conclusions, and keep it on the associative track. (For some people, journaling might help with maintaining this mindset.)

One kind of conclusion that the linear mind seems to especially like to jump to is to answer definitively the question of whether or not these mysterious imaginal phenomena are real. But, answering these questions in any definitive way is a linear explanation that shuts down the possibilities inherent in the experience. If you decide that the Below is actually a product of your own psychology, then that will limit your experience in certain ways; if you decide it’s actually coming from some external source (particular deities, astral realms, aliens, or what have you), then that will limit your experience in other ways. Instead of letting your mind jump to explanatory conclusions, can you just sit in the unknown, and let the fullness of the mystery unfold? Set your mind to deepening the mystery by unpacking it in more and more meaningfulness, but don’t let it settle on any one detail as the ultimate answer. You’ll find that the meaningfulness evolves through a process of ongoing unfolding, exploration, and discovery.

Experimentation and Innovation

In general, the approach to the Below I am advocating is experimental and innovative. You pay attention to opening your sensory channels. You follow your guides and trust where they lead you. You search through books and existing spiritual teachings for ideas about specific techniques to try. When you find something that interests you, you take it up, implementing some version of the practice for a few weeks or months, in order to see what effect it has on the quality, intensity, and impact of your experience of the Below. If you notice something working, you tweak it further to enhance the effects. You discard whatever doesn’t work, and you keep experimenting with adding new practices you think might be promising. You might start clustering certain practices that work well together into “modules” that can be done in a particular sequence at a particular time of day. You maintain a regular, rhythmic structure to your practice while also allowing for plenty of flexibility and innovation. All along, you pay attention to grounding and integration with daily life.

In my case, when I began my Descent, I already had a morning routine in place where I sat in meditation out on my back deck for about an hour and then practiced qigong for half an hour. Additionally, I did an hour of walking meditation at the end of my work day and did yoga in the evening before bed. Once I started the Descent in earnest, I realized that it was during my qigong practice that I experienced an enhanced receptivity to visions. So, I started to experiment with that portion of my routine to see how I could maximize those effects. Little by little, as a result of these experiments, my qigong session started to transform.

By the time my Descent culminated three years later, that half hour of qigong had become a completely different module. It had moved to my basement and had gradually morphed into a 40-45 minute session, the first half involving shamanic drumming and vigorous spontaneous movements where I allowed spirits and energies to arise and move through my body, and the second half involving sitting in the center of a visualized mandala surrounded by ancestors and protective goddesses on all sides. Often, those spirits took me on a journey to far-away spirit worlds where I met teachers and other beneficial beings.

Over time, I also developed a small altar that I used for 15-20 minutes or so to initiate and complete the morning module. Some of the things I incorporated into these rituals that opened and closed my morning module included ringing a bell to invoke beneficial deities; my surrender prayer; offerings of food, drink, and tobacco for my ancestors; offering of fire, light, and perfume to my spirit guides; consulting an oracle card for divination.

For me, it happened to be the morning module where I incorporated most of my Below-centered practices, and I fit a whole range of different practices into that time. I kept the things that worked for me, but I let go of many of the ones I tried — such as dream journaling, chanting mantras, a martial-arts type exercise routine, high-heat sauna, and making art, among others — when I saw that they didn’t enhance my experience of the Below in any kind of predictable way.

As I keep saying, I am not giving you these details to suggest that my style of practice is the right way for you to do things. Experiment and do what works for you. I just want to give an example of how rituals might be incorporated, adapted, and stitched together as a part of a process of creative innovation. The main idea here is that nothing should be fixed in stone. Spiritual teachings — no matter how authoritative they may be — are merely suggestions, rough guidelines that you can feel free to tweak or ignore as you see fit. All of your practices should be flexible, adjustable, modifiable, and you are the one who is in the drivers’ seat.

Your best guide in the design of your own personalized suite of ritual practices is always going to be your own inner guidance. That may come as a gut feeling, or a felt sense of alignment and purpose, or an energetic pull toward something, or even in the form of a seemingly external spirit protector, guide, or higher power. (Note that inner guidance doesn’t come from thinking, emotions, or other egoic activity.) Whatever form your guidance comes in, if it’s authentic, it will always lead you to make innovations in your practice that are beneficial.

