When Your Psyche Loses Its Voice

Following Inanna on her journey through the second gate.

Since the hurricane, I have been weepy. Not a little bit weepy: ridiculously weepy, Victorian-novel weepy. The tears come randomly and often in disproportionate measure to whatever seems to have brought them on. Thus the smell of a tangerine leaves me sobbing but hearing that an acquaintance found a bit of her destroyed home’s deck, downriver from where her house once stood, only makes my vision go swimmy for a moment. My internal water table is rising and falling on its own peculiar cycle. Sometimes I spontaneously overflow.

Growing up, my mom was a crier. If I got an A on a paper, she cried. If someone died (and then was bought back to life) on General Hospital, she cried.

Stalwartly, my teenage self decided I would not leak at the slightest provocation.

But that resolve has been thrown over by storm winds, twisters, and the sense that my body needs to release and release and release.

Which makes this the perfect moment to be delving into the mythical Journey of Inanna. If you missed last week’s post introducing Inanna and beginning this descent into our psyches, you can catch up here.

The short version:
Inanna was a Sumerian goddess. On a visit to her sister, the Queen of the Underworld, she had to cross through seven gates. At each gate, she was asked to release something she held dear.
We will be traveling through the gates until Winter Solstice. Paid subscribers will receive additional journaling prompts and thoughts for making the journey feel sacred.

And so we come to the Second Gate…

To cross through the second gate, Inanna is required to give up her necklace. A necklace sits at the throat chakra, and so represents one’s voice and how we express ourselves.

(In honor of this particular gate, I quietly changed the name of this publication from Tell Me Something True to, simply, Something True. If you’re an internal processor or you’re just not sure what you want to say, I feel you. Let’s just be here together. Comment as you wish.)

Back to the Second Gate….

Metaphorically, taking off your necklace doesn't have to mean giving up your ability to speak…although it might. What would that feel like? I can viscerally remember the panic pushing upward through my chest when I had a head cold and completely lost my voice, the futile attempts to make a sound come out as the air rushed uselessly through my vocal cords.

Think of the initiation of the second gate as giving up not just one way but the many ways in which you express yourself in the world. How do you show the people around you that you love them? How do you create: singing, baking, gardening, writing poetry, blogging?

What would it mean to put these down (and, no, you can’t simply replace one form of communication with another).

A few more journaling prompts and suggestions for making this a sacred ritual: