Initiation or Psychosis? My Descent Into the Underworld

In the summer of 2024, I went on a regression retreat in Crete and reached the highest ecstasy point I have ever known.

There was a moment (brief and infinite at once) when I experienced the light and the dark as the same substance. Not opposites. Not in battle. One field. It was in that state that I felt the totality of peace and love in my heart. It felt as though every past life, every wound, every devotion had led to that precise moment. It was the most complete fullness I have ever experienced in a body.

For a second, I believed the mission was complete.

And then I said: Initiate me to the underworlds. I’m ready.

Because I knew I was not here to escape into bliss. I was not here to ascend alone. If the Earth was rising, I wanted to understand what weighed her down. I wanted to know the underworlds so I could walk with them rather than bypass them.

A friend on the retreat sang me a melody that I understood (without words) to mean that the time has come for the Earth to rise as a collective field. I responded by descending into the cave where Zeus was born.

It was there that I received information. My friend channeled sounds that I recognised as the Nagas (serpentine energies of the underworld). I did not fully understand what was happening at the time. I only knew I was being initiated.

Immediately after the retreat, my young daughter was taken from me.

Because what I experienced that week (the most beautiful state of my life) is what modern science calls psychosis.

My perception was vast. My heart was open. My personality shifted. When I returned home changed, the people I loved were deeply afraid.

Paranoia followed. Fragmentation. What psychiatry would call schizophrenia. I was hospitalized for the first time. Since then, my system has entered that state many times, often without substances. It happens naturally, though not intentionally. However, the most recent time, cannabis — a clear CO₂ resin I had never tried before — accelerated the descent immediately.

The state was luminous and loving. In it, I received a simple message: From now on, you will enter the underworlds and you will remember. I felt relief. I was tired of forgetting and tired of waking up in hospital rooms feeling as though something was fundamentally wrong with me.

During those states there were also presences that spoke to me. They spoke internally and sometimes seemed to guide what I did or where my attention moved. These experiences carried the feeling of being in communication with other intelligences. When inside that state, the boundary between self and world becomes extremely thin.

And when others are afraid of you while you are that open, their fear floods your system.

It moves through the vessel.

Despite this, I remained conscious. Present. Loving toward myself even while being transported to a psychiatric ward by friends who did not tell me where we were going.

One friend stayed. In the moment we arrived, I recognized something larger moving through both of us. I did not understand it. I only felt her warmth, her steadiness, even as she left me there.

Then came the restraints. The injections. The fluorescent purgatory.

And yet…

When I am in those rooms — when I am in what feels like a torture chamber — something extraordinary happens. I fall asleep and ascend to the highest heavens. I am replenished. Then I wake back inside the nightmare. Then I return to the heavens again.

This oscillation saves me.

It is a strange paradox: profound communion inside institutional containment.

The closest analogy I can offer is intoxication. How someone deeply drunk can access immense love, beauty, harmony in the midst of chaos. Except in my case, I remain lucid and in my body. Watching. Participating. Remembering.

This is what psychosis feels like from the inside. It is permeability without containment.

Collective fear moves through quickly, and intensity arrives faster than the body can regulate. Meaning becomes clear only after the experience settles and integrates.

The work is not to stay in those states. The work is to return from them and speak. To speak for people who come back believing something is inherently wrong with them, believing they are dangerous or cut off from god. Many reach these states through deep surrender to something larger than the personality, and the cost can be enormous. Friendships dissolve. Careers disappear. Identities collapse. Some are jailed. Some are heavily medicated. Some lose families or community.

Sometimes the catalyst is simply dropping inhibition and allowing the body to transmute what a room cannot hold. When I use the word transmutation I am not speaking about something decorative or gentle. I mean disruption. I mean exposing what a group suppresses. I mean becoming the lightning rod that reveals tension already present.

Certain shamanic traditions describe a similar archetype called the Heyoka, a sacred trickster who disrupts and mirrors behavior in order to reveal what is hidden. Language changes across cultures but the pattern persists.

We arrive with a direction even when we cannot remember the details. Something in us moves toward particular experiences. Over time, I started noticing that people play very different roles in the same unfolding. Some create structures that support others. Some repair what has been wounded. Some bring stability. Some reveal what is hidden. Some help reconcile tension. I have been shown that my role is harmony.

And harmony is not the absence of discord. It is the integration of it.

If my nervous system opens wide, if I descend into underworld states, it is not to glorify them. It is to return with language. To speak for those who feel exiled from love. To reach those who believe their sensitivity is a defect.

Because many of them are not bad children. They are overwhelmed children.

They are permeable systems in a fear-saturated world.

So I ask:

What is your mission?

What is most important to you?

What are you here to fulfill?

Harmony requires entering dissonance.

My recent hospitalization clarified something important. Even the people who brought me there were participating in something larger than any of us could fully see at the time. We are moving together toward deeper understanding, toward compassion that includes complexity and toward love that does not require sameness.

This is a time to see one another more clearly and forgive more deeply. Even destabilizing experiences can reveal something once they are given time and understanding. We are not enemies here. We are one family learning how to hold intensity without destroying one another. And some of us (willingly or not) are learning that lesson from the underworlds. I am grateful to be the voice for those who are ready to rise.