When you are familiar with what practices work for you and help you to connect with the Below, and you are communicating well with your inner guidance, you will feel confident to spontaneously modify or invent rituals on the fly, knowing that they will be effective and meaningful. I have been called upon to do this many times in a variety of circumstances over the years, but I still remember one of the first times as particularly meaningful.

I was staying in a cottage beside a small private lake, and one day found myself alone for several hours around sunset. I had been feeling a certain draw toward the lake, and took the opportunity to try to connect with its elemental spirits in a more intentional way than I had done up to that point. I didn’t know what I was going to do to connect, but I knew I wanted to go into the water to do so.

Stripping down to bare skin, I entered the lake up to my waist and looked out over the water, watching the ripples of orange and pink sunlight dancing across its surface. I noticed that, because I was moving, these ripples were traveling from me outward, emanating out toward the center of the lake. So, I imagined that these ripples were carrying my good intentions and energies out to the water spirits, bringing them messages of joy and wellbeing. As I stilled my body and relaxed my breathing, I watched as the ripple patterns slowly changed across the quiet surface of the lake. After a while, they were no longer emanating outwards, but were instead coming from the center of the lake towards me. I thanked the spirits for returning my message, and I felt a subtle sense of pleasure on my skin as the ripples lapped gently at my torso.

I was moved to make an offering to the lake spirits to embody my gratitude and respect for them, but here I was, naked, waist-deep in water, with nothing to give them. Just then, I remembered that my body is itself about 70% water. In other words, the water spirits that I was communicating with out there in the lake were also here within my own body! Having had this realization, the offering I should make suddenly became clear. I urinated, visualizing the waters of my body intermingling with the waters of the lake. Then, I dunked my head under the surface so that the waters of the lake washed over the waters of my body. The intention was a commingling, or unification, of the water spirits of my body with those of the lake.

As I stood back up after this exchange of elements, I noticed that I was now surrounded by dozens of flower-like plants. My movements as I dunked myself must have disturbed the underwater foliage of the lake, causing these to float up to the surface. Given the context, it was clear to me that this was a positive response from the water spirits, a confirmation that my invented ritual and offering was well-received as a celebration of our unity.

Now, if I just had told you, out of context, that I urinated in a lake to connect with the water spirits that inhabited it, you might think I was disrespectful, or crazy, or both. But, in context, I hope you see how this made total sense. Anyway, the point of my story is not to prescribe the best way for you to communicate with water spirits. It’s to give you an example of how ritual innovation can take shape spontaneously. In that moment, standing in the lake, I was deeply immersed in the imaginal world and had a sincere intention to connect. I had given offerings and exchanged energies with many types of spirits in the past, and was confident about my ability to feel into the situation at hand and to respond appropriately in the moment. With those things in place, the connection could unfold naturally and I could respond spontaneously in an authentic way with actions that felt right and were meaningful in the moment.

Notice that I didn’t consult a guidebook on how to construct a ritual for the water element. I didn’t need to pull out my phone and Google what kind of gift to offer to a lake spirit. I didn’t even reach into my own repertoire of rituals I had cultivated and perfected over the years. The key is not figuring out “the right thing to do.” It’s about creating your own authentic relationship with the Below, and then taking guidance from the energies that emerge through that connection.

Here’s another story with a similar point, this time about how Jack sought and followed the advice of his dragon guides when he was in need of financial assistance:

When I first was starting my business, and was having financial problems, I reached out to the golden dragon, and I was like, “Okay, please help me. I really, really need your help.” And she was like, “Of course.” So I said, ”Okay, what do we need to do? Do we need to do a ritual or something?” And she’s like, “Yeah, we can do a ritual.” And I’m like, “Okay, so do I need to offer you money? Like, do you want all the rest of my money?” And she’s like, “No, you don’t need to think like that. I just love really shiny coins. I don’t care about the value, I just like that it’s shiny. So, take a few pennies that are super shiny, take them down to the water by the sea. Place them on a stone that feels right for you. Ask me to provide you wealth. And it’s done.”

And so I go down to the sea. And there’s a huge storm, and the waves are enormous. I go down to the water and there were a couple of stones that were already on top of each other. It looked like a little altar. So I walk over to that, and I place my coins on it. I state my wish. And then I look up and there’s this huge wave coming towards me. So I run out of the way so that I don’t get wet.

