What Goes Up Must Come Down, First
by Ed Reither
(Full essay below PDF book)
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his is a story about going down—into the body, into memory, into the dark. Not in despair, but in recognition. For all the talk of transcendence, of awakening and ascent, there is a truth often left out: before anything can rise, something must descend. This essay weaves together personal experience with the insights of Julia Seton, D.T. Suzuki, Robert Bly, Greek mythology, and Carl Jung to explore the necessity—and sacredness—of that descent. Through ayahuasca, shadow work, and mythic reflection, it becomes clear that the soul doesn’t grow by escaping the dark, but by entering it. Carefully. Quietly. Willingly. Because what goes up must come down, first.
Many Moons Ago
It began with a cramp. A low, tight knot in my abdomen—just below the navel—while lying on a mat in the flickering candlelight of an ayahuasca ceremony. The brew, bitter and ancient, had long since passed through my throat, and now it was speaking elsewhere—not in words, but in sensation. The discomfort wasn’t just physical; it was a summons. I was being pulled downward—not into pain exactly, but into something far more demanding: my own depths. Memories began to stir. Not surface thoughts, but roots—buried emotional patterns, fragments of childhood, real visions of leaving my family, friends and life behind, silent determinations I had made long ago that were still, somehow, shaping the course of my life.
I had gone to the ceremony not knowing. Instead, I found myself completely aware, descending—drawn down into my body and at the same time my psyche into the womb-like cave of the belly and also of the mind, my mind. And this descent was no mere fall; as it turned out later it was a purification. A necessary journey through fear, sadness, and a stuggle with an identity I had little notions of how deep it was.
The vine of death, as ayahuasca is sometimes called, was calling me to see what lived below—what resided in the dark soil of my being. Only later would I begin to understand: before one can go “up,” which ayahuasca also calls one to, before light or clarity or transformation, one must first go down. Into darkness. Into the unknown. Into the origin of what I feared and what I had no notion or comprehension of—and into the deeper understanding that this was not just my journey. This was the soul’s journey, the soul that is not mine alone for I was but part of a much greater; a universal soul that seeks to reclaim itself.
As I began to study and integrate that experience, I came across a passage by D.T. Suzuki—one of the 20th century’s great voices of Zen. In a lecture on Zen and psychoanalysis, he quietly offered a statement that felt as if it had been pulled straight from the heart of my journey. “I have no knowledge whatever from the medical point of view,” he said, “but my commonsensical understanding, based on certain experiences, is that the diaphragm is one’s sense of security, which comes from being more intimately related to the ground of things—that is, to the ultimate reality.”
He wasn’t making a claim in scientific terms, but rather pointing to a deeper intuition: that the abdomen – the navel – is where we first encounter the deeper aspects ones self. Not the intellectual and thinking self, not the verbal or conceptual one, but the felt presence of a deeper sense of being. What stirred in my gut was not just memory, there were lots of that, but a call from something more ancient, truly there was a ‘call’. The diaphragm was not just regulating breath—it was acting as a threshold between normal waking consciousness and what I now call ‘the test of integration’.
Long before modern science concerned itself with brainwaves or gut bacteria, Julia Seton, writing in the early 20th century, described the solar plexus as the vital center of subconscious and spiritual life. “The energy which operates the physical human form,” she wrote, “is derived from, and is a part of, the Infinite Source… the human instrument is attuned to transmit creative spiritual impulses.” In her view, the navel region—so often dismissed in modern culture—was a kind of psychic network, where the unconscious and the divine converge.
To Seton, this wasn’t symbolic—it was anatomical in a spiritual sense. The solar plexus, in her language, had to be brought into “perfect atonement” with all other centers of consciousness. Otherwise, life would take on a distorted shape. She did not mean this as moralism or dogma, but as spiritual physics: if the belly—this forgotten repository of memory, instinct, and early life—remained unexamined, the higher faculties could not sustain clarity. Her system echoes Suzuki’s Zen instinct almost perfectly. Both describe the navel region not as a site of fear, sorrow, anger, and desire, but as the buried altar from which all true transformation must rise from.
It was around this time that I revisited Robert Bly’s Iron John, a book that many have called a guide to masculine initiation, though I have come to see it more broadly—as a tale of the human descent into buried life. In the old story, the wild man—Iron John—dwells at the bottom of a forest pond, deep below the surface, unseen and untouchable until a young boy dares to retrieve the key and descend. “The boy must go down,” Bly writes. “The treasure lives in the dark.”
This descent is not romantic. It is not an ascent toward heaven, nor a moment of peak insight. It is a journey downward—into the unknown, full of dread. The figure of Iron John, covered in hair, caged by a fearful society, is the embodiment of the rejected unconscious—wildness, grief, instinct, raw knowing. He is what our culture forgets. And what we each forget, too, in the rush to become civilized, acceptable, intellectutally and spiritually “light.”
In my own descent—through ayahuasca, through the belly, through memory—I realized I was brushing against my own Iron John: an unlived part of me who had been left at the bottom of the lake long ago. The task was not to destroy him, but to free him. And in doing so, free myself—not into some thing or someone I knew, there was not awareness of that. As I said, there was something more ‘real’ leading me, “calling me” to something far older, something beyond the human identity I was identified with, some thing more whole.
