the way of Persephone
Welcome to Messy Recovery (soon to be The Way of Persephone) - a weeklish publication. Please feel free to share parts of this newsletter that speak to you, or send it to someone you love. Paid subscriptions make writing possible and is the best way to support this newsletter. Thank you for reading, sharing, liking, commenting, subscribing... Thank you for being here. It means a lot.
I started this newsletter in April 2023, exactly a year and a half ago. My initial intention was to write about my personal journey of recovery from addictions - more specifically, about the challenges and difficulties, as well as the benefits and blessings of the recovery. This newsletter was created to be a safe space for me to express and share what I know, theoretically - as a mental health professional - as well as what I have been living, experientially - as a woman on her own recovery journey. At the time when the newsletter was launched, I was still very intimately attached to the identity of a recovering addict. And, as much as I still am - and will continue to be - in recovery, as this is a lifelong journey for me, I don’t necessarily place the identity of an addict in the forefront of my life and a person I believe I am. I feel that I can’t relate that much anymore with the struggles of early recovery, and I choose not to assign some of my many flaws and shortcomings to addiction or alcoholism. I simply don’t wish to focus so much on this aspect of my life anymore.
Instead, I am interested in diving deeper - below the obvious and detectable, below the consciousness and the expected, beyond the facades and appearances, and into deep dark shadows and taboos, into the unconscious, the raw and, most often, socially undesirable, unacceptable, and even shocking. I am interested in exploring and witnessing how different areas in life - more precisely, unconventional (as well as conventional) sexualities, preferences, and practices - can (and, very much do) serve to our personal process of individuation - in this case, my own.
In this process, I am excited about welcoming and befriending all parts of me, about embracing wholeness and the mysterious individuation process, in bringing the unconscious to the surface, and in becoming who I truly am - despite the societal and cultural norms, standards, and expectations that are so incredibly forced upon us all (especially women). I am interested in integrating all parts of me - conscious and unconscious, those which I like and those which I very much dislike, my shadows, dreams and projections, as well as the “forbidden” fantasies and desires. I am interested in becoming a woman that I know I have always meant to be. Sexuality was always a path where I was discovering my potential, my wholeness. For a while out there, I failed to see how my sexuality has always been a main source of intimacy for me, as well as a primary catalyst for my spiritual quest; and, instead, I often chose to judge myself for being so “superficial”. But, now I am in acceptance of my own truth. And, as always, I hope that my writing fully reflects my own path and experiences.
My life and personal development in the last year and a half, was of the most significance and mostly influential in this choice. I have grown from an insecure, restrained, afraid, lost, and deeply depressed and isolated human (although this may come as a surprise to many of you who know me) to a confident and remarkable woman beyond my belief - wild, curious, uninhibited and alive; a woman open to new life and experiences, and willing to investigate and explore her deepest and darkest thoughts and desires. Let no one be mistaken - while on this path, I have faced many difficulties and experienced many aches and pains; mental, emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual. And, most importantly, I have recently become aware that my health and happiness mainly always depended on my sexual satisfaction. And I don’t mean that in a sense that I would get to be validated and therefore know my self-worth through sex - although in very dark times I used to believe in this nonsense. What I mean is that getting laid would make me feel good, grounded, balanced; it would help me snap out of depression and misery, and become more connected to my body and my true self.
Sexuality has been a kind of liberation for me. Personally, I am blown away by this marvelous transformation, and I wish to carry the message that sex is good, sex is transformative, and sex is holy. I want all of those who need to hear this, to hear it, and hopefully be inspired. I am now aware that my search for wholeness for a long time excluded sexuality, and that this journey actually is supposed to be executed through the integration of mind, body, spirituality and sexuality. I have always used my own body as a kind of experimental laboratory, when it comes to diet, physical health, exercise, yoga, spirituality, detox practices… so why not when it comes to sex. If truth is that we must give our body heathy food, exercise, relaxation, sleep… then why would we not include good sex in it as well (of course, only if sex/sexuality holds an important place in your life)? As it has been expressed in the book Women of the Light: “To honor the body requires that we honor our sexuality”.
I wish to share more openly about my experiences here, in my newsletter. That being so, I’ve decided to change the name of my newsletter to The Way of Persephone - I find it so much more fitting. And, if you wonder why, let me tell you about Persephone…
“Every woman “gives birth astride a grave” (Beckett) as she brings forth new life but simultaneously, by nature of the necessity that all things born must die, creates a death.” ~ Emma McGrory, Death Becomes Her: Persephone as the Mother of Mortality
Persephone is a Greek goddess, a daughter of Demeter and Zeus, a wife of Hades, and queen of the underworld and the dead. Most important myth attached to her is the one of her abduction by Hades, her father's brother. In her absence, her mother, Demeter, is overwhelmed by the sorrow and causes the crops to die. She also allows the crops to grow again after the “solution” is reached and she can see her daughter again - Persephone will spend six months out of the year with her mother, and six months with her husband in the underworld - as she had eaten six pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld (eating pomegranate seeds symbolizes that she would have to come back to the underworld, and the amount of the seeds decides on the length of her stay).