And as I turn around, I see the wave coming in and it goes over my offering and then pulls it back into the sea. This was pretty mind-blowing to see. And then I look out over the ocean and I could just feel the dragon’s spirit all throughout the ocean. Like she’s just this huge, vast being. It felt amazing. I felt really uplifted by it.

And, within about two days, I had a sale for my most expensive long-term program that brought in more money than I had ever brought in a single sale. And it completely wrote off my debts and provided for me for the next three months.

Microcosms

One effective way of enhancing connection and communication with the Below is to symbolize or embody it in physical form. For many people, the most natural way of doing this is to create an altar. By “altar” I don’t mean any particular traditional configuration. I really just mean a dedicated place where you keep a collection of imaginal objects, images, implements, and other material symbols or representations of the Below.

My own altar is actually a small chest of drawers (Fig. 5). In them I have collected feathers gifted to me by vulture spirits, various charms and amulets, sets of mala beads, and various other meaningful objects and implements from throughout my Descent. In other drawers I have tea-light candles, sage and palo santo incense, tobacco and whiskey for the ancestors, and various small cups and vessels for making other offerings. On top of the chest, there is a circle of small statues representing my animal guides, some ashes from my grandparents’ cremation, and other objects representing other ancestors. Standing above them, statues and framed images of María and Quan Yin, and a photo of Rómulo Rozo’s Bachué, and a vase with a white flower symbolizing Sol. In-between and among these figures, there’s a candle, a bell, a small bowl of tobacco, a bowl of stones for incense, and a lighter.

FIG. 5. My microcosm

You know from reading that these objects capture many of the major themes of my imaginal world. However, it’s more than just a haphazard collection of objects: my altar is also a microcosm. Etymologically, the word microcosm means “miniature cosmos,” and the objects on my altar are indeed laid out in such a way that they represent the structure of my imaginal universe. Having these objects laid out in this configuration allows me to engage with them in highly meaningful ways, and doing so routinely triggers the emergence of certain experiences and realizations. Of course, I can have imaginal experiences anywhere. But, I find that I am often transported into a more open state of mind just by standing in front of the altar. As I light candles and make offerings to each of the entities represented there, I feel my channels opening up further and further to the imaginal world.

While to me it is a mandala that captures complex relationships between the elements of my imaginal world, the layout of my altar is more complex and therefore the logic behind its structure is a bit hard to explain. My friend Jeff has a much simpler example of a microcosmic altar that you can quickly grasp. This comes from his blog on Aug. 7, 2020 (condensed and lightly edited by me), in which he describes how he created an altar in his art studio to visually encapsulate the three parts of what he calls his “self-sense.” These three elements are “little jeffy,” which is his mundane everyday ego-self; “Big Jeff,” his creative self that is plugged into the imaginal realm; and “The Unborn,” which he also calls “the world of Mysterious Rapture.” In the language of this book, I believe that these three terms are referring to the Middle, Below, and the Above respectively.

To put it simply, ritual has come to increasingly define how I approach even the simplest of activities. This hasn’t come about by conscious intention; rather, it seems to have gradually grown into the fabric of my activities without my noticing, until one day it dawned on me what had happened.

One of the rituals I’ve developed consists of a small altar just inside the door of my working studio. Central to the altar is a Tibetan singing bowl, one with a rich sound and long period of resonance. Next to it is a hand-wrought wooden handle wrapped at the end with fabric, for the purpose of striking the bowl. Arranged in front of the bowl are three images on postcards of artworks of mine, each image representing for me one of the three holons that make up the holarchy of my self-sense — little jeffy; Big Jeff; The Unborn.

When I’ve settled into my studio for a day of work, before any creative activity begins, I perform a benediction of sorts — I first place a hand on the image representing little jeffy, acknowledge his place in the holarchy and the value he brings, then I strike the bowl, focusing intently on the reverberating sound as it slowly fades. Then I follow suit with Big Jeff, and follow that with The Unborn. Finally I strike the bowl and stretch both hands over all of the images, acknowledging the holarchy of my self-sense and its structure that holds it all together. All of this is a very centering, very calming ritualistic start to my creative day.

