As part of the Shadow School Yoga Challenge, we’re honored to welcome Cindy Stockdale as this month’s Seeker Special Guest Lecturer.
In her session, Inanna’s Descent, Cindy guides us through one of the oldest and most profound myths of transformation—the Sumerian tale of the goddess who descends into the underworld to face her shadow, surrender her power, and return reborn.
Cindy’s teaching invites us to explore our own inner underworld with courage, compassion, and curiosity, using myth as a mirror and movement as a form of medicine.
Join us inside the Shadow School Yoga Challenge to experience this mythic journey for yourself — a practice of letting go, listening in, and returning with light you didn’t know you carried.
ABOUT CINDY STOCKDALE
My deepest passion is to support you to reclaim your personal power and help you live a fulfilled and satisfied life.
I am a certified Quantum Life Coach with degrees in Psychology and Archaeology. I have been teaching yoga, studying Mountain Shamanism and the energetic healing arts for over 20 years, and been an intuitive and channel my entire life.
My highest purpose is to help people remember they are loved. This is a true homecoming. Homecoming means we get to identify what we believe to be true, not what society has told us we need to be. We learn how to identify and discern our own feelings, beliefs, sensations, and then have the courage to live them outloud in the world. I am here for the wild one, the edge walker, the curse breaker, the life claimer. I am here for those who are ready to transform their lives.
A mythic journey into the underworld of self. Through the story of Inanna, you’ll explore shadow work as a path of surrender, release, and rebirth. Each gate becomes a mirror: where do we cling to identity, protection, or power—and what opens when we let go?
5 Takeaways
Learn the ancient myth of Inanna’s descent and its symbolic gates.
Understand shadow work as the process of reclaiming rejected parts of self.
Identify where external authority or conditioning still defines you.
Explore the role of vulnerability, anger, and boundaries in transformation.
Discover how surrender leads to authentic power and rebirth.
Long before Persephone was taken to the underworld, before the myths of Ishtar or Hecate, the Sumerians told the story of Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth. Written in cuneiform—the world’s earliest known script—her descent is one of the oldest recorded myths we have, dating back more than four thousand years.
On the surface, it is the tale of a goddess visiting her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. But symbolically, it is a map for transformation, a guide to what modern psychology calls shadow work, and a mirror for our own journeys of loss, surrender, and renewal.
Inanna was not a minor figure in the Sumerian pantheon. She was the goddess of love, fertility, war, beauty, and power. Her realm was both heaven and earth—cosmic and embodied, celestial and political. She wore a crown, carried a scepter, and ruled with both sensuality and strength.
And yet, like every great archetype, she was incomplete until she faced her shadow.
The story begins when Inanna feels called to descend to the underworld to meet her sister Ereshkigal. Some versions say it was curiosity; others imply rivalry; still others frame Ereshkigal as Inanna’s own dark double. In Jungian terms, Ereshkigal represents the unconscious—the repressed, rejected, and feared aspects of self that demand to be seen.
On the surface, it is the tale of a goddess visiting her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. But symbolically, it is a map for transformation, a guide to what modern psychology calls shadow work, and a mirror for our own journeys of loss, surrender, and renewal.
To reach her sister, Inanna must pass through seven gates. At each one, the gatekeeper demands that she surrender a piece of her regalia. One by one, she gives up her crown, earrings, necklace, breastplate, girdle, ring, and royal robe.
By the time she reaches the throne room, she is naked, stripped of every symbol of status and protection.
Each gate mirrors an inner letting go:
At the final gate, nothing remains but Inanna herself—raw, unadorned, unprotected.
Once she arrives, Ereshkigal does not greet her with warmth. Instead, she kills Inanna and hangs her lifeless body on a hook.
For three days and three nights, the Queen of Heaven lies in the realm of the dead. The world above withers. Fertility ceases. Love stops flowing. Life itself begins to falter.
This motif is familiar: three days in the tomb before resurrection. It echoes later myths and spiritual traditions, from Persephone to Christ. The pattern is archetypal—death before rebirth, the night of the soul before awakening.
Inanna had planned. She instructed her loyal servant to send help if she did not return within a specified time. The god of wisdom, Enki, fashions two beings without gender and sends them to the underworld. They do not fight or demand. Instead, they witness Ereshkigal’s grief, acknowledging her cries of pain.
Moved by their empathy, Ereshkigal allows them to take Inanna’s body, on the condition that another soul take her place. Eventually, her husband Dumuzi (or his sister, in some versions) is chosen to spend part of the year below. Thus, the myth becomes an explanation for the cycles of nature—summer and winter, fertility and barrenness, the eternal return.
So what do we do with this story today?
The descent is not simply an old tale about gods and goddesses—it is our story. Inanna’s stripping at the gates is the stripping away of everything we cling to: titles, identities, stories, defenses, illusions of control.
Her death is the death of who we thought we were.
Her rebirth is the discovery of something deeper, freer, and truer.
This is the heart of shadow work.
Moved by their empathy, Ereshkigal allows them to take Inanna’s body, on the condition that another soul take her place. Eventually, her husband Dumuzi (or his sister, in some versions) is chosen to spend part of the year below. Thus, the myth becomes an explanation for the cycles of nature—summer and winter, fertility and barrenness, the eternal return.
Oliveto Estates, Italy — our upcoming retreat destination in 2027.
Want to go further, with support and structure? The Seeker Membership gives you a home for the descent — teachings, integration, community, ritual.
Carl Jung introduced the concept of the “shadow” in the early 20th century: the unconscious aspects of the psyche that we repress or deny, often projecting them onto others.
Inanna’s descent is a mythic dramatization of that process. Each gate represents a chance to recognize and release:
When we face these questions, we encounter the uncomfortable truth: much of what we call “self” is borrowed, conditioned, or defensive.
To descend is to dismantle. To rise is to remember.
One often-overlooked element of shadow work is anger. Especially for women, anger is taboo, repressed, or mislabeled as hysteria. Yet anger signals boundaries—where something sacred has been crossed.
Ereshkigal, groaning in her grief and rage, embodies this raw power. She is not evil but necessary. Without her, Inanna would never be reborn. Without our own capacity to feel the dark emotions, we remain shallow and split.
The descent teaches that the dark goddess is not to be conquered but to be honored.
Unlike heroic myths of conquest, Inanna’s journey is not about slaying a monster or winning a prize. It is about surrender. Vulnerability. Softening.
The “heroine’s journey,” as some scholars call it, is less about ascending the mountain and more about descending into the depths. It is cyclical, not linear. It is not about dominance but integration.
And it reminds us that true power does not come from crowns or weapons but from the willingness to die to who we were, so that something greater can be born.
If you wish to work with this myth in your own life, here are questions to sit with:
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