Some believe that Persephone only suffered and struggled in the underworld, that she was a victim solely; many people (myself included) believe something else. Persephone walked through the darkness - her own personal heroine journey through the dark woods - got comfortable in there, and had grown from a young and inexperienced maiden, into a full mature woman - a Queen. Persephone encompasses the full life and death cycle within herself, independently from both her husband and her mother. She is not simply that which sparks off the seasonal cycle change - she is the entire cause for it. As Antonia Tripolitis says, Persephone’s annual rebirth “symbolizes the eternity of life which flows from generation to generation”. As she eats a handful of pomegranate seeds (possibly knowing exactly what the consequence of it is), Persephone secures her come back to the underworld - exchanging innocence for maturity, and maidenhood for womanhood.
Each spring Persephone comes back with the flowers to tell the story of renewal, the story of hope and balance. And each fall, when she leaves again to join her husband down below in the underworld, her mother weeps yet again - cold winter comes, while Demeter waits for Persephone’s return. For Persephone, however, there seems to be no deep regret. She looks forward to the time she spends as Hades' wife, and as a Queen of the Underworld where she gets to be guiding those who have lost their way to their next adventure, the next phase of their life. Persephone, means “bringer of death,” in the sense that her precise and intentional, but gentle and caring, hand, is a comfort and a guide to those who are making their descending. In this way, Persephone herself is the door to the unknown worlds, a gateway to revelations and realizations. She embodies transformation.
Persephone, just like all of us, is a figure of contradictions, discrepancies - tension here is mostly arising between her status as a fertility deity and a ruler of the dead. Persephone moves between the worlds of the living and the dead; she can be seen and understood as a sign of the inseparable interconnection between the life and death. And when you think about it - when can there be any new life where there is no death of a kind, at first. This is an essential connection, “for a lord of the dead with no ability to impact the living does not have much power” (Emma McGrory).
Persephone is not exactly a sweet, innocent maiden turned into a death goddess against her will. She is death; as much as she is life. Born out of a natural, organic, conception of death through plants - specifically those grown for our sustenance and nourishment - Persephone comes long before the myth of her abduction and have already had an existence as a powerful life & death goddess because of her own ability. Her name may not have been Persephone, but the Greeks gave her that name - closely related to the Greek word for “destroy” or “bringer of death”. It was not exactly the spring goddess they had in mind, but rather the representation of the eternal continuous equilibrium between life and the general tendency of the universe towards the chaos and death. (Emma McGrory)
"When [one begins to see] that the whole story is about a figure who is first and foremost goddess of the underworld, one understands very differently what it means to say that she is also goddess of spring and renewal. To start with death, with the underworld, as a given is to see life in an entirely different way. . . . We are always still virginal before the really transformative (killing) experiences." ~ Christine Downing, THE GODDESS: Mythological Images of the Feminine
We humans gravitate towards living our lives within a relevant and significant context - within a story, a myth. That’s a life with a meaning, after all. Unfortunately, today most of us are living modern lives in a different way, where there is loss of myth and story, and as a result we tend to get a sense of unsettledness, homelessness and loneliness. As psychoanalyst, Rollo May, puts it “The person without myth is a person without a home… The loneliness of mythlessness is the deepest and least assuageable of all. Unrelated to the past, unconnected with the future, we hang as if in mid-air.” Myth is many things, but above all it what gives life a meaning.
The myth of Persephone and especially her transformation in the underworld and her (as some of us believe) willing partaking in the eating of the pomegranate seeds have been the subject of numerous works by psychologists, mythologists, religious studies scholars, and artists. A revamping of the image of Persephone reveals her as a complex woman made up of equal parts victim, survivor, strategist, daughter, lover, partner and queen. And this is so inherently familiar to most of us, women. We’ve all been (and often still are) all of these characters. The story of Persephone is also familiar because it reflects the well-known reoccurring nature of life. In her separation from the mother, as well as the identity of the maiden, we see shades of death, we sense coldness of the winter, we feel grief, loss, change, as well as new beginnings. (Mary Antonia Wood)
These things are all so extremely transformative, and so profoundly healing. This eternal reflection of a woman’s development and growth through natural cycles is so deeply intertwined into the story of Persephone’s journey to the underworld. As it is so in my own journey of self discovery, and into an evolved, mature, and confident woman - one who chooses to expose herself to her biggest fears until fears hold no power over her anymore.
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Stay safe.
Until we meet again,
Marina
Thank you so much for restacking me 🙏❤️ @Juniper Lynn Tartaglia