Jeff’s altar is a microcosm that symbolizes the Above, Middle, and Below, and allows for a ritual that unifies this “holarchy” (i.e., wholes that are also parts of something larger) through the medium of sound. For Jeff, striking the singing bowl serves as a daily reminder that he is more than just a one-dimensional being, and helps him drop in and open up to his full self as he begins to work on his art each day.

While altars are microcosms that are intentionally designed as a dedicated space for ritual practice, other kinds of spaces or objects can also be microcosms. For example, I have a tattoo on my right arm that is a microcosm, combining potent imaginal symbols of the Above, Middle, and Below into a coherent diagram or representation of the unity of the three.

For me, however, the most powerfully evocative microcosm of all is that statue of Bachué by Rozo. She is my “axis mundi,” the imaginal center of the universe around which the Earth and the Heavens spin. I don’t expect the image in Fig. 3 to affect you as it does me — or even to have any impact at all. However, I would invite you to take a look back at it and to notice how, at the top of the statue, Bachué is a sun goddess. Her perfectly equanimous face emits rays of light, while her arms extend upwards in a cone of heavenly light that streams down from Above. As our eye moves downward, she transforms into a human figure. Here, she is a sensual embodied being with heaving breasts and undulating hips. She is a lover and a mother, an incarnate being of flesh and blood. Moving further down, she transforms yet again as her serpentine coils lead us into the dark waters of the underworld, churning and frothing with snakes. To me, she is the full package, from the Void to the Abyss, and everything in between.

Paranormal Abilities

People talk a lot about paranormal abilities emerging spontaneously during an awakening process. Some people consciously try to acquire or develop such abilities. Some traditions hold that the emergence of these powers is an important marker of spiritual attainment, and some even say that not having them means you are not awakened. Conversely, the Buddha is famous for saying that all such powers are a distraction, or even a perversion of spirituality. Here, I’ll offer you my thoughts, which is a different take than any of those positions.

I agree that it seems to be the case that all sorts of paranormal effects can occur when you are navigating the Below. I think of these effects as falling onto a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, uncanny or weird events can be associated with certain states of consciousness. These may be paranormal, but they don’t have profound spiritual meanings. For example, in my own experience, I developed for a period of a few months extraordinarily strong powers of smell. In Misha’s case, she sometimes experiences weirdness with electrical appliances:

If my energy gets too intense, into a “screechy” kind of frequency, it interferes with electronics. I have this one particular CD player that, if the energy gets too screechy, will pause the CD until I calm the energy down enough, and then it starts playing again from exactly where it was paused. And it can happen with Zoom as well.

It also happens with this one friend. I don’t know why, but it’s something about her technology. So that when my energy starts getting screechy, then she starts having problems with hearing me through her device. This doesn’t happen with other people’s phones, but just with that one particular person’s phone.

So, yeah, I can interfere with electronic devices, although I don’t do it on purpose. That would be kind of a nice party trick if I could do it on purpose, right?

Beyond these meaningless kinds of effects, there are also those paranormal abilities that can be considered gifts or blessings. These are often called siddhis, using a Sanskrit word meaning “accomplishment.” Jack talked with me about some of the kinds of powers or abilities that he has discovered and developed through his process of Awakening from Below:

I guess one of the funny things with the whole awakening experience is that when things start to open up, they become very ordinary very quickly. So, something that someone else might think is a siddhi, I might not even have realized or conceptualized in that way.

Like, I can see divine light, this golden white light, shining out of every object, every human being, everything. And, what I learned after a few years of seeing that was that when human beings are baring their soul, this light shines more brightly. And if I focus on it with an open heart and a lot of presence, it will shine more brightly. It’s like I help people to heal by holding their spirit with my spirit, but through my eyes. Just by seeing them, they become unburdened and their soul shines more brightly. So you could call that a siddhi. I use it for the healing of others, and I benefit by being healed and opened at the same time.

There’s also the beings that I channel: some people might say that’s a siddhi to be able to communicate with deities and dragons. And to allow them to occupy my body and flow through my body, and to speak to people through me. To be a link between their world and the human world. And I deliver messages from them to support people who are listening to me, and to do healing work with other people. And I can feel them expanding my consciousness too. They’ll focus in on a trauma held inside of the body of the person I’m working with, and then expand the field of consciousness so that I can sense where that trauma links to past lifetimes or other points in time in space. So that the trauma isn’t just held in this body in this moment in time, it now links to all moments in time and space. That, you could say, is a siddhi that I’m using to help people heal.

