Reflections on My Own Myth Work So Far

In my last three posts, I shared with you the key insights I gained from reading Descent To The Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women by Sylvia Brinton Perera. Today, I want to share with you how the insights gained from her work has influence my life.

About 11 years ago, I decided to go on a healing journey. In the years prior I had been in not one but two narcissistic relationships. I realized I was looking for validation in all the wrong places. The psychological weight of childhood trauma caused by my father had worn me down and the only way out of the subconscious patterns constantly shaping my life was to go on a healing journey.

Of course, I didn’t know where to begin so I decided to trust my intuition and myself and move in the direction of the discomfort of change.

The myth of Inanna’s descent became the guiding metaphor that helped me navigate the loss, transformation and rebirth I experienced on that journey.

Unknowingly, I had used it as a symbolic resource. The myth was more than just a story; it became a tool for making sense of my journey, offering structure, language, and imagery to process what I was going through.

I recognized Inanna’s voluntary descent, her stripping away of power and identity at each gate, her death and time in the underworld, and her eventual resurrection as a symbolic map for my own process of personal dismantling and renewal.

I actively engaged with the myth to find insight, meaning, or even direction and Perera’s work in the Descent to the Goddess helped me do this.

I learned then the power of narrative. How the stories we tell ourselves shape who we are – for better or worse – and how they can help us heal.

The key difference between a myth and a regular story is that myths carry deep symbolic and often spiritual significance, while regular stories primarily entertain or inform.

Myths tap into shared human experiences and fundamental truth. They offer a symbolic structure that can be interpreted in many ways: psychologically (e.g., Jungian archetypes), spiritually, socially, or even personally. Inanna’s descent, for example, can be read as a story about seasonal cycles, a psychological journey of ego death and transformation, or a sacred initiation.

Unlike a regular story which has a fixed beginning, middle, and end, myths are fluid. They get retold, adapted, and reinterpreted across generations. My use of Inanna’s descent as a symbolic resource is an example of this— I’ve taken an ancient myth and applied it to my own life, bringing it back to life again.

We have only to look at religion to see how myths form the backbone of belief systems, shaping how people understand their place in the world – providing a framework for meaning, ethics, and identity. Regular stories, even meaningful ones, don’t necessarily hold this foundational role.

Engaging with the myth of Inanna’s descent wasn’t just an intellectual exercise—over a seven-year period, it helped me actively facilitate deep internal work which allowed me to uncover and release layers of psychological weight I hadn’t even fully recognized before. Also, where I had felt fear in letting go, now letting go felt organic, even inevitable.

Throughout this process, Perera’s book acted as a companion, helping me stay present in the experience of my healing journey rather than resisting or getting lost in it. It also helped me to feel less alone in the process and gave me a new way of seeing what I was going through.

Inanna’s descent wasn’t just a myth I studied—it became the path I walked. Perera’s work helped me see that healing isn’t about escaping the darkness but learning to move through it with trust. The stripping away, the surrender, the waiting in the unknown—it all had purpose. Engaging with this myth gave me more than insight; it gave me a way to hold my experiences, to see them as part of something deeper. And in doing so, I didn’t just find meaning—I found a renewed sense of self, shaped not by what I lost, but by what I was able to reclaim.

Have you ever had a similar experience?