The Below is inviting you into a two-way relationship. Images, symbols, energies, and entities are communicating messages to you, but the Descent is not a passive process where you kick back and watch it unfold like a movie; it’s an immersive world where you are invited (and, indeed, sometimes forced) to fully participate.
There are a number of tips I can give you to help you to engage in two-way dialogue in order to enrich your immersion and deepen your communication. First and foremost, I’ll say that you should avoid interacting with the imaginal in ways that attempt to immediately interpret the mystery or collapse it into some kind of explanation. Note the difference between the following two scenarios:
First, an example of how to shut down or stifle the imaginal by leaping to conclusions. Imagine an angelic feminine form made of radiant light emerges to you in a vision. She exudes joy, safety, and warmth, and you feel an intense attraction to her. When you emerge from your session, you jump online and do image searches for blonde goddesses. You discover a Norse goddess named Freyja who is said to be the goddess of love, and conclude that your vision must be a premonition of a new romantic adventure on the horizon.
Here’s the second scenario, which is what actually happened when this feminine form appeared to me. The first time she visited, I spent a good amount of time just basking in her presence, feeling the emotions and the body sensations she elicited in me. At the end of the session, I thanked her for coming to me and invited her to return if she wished to. And she did. At one point, after she had appeared to me a few times, I did some preliminary internet research, and I noted a number different goddesses blonde hair. While I thought that she might be Freyja, because of the sensations of love and attraction, I didn’t want to settle on that interpretation without more evidence.
Over time, this anonymous angelic figure appeared to me more often. I found her incredibly alluring, and wanted to engage with her more directly. So, in one drumming and spontaneous movement session, I opened up my visual and body-sensation channels and invited her into the space. I then stood silently, listening, watching, and feeling for a response. When I felt her presence emerge, I decided I would ask her for her name. I spoke out loud into the darkness of the practice area in my basement: “Freyja.” I didn’t feel anything change or shift. I repeated again, “Freyja.” Still nothing.
I guessed that her name wasn’t Freyja after all. Undaunted, I decided to go through the names of some of the other goddess names I had researched:
“Frija”… nothing.
“Figg”… nothing.
“Ēostre”… nothing.
“Olwen”… nothing.
“Sunne”… nothing.
“Sol” …
I kid you not, the instant I spoke that name (which means “sun” in Latin), a bright sun ray suddenly pierced through the single tiny window in my basement and streamed into the practice space. Whereas the whole place had been dark just a second ago, the rug I was standing on was now lit up with this sunbeam. I felt the goddess’s presence fill my body more strongly than ever, an almost orgasmic sensation of bliss. Then, I heard her speak to me:
“Sol,” she said… “Sol. Sol. Soul.”
At that moment, the full meaning of her identity dawned on me (pun intended). She was a vision of the radiant light of my own soul, appearing to me in the shape of Sol, the Pagan goddess of the sun. My life was never the same after this revelation, and she has been a constant companion and reminder of my own divine essence.
I hope that these two scenarios clearly illustrate the difference between the kinds of actions that collapse the meaning of an imaginal event into a simplistic conclusion, versus those that invite more intimacy and relationality. I also hope to somehow convey the richness of the relationship you can have with the imaginal world if you focus on developing the two-way conversation instead of on “solving the mystery” or “figuring out what it all means” in a linear way. I never could have arrived at the complexity of this vision of Sol by simply jumping to my own conclusions. I needed to let this imaginal being in, to get to know her by feel, to invite her into a conversation, and to allow a powerful synchronicity to take place in order for the full symbolic and emotional power of this imaginal vision to unfold. It required patience, time, curiosity, and presence to come to fruition.
Actually, though, the underlying principle is not all that complicated. Perhaps we could just say that the best advice is to simply to treat imaginal beings as you would human people you encounter in ordinary life. If you met someone new that you were intrigued by, would you turn away from them in order to Google them on your phone and then make up your mind about who they are, or would you spend a little time chatting face to face in order to get to know them?
In the previous example, I had a two-way conversation with an imaginal being using words. But another really effective way of creating bidirectional communication with the imaginal world is to engage in physical acts of exchange. For me, the most effective way of doing that is to give offerings to specific entities, or groups of them, and to ask for blessings or other messages in return. But what do you offer to spirits?
When I first started out, I only gave two kinds of offerings: lighting candles and burning incense. This was because these two are extremely common offerings used in virtually all Asian religions (and quite a few non-Asian ones as well), and it seemed to me like the most logical place to start. However, once I began to get a bit more familiar with the Below, I began to branch out into more specific (and often, more spontaneous) gifts. I do sometimes look up traditional offerings to deities (e.g., marigolds for Virgin Mary), and do that if it feels right to me. However, for the most part, I just ask them what kinds of offerings they prefer.
This was yet another arena in which I had to learn to listen with an open mind to what was being said, instead of imposing my own thoughts and opinions onto the Below. One time, for example, I had a particularly vivid vision of a spirit I call “La Vieja,” an elderly indigenous South American woman who advised me on how to make connections with my indigenous ancestors. In this vision, I visited her in her home in the underworld. Sitting in a rocking chair, she puffed on a huge cigar, the smoke encircling her head and filling the room. She tapped the ashes out into the smiling mouth of a skull, which clacked its teeth like it was enjoying eating the spent tobacco. The scene then changed to an image of me, carrying a tobacco pouch at my waist. It was clear to me that the message La Vieja was imparting was that I should use tobacco offerings for my ancestors.