And then, there’s manifesting prosperity, which some people also would call a siddhi. The dragons I channel also are deities of wealth. They would be like, “Jack, you do realize that in all of the stories, we sleep on piles of gold, right? There’s a reason for that!” It’s all about flows of energy. You are this whole cosmos and this whole Earth, and that’s where all abundance flows from. All abundance that anyone can ever have, it always flows from the cosmos and from the earth, and it flows through energy channels. So, if you are blocking the channels of abundance that exist inside your body with shame or trauma, you are blocking the flow of the earth and you are blocking the flow of the cosmos. So by unblocking it, by allowing the cosmos and the earth to provide for you, you are allowing the cosmos and the earth to flow, you are undamming a river. You are doing that as a gift for the cosmos for the earth and for yourself.

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with courting synchronicity, premonition, or blessings in your life like the ones Jack is describing. There’s also nothing wrong with asking higher powers, ancestors, and other spirit guardians for guidance, help, or support — whether with spiritual matters or with mundane things like money or a job. But, I do believe it is a perversion of spirituality and an enormous karmic fault if you ever use siddhis you gained from your spiritual practice for greedy ends or to harm others.

That is why, in my opinion, if you start moving in the direction of cultivating paranormal powers — either intentionally or spontaneously — it is imperative to take responsibility to ensure that any powers you develop are used to benefit and never to harm others. Therefore, I think your first act of magic should be to place a permanently limiting spell on yourself that will prevent any siddhi you ever gain in the future from possibly ever bringing suffering to another being. At the same time, you should vow that any power you do gain, if you ever tried to use it for unenlightened purposes, would be immediately rendered ineffectual. With that limiting spell in place, then I think you can invite siddhis that will benefit all beings to emerge and to flow through you, as necessary, in order to help where needed. Set the intention and forget it. You need not cultivate any specific powers, but just see what arises naturally to meet the needs of the moment. And, whatever does arise, don’t ever cling to it as it moves through you. Remember that it’s never about you; it’s only ever about spreading love and alleviating suffering.

Another thing you don’t want to get hung up on is figuring out whether paranormal powers are real. As I’ve said now many times, you’ll do best to abandon that whole line of thinking, since any specific answer to the question will only serve to limit the possibilities of the mystery.

Emptying Your Vessel

While we are not demonizing the mind in this book, sometimes it’s important to be able to set aside thinking in order to allow something else to flow through us. In this section, I am going to talk about a whole spectrum of experiences that includes artistic creativity, channeling, mediumship, trance, and possession. I think of all of these phenomena as variations on the common theme of “emptying the vessel.” That is to say, they are all examples of what happens when you are able to set aside your thinking mind and allow the unimpeded flow of imaginal energies to emerge, flow through your being, and emanate out into the world.

Here’s Jeff again, talking about how tapping into these energies has become a central part of his creative process as an artist. This is from his blog on Feb. 27, 2012 (as always, extracted and slightly edited by me):

For some artists, engaging in the practice of art making leads them to an exploration of subconscious and unconscious territories of the psyche. When this happens one finds that the unconscious — that which, by definition, was unavailable to conscious attention — is far richer and deeper and wider than was anticipated. This is certainly true of the personal unconscious,… but there is another realm of the psyche that can become available to creative exploration — the elusive, sometimes mysterious, sometimes scary, always surprising transpersonal unconscious.

It’s here that creativity starts tapping into energies never imagined and rarely understood. From far below the region of the personal unconscious, the deep unconscious reveals species instincts and urges that are so raw and formless they can barely be contained in cultural symbols, yet manage to find creative form in myth and ritual that is often shimmering in numinosity…..

It’s infinite, unlimited, endless, awe inspiring. This is where the artist in his/her creative practice finally stops seeking and begins to be guided. This is where the artist steps through doors never before recognized into territories never before intuited. This is where the artist steps back from the work, looks at it and wonders, “Who the hell did that?”

This is where I am. And how I got here is mostly a mystery to me, though in looking back I see a long and battered journey that was somehow fueled and inspired by a crazy intuition, a pull from far off, dimly perceived but undeniable.

An artist engaging with “the transpersonal unconscious” — by which I think Jeff means the Below — must find a way to take their everyday Middle-world ego-selves (their “little jeffies”) out of driver’s seat. They must instead embrace not knowing, trust in the process that is spontaneously unfolding, and allow surprising new things to emerge out of the mystery. That is precisely the same thing that the medium does when channeling. Whereas the artist allows the mystery to manifest through the media of pencil, paint, clay — or in Jeff’s case, string — the channeler’s raw materials are words. The medium empties themselves out and allows words to autonomously come to life and to flow through them.

Again, where you think those words are coming from doesn’t matter. Whatever you think the source is — the “transpersonal unconscious,” spirits, deities, the Akashic Record, etc. — the thing you must do is the same: you must find a way to empty yourself out and allow the information that is emerging to move through unimpeded.

Here’s Jack talking about his experience with emptying out his vessel:

I was preparing to come to England to give these talks and lead my first day-long retreat. And in my mind, I was thinking, “I need to prepare for this. I need to have things written down. I need to know what I’m doing.” And the dragons came in and they were like, “No, no, do not do that. You need to do this spontaneously. It needs to come straight from your heart. And you need to learn that you can trust yourself and trust life enough to step into this.”

And then what happened was my flights got canceled at the last minute, and it created a lot of stress. I was totally busy with all of that, and I didn’t have time to even think about what I was going to do. And then I arrived at the venue right before I was supposed to go on. I arrived, got introduced, and then it was like, “Okay, Jack, the next hour and 45 minutes are yours. Off you go!”

And, I did it. You know, I trusted it. I just said what was coming through my heart at the moment. I channeled the beings when they came through. And we did small rituals at times, but everything came through spontaneously.

What’s necessary is stepping away from the mind and trusting. I go into a trance state, and I trust in the beings that I’m connected to, because I’ve built a relationship with them over time, and they’ve proven themselves trustworthy. And then my consciousness is in the background. My humanity is in the background, and I let them be in the foreground.

Are there specific instructions on how to empty your vessel and let the energies flow? In Jeff’s case, we already know that he has a microcosmic altar in his studio and a daily ritual that helps him to plug into his full self before he begins work. In my case, I often do not need to do anything other than step into the right context and the flow starts happening spontaneously. But, often, it helps to give a little nudge in the desired direction. For example, if you want to channel words, just start writing or speaking a bit in a spontaneous way; if you want to bring in creative inspiration, just start putting the pencil to the page or the paint onto the canvas.

In writing this book, for example, I have felt that every word has been channeled. All I have needed to do is to open up the laptop, start typing a sentence, and then something takes over. My fingers start flying over the keyboard and the words just come to life of their own accord. While the channeled information is pouring out of me, I am totally plugged in and almost oblivious to my surroundings. And, yet, it is totally effortless: I’m looking at the display on my screen right now telling me I have written nearly 10,000 words in the last two days. Tomorrow, I’ll spend some time going back and reading what I’ve written here, and it will seem to me like I had little if anything to do with this creation. (As Jeff said, “Who the hell did that?”)

Misha has a more concrete and intentional technique she uses to empty her vessel:

The first thing that comes to mind for me is putting the body in an open receptive posture. Lying on my back, neutral posture, symmetrical position, palms up, open and allowing. And then internally, do the same thing with the mind and the attitude, so that’s also open and receptive. And then, allowing — and maybe even sometimes inviting — whatever wants to come forward in experience. I’m intuitively sensing into that which wants to come forward, but not in a directive way where I’m trying to find something specific. And then, paying attention. When something starts showing up, allowing it to continue, mainly by just resting the attention on what’s happening in the physical sensations and energy fields. Occasionally there’s an inner prompting to more actively encourage a process to emerge. So, very highly attentive and attuned to what’s showing up in this moment as it’s emerging.

Don’t try to compare it against anything. Don’t try to make meaning out of it. Don’t try to analyze it. Notice in a very fluid in-the-moment way, like a seismographic sensor as the page of experience is going underneath it, noticing experiences flowing by.