To be honest, my first reaction to this idea was that I must be making things up! It felt like I must be mixing my own subconsciously stereotyped ideas about Indigenous people using ceremonial tobacco into my visions. Plus, I had no interest in smoking or even having tobacco in my home. But, as I had done in the past, I decided to not reject the message outright before sitting with the idea for a bit. So I did. I also started doing some research, and I soon realized that, while I had always associated tobacco offerings with Indigenous North Americans, the tobacco plant is actually native to Mesoamerica, and is/was used widely by all kinds of indigenous healers and ritualists in most parts of South America, including in the areas where my ancestors are from. Upon further reflection, I also remembered three facts that tied tobacco to my own ancestral bloodlines: (1) there was an ancestor on my maternal grandmother’s side who worked as a cigar roller, (2) my maternal grandfather worked for a cigarette company for almost his whole life, and (3) my father was a nicotine addict and died of emphysema.
Adding all of this together, in the end, I concluded that La Vieja was right: tobacco was actually the perfect offering for my ancestors! Once I had this realization, I purchased pure, natural tobacco leaves and began burning a small amount in a bowl on my home altar as part of the closing of my daily ritual. I immediately felt that my ancestors were quite happy with this, and it made me feel more connected to them. The point of my story is that I never would have thought of tobacco offerings myself; this insight could only have come from a two-way dialogue with the Below.
Aside from directly addressing them by making offerings, another way of enhancing two-way communication that I have found works well for me is to use oracle decks. I’ve never been into Tarot or other commercially available cards myself because their symbolism doesn’t have any deep meaning for me. However, as I continued to have highly meaningful encounters with different entities and energies during my Descent, I began to create 3×3 printed cards with names and images I felt were evocative of my own personal imaginal lexicon. I made a card each for Bachué, María, Quan Yin, Sol, La Vieja, the jaguar, other animal and angelic spirits, ancestral guides, the four elements, and others — about 60 in total.
While I continued to engage with this whole range of entities through my visions, journeys, offerings, and other ritual practices, I now had an additional method of receiving messages — another channel aside from the sensory ones I had been working with — that could also enrich my communication. I incorporated using the deck into my morning practice. After burning the tobacco, I would shuffle the deck and draw a card. Sometimes I would ask a specific question first. Usually I considered the card I drew to be a message about something I needed to focus on or attend to that day. Each of the cards had a wide range of symbolic meanings, emotional connotations, and other associations built up from my experiences in visions and rituals in addition to the specific visual details in the images. This meant that the messages received from the cards could come through in a wide variety of ways.
My point, again, is to use tools that open up the possibilities for conversation, connection, and relationship instead of shutting down or collapsing the conversation. I’m not saying that you have to use oracle cards specifically. Friends of mine use mandalas, paintings, natural objects, homemade ritual implements, or all kinds of other things. Think about what kinds of tools youcan employ to bring in additional sensory domains and material objects in order to enrich your communications with the Below.
In the long run, the goal is to establish meaningful reciprocal relationships with our imaginal interlocutors. In time, these relationships can be every bit as rich and as real as those between humans. Listen to how Misha made one of the most important connections in her life with the spirit tree outside her home:
In the middle of the night, there was some kind of real emotional need happening for me, and I just felt called to go out to be with this Arizona ash tree outside my house. This one is the first tree I planted on this land. And, I had put in a lot of effort to make a really good home for this tree to root into. At some point, I figured out that even though it has flowers, it’s male. I didn’t know its sex before that.
Anyway, on that moonlit night I go out to the tree. And you know, I’m just following my sense of whatever needs to happen. So, I’m hugging him and I’ve got some low branches that are trimmed in ways so birds can sit without having foliage in their way. And I put my hands on some of these low branches and it feels very supportive. I don’t remember exactly the specifics, but I was asking him for help in a very heartfelt, vulnerable way. And I felt like he volunteered — or I don’t know the right languaging for it — but, somehow we got married that night. He became my spirit husband.
And, a name came to me through some kind of audible inner hearing — as if it were sound but I just knew the name. It said “Ashleigh.” And I was like, “Oh, of course. Right.”
And, when I go out and hug him sometimes now, I have the front of my body toward his trunk, and then his energy comes around behind and then into my heart center, and it’s like, he’s hugging me through me. Anyway, it feels really strange to talk about my husband the ash tree. It feels that there’s something non-ordinary and very sacred about that. And the whole connecting process was spontaneous; I was just following what was needed and where I intuited to position my body.
One part of it that is really touching for me is that it was almost like a form of reciprocity, but not as in a transactional way. He was like, “You put in all this energy, you gave me a home, a place to be. You’ve cared for me all these decades. Now, I can care for you.” I guess I feel like he sensed what kind of need I was expressing when I was asking for help. That was kind of like a call into the void. It was an undifferentiated kind of a call. So it’s as if he stepped forward, you know, and just knew deeply what was needed.
And, another piece of it was that I felt called to cut off a couple of smaller branches. The sense was that I could carve wooden beads from one of them, so that I would have a rosary or a mala that’s beads from his wood that he gave to me. Then that would become a new ritual object that’s infused with all this meaning and context and relationality. With the other branch, I could carve pieces to give out to individuals who I do healing work for. In this way, his healing presence could move out more broadly into the world and extend the web of relationship.