And once there’s an energy moving, if it’s sufficiently present, if it’s becoming more stable in its expression, then sometimes, there’s an intuitive sense to accentuate something. Like, maybe there’s an arching of the neck and maybe letting a deep growl out to accentuate it. And that can really help it to come forward and more fully express. There could be more body movements and vocalizations. Even, you know, gnashing of teeth and stuff like that. There can also be some vocalizations that express feelings, like, “Oh, this is yummy,” or, “Yay, relaxation!” And there are other energies that also are more vulnerable with vocalizations more like whimpering. When that’s going on, it can be the full body that’s being moved. And I’m not deciding anything. The energy is moving the body and causing the vocalizations.

While Misha’s tools are entirely internal, in my experience, there are also external aids that can significantly enhance the emptying of the vessel. For me, I discovered that putting on a shamanic drum track and allowing my body to move spontaneously in my darkened practice space can sometimes nudge me into a full trance state where my body deva or some other protector or guide will take control of my body.

In these kinds of situations, do we want to give over complete control or remain partially present? I think the answer to this question is individual. If you don’t feel that you are drawn to full possession naturally, then there’s no reason to think that kind of experience is a required feature of Awakening from Below. However, if you do find yourself wanting to vacate your vessel spontaneously, you can welcome that as part of your process. With your eyes wide open about the potential risks and rewards, and making sure you’re not opening yourself up to random influences, go ahead and open your sensory channels even wider than you did previously and invite your guides and protectors to “take the steering wheel.”

In all cases, in order to empty your vessel, you need to suspend your judgment, interpretation, and other critical faculties, and just let things flow. If nothing happens, or it’s not a very deep trance, keep at it and experiment with different aspects of the set and setting. I think you’ll find that this is a skill that anyone can cultivate. What happens when you do — creativity, channeling, mediumship, trance, possession, or something else altogether — you won’t necessarily be able to predict or control. As with everything else in the Below, just surrender to what is happening and allow it to unfold naturally.

Establishing and Maintaining Boundaries

Navigating the Below in a way that is both safe and responsible requires a strong commitment to ethics. As we have been discussing throughout this book, surrendering yourself to an Awakening from Below process involves the ego totally giving over control to the autonomy of your body, ancestors, the natural world, and a host of other agents. What these facets of your being present to you can be quite surprising — shocking, even. It is therefore advisable to have strong ethical commitments in place in advance, which can act like guardrails on the Descent.

In my view, a firm line should be always drawn at the point where your new-found freedom may possibly bring harm to another being. Awakening from Below leads to the liberation of every facet of the cosmos, and there is no way that is compatible with you harming another being. If, in the course of Descent, there arises an impulse or a desire to harm another, there is no way that this is your soul speaking to you. It is surely a corrupted or twisted element of your ego.

To give a concrete example, let’s come back to the topic of sexuality. As part of the Awakening from Below process, you want to be able to completely give over control of your sexuality to your body deva (or your body’s intelligence, If you prefer that terminology), and allow it to show you how it wants to experience pleasure and intimacy. However, this under no circumstances gives you free license to engage in sexual activity that is harmful or hurtful to others. In other words, you need to figure out a way to totally surrender to the Below while also maintaining some firm lines that you refuse to cross no matter what. This may seem like an impossible paradoxical task, but it’s a balancing act that you simply must do.

That being said, if you do experience impulses to harm others, you shouldn’t bottle them up or push them away either. The surrendering process is about including, not denying. The proper response is to sit with the feeling and allow it to unpack itself, to express what it is trying to say, and thereby to untangle itself. But even as you welcome the potentially harmful impulses to move through you, you must have a strong resolve to never, ever act upon them. Experiencing passing feelings of rage, greed, lust, or of wanting to lash out at or control others is a normal part of the Descent because these impulses are normal parts of everyone’s unconscious. However, if you ever feel that such thoughts are becoming compulsive, or you question your ability to resist acting on them, that is red flag indicating that you need to talk with a therapist or spiritual counselor.

Uncontrollable compulsions to harm yourself or others are in many cultural traditions around the globe considered to be examples of possession by an evil spirit. This brings us to another kind of boundary that you need to have firmly in place. Entering into the Below, you will certainly encounter many energies and entities that seem autonomous and external to you. As we have discussed, nearly all of them will eventually turn out to be parts of your own awakened being. They only seem external to you because you have repressed or denied them. In the end, they are revealed to be previously unconscious parts of you that, once fully awakened, become integral parts of your majestic wholeness.

However, it is possible that during your time in the Below you may encounter energies or entities that you truly believe are not part of you. For example, you might run into a ghost, spirit, or other entity or energy that you feel does not have a positive intent toward you. One of the lessons you need to learn in order to navigate the Below safely is how to clear such negative entities/energies out of your space. There are many ways of doing this using ritual, incantations, prayers, invocations, visualizations, and other techniques. You can find many specific techniques if you look into the books in the further readings section.

In my view, however, it’s critical to balance setting boundaries or banishing rituals with a compassionate concern for the wellbeing of all. Wishing for the utter destruction of any being is an unhealthy and unenlightened form of violence. Also, it’s important to keep this door open because, in the end, you’ll probably come to recognize that this unwelcome presence is actually just another aspect of your unconscious you have yet to accept. Therefore, look for techniques like “compassionate depossession” and others that focus on helping malevolent spirits to transform rather than on destroying them.

Another type of boundary that is critical to uphold is what I call your “energetic bubble.” The idea here is to minimize collateral damage when working out your traumas and complexes in the Below. You must recognize that your feelings, reactions, and egoic dramas that arise in the course of doing this work are all projections of your own mind, and you must work hard to not involve other people in them. If you find yourself working out some past trauma or situation that involved another person, you do not need to contact that person and drag them into your process. If you find yourself feeling regret for past actions, you do not need to reopen someone else’s wounds in order to heal yours.

The same goes for positive feelings or even blessings. To give you a quick example, just a few weeks ago, my wife was approached at work by a total stranger who claimed she had a dream about her. The woman was emphatic that in her dream she had received a message from God and she simply had to share it with my wife, and she was quite insistent that my wife had to allow her to do a blessing for her. She made these pronouncements right in the middle of an office where my wife was surrounded by co-workers and was trying to do her job. The woman would not go away, waited until my wife was on break, and then accosted her with the insistence that they meet privately somewhere so that she could perform some kind of ceremony.

In this encounter with my wife, the woman clearly breached her own energetic bubble by pushing her spiritual agenda in a way that encroached on my wife’s freedom and comfort. Now, she may just have been delusional, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that she had an authentic imaginal experience in which she legitimately had received an important message from God. Even so, surely there would be a better way to share this, right? Could she have written my wife a quick note and left her phone number inviting her to speak about it? Could she have delivered the blessing silently and unobtrusively from across the room, without involving my wife at all? My intention here isn’t to dictate how the encounter should have gone; my point is to encourage you to reflect on how to maintain your own energetic integrity without heaping it onto others who might find your overtures unwelcome or uncomfortable.

I will mention one last boundary that’s important as you navigate the Below. As we’ve said many times, the Descent can be terrifying and dangerous. You therefore need to exert your spiritual sovereignty and discernment when it comes to determining how much is too much at any given moment. Here’s Misha talking about her experience exploring her limits:

In my case, it’s taken a lot of healing with skillful guidance for me to develop the capacities that make surrendering likely to result in becoming less, rather than more, broken. If trauma activation is too intense, it can result in exacerbation and retraumatization rather than healing. At the same time, part of the healing process has been about realizing that I can go through flashbacks and other kinds of dysregulatory experiences, and successfully come out of them. Part of the learning for me has been that these experiences can feel like “it will be like this always,” but I’ve learned that this is not objective reality/truth.

Since my most recent retreat, part of the shifting has been around allowing myself to experience trauma reactivation. It’s been difficult to let go of the resistance to the experiences that generate unpleasantness. Many times in my past I’ve been hijacked by PTSD activations, yet recently there have been times I’ve been able to surrender and let the dreaded experience happen. One time, after feeling pierced through as if by multiple small projectiles, what showed up was vulnerability and a lovely, pure innocence.

As time went on, however, I ended up in a PTSD flare-up, and for a couple of weeks I was floundering. I had to significantly shift how I was practicing. I had to stop diving in to any activation that was happening and instead intensively practice mindful witnessing, noticing sensations, staying out of the mind and thoughts, and doing lots of grounding. At first this was on and off for most of the hours of the day, particularly at night. Over a three week period, the activations gradually reduced to a much more manageable level. Interestingly, allowing what was showing up — even resistance — to be present was key during all the parts of the retreat and post-retreat experiences. It’s the other forms of skillful engagement that changed.