These themes are far older than Bly’s rendering. In the Greek imagination, the journey downward was the most sacred of all. It marked the beginning of change—not just externally, but in the very fabric of the soul. Katabasis, they called it—the descent.
Think of Orpheus, who goes below the earth to retrieve Eurydice, trusting that love alone can lead him through the shadows. He nearly succeeds, but his doubt—his backward glance—severs the path and turns longing into tragedy. Or Persephone, dragged into Hades, whose months below mark the turning of the seasons—not just on the earth, but within the body. Her descent is an abduction, yes—but also an initiation, one that entwines her with death, rebirth, and the rhythms of time itself. Even Odysseus, before returning home, must go down into the underworld to speak with the dead, to receive guidance not from the gods above, but from the shades below.
The message is clear: no true transformation occurs without the descent. No wisdom, no renewal, no blooming spring arrives without first passing through the winter world of Hades. The darkness is not a mistake—it is a rite. The dead are not enemies—they are counselors. And the one who returns from that realm comes back changed—not enlightened in the bright, brittle sense we like to imagine, but deepened, quieted, humbled.
In all these stories, the underworld is not Hell. It is the hidden half of the psyche, the place we each must visit—not once, but over and over, in different ways and seasons of life. It is the necessary ground for real vision.
Carl Jung, who spent much of his life decoding the language of myth and symbol, gave us a name for this first encounter with the depths: the Shadow. It is not evil, he insisted, but everything we refuse to see. Everything we disown, repress, exile. To meet the Shadow is to meet what has been made “other” within us—anger, grief, power, sexuality, need, fear. And while the modern world often treats “shadow work” as a psychological technique or wellness slogan, Jung was clear: this is the beginning of the soul’s descent, not the end.
He wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” The Shadow is the threshold guardian. It appears early, often with great resistance—because it signals the start of something far more terrifying than trauma. It signals the undoing of identity. The descent beyond the Shadow leads not just to more content, more memories, more healing—but to what lies beneath identity itself.
And this is where many turn back. Because if we go beyond the Shadow, we no longer merely confront what we’ve repressed—we confront the fear of obliteration. We begin to brush against the death of the ego, the collapse of the separate self. And if we do not go through with it—if we stop at the threshold—we often project what we fear outward. We invent enemies, devils, demons. We create Satan to stand in for what we refused to meet within.
But if we do continue—into the “total darkness,” as I experienced in that ayahuasca ceremony—we begin to sense something far deeper than horror: a silence, a presence, a vastness. We begin to remember something we didn’t know we had forgotten.
What I encountered beyond the Shadow wasn’t some monstrous force waiting to devour me, but something far quieter—a kind of emptiness. Not hollow, but vast. Not cold, but unknowable. It felt like being lowered into deep water with no sense of bottom. And yet, somewhere inside, I knew: this was the death that needed to happen.
Not the end of the body, but the end of something I’d held onto tightly—my certainty, my story, my sense of control. The version of myself I had been protecting. As I let go, the usual scaffolding—thoughts, memories, explanations—began to fall away. What remained was something wordless: a stillness that pulsed through the dark like breath through the earth.
This is why ayahuasca is sometimes called the vine of death. Not because it wounds, but because it reveals. It peels back what is false. In the traditions that carry it, this isn’t seen as punishment or escape—it’s a sacred purification. The soul isn’t meant to be polished and elevated. It’s meant to be stripped bare, to remember what it once knew. Not as an idea, but as a felt truth.
And it was there, in that bare place, that I realized this descent wasn’t mine alone. What I thought of as my story—my body, my memories, my undoing—was really the soul’s story. Not just my soul, but the soul we all belong to. The soul that speaks through myth and dream and rhythm. The soul that doesn’t want to escape the dark—but to be made whole through it. Wholeness doesn’t live in light alone. It lives where the light meets the dark, where grief and grace share a common ground. It lives in the belly, in the ground, in silence.
Coming back from such a descent isn’t about arriving at answers. It’s not a matter of becoming healed, enlightened, or somehow whole in a way that excludes pain. If anything, what returns is a kind of listening. A vulnerability toward things. A new respect for what life is along with the horror of how people live it.
There’s no fanfare in this kind of return. You come back into the world—back into dishes, conversation, traffic—but something has shifted. The body feels different. You breathe a little lower and fuller. The belly feels bigger. You carry a kind of gravity, not as weight, but as fullness, a presence. And when others speak, you begin to hear what’s beneath their words—the places they’re afraid to go, the tensions and the fright held deeply in their eyes. You can feel it!
You don’t need to say much. The point isn’t to explain what happened. It’s to let it live through you. And little by little, the soul that descended begins to show itself in how you move through the world—in how you hold pain, how you meet beauty, how you stay close to the ground.
Because once you’ve gone down and come back, you know: the darkness wasn’t the enemy. It was the doorway. And it’s still there—not as a place to fear, but as a place you now carry within you. A quiet depth that remembers. A home for what we forget.
If something like awakening does occur—and it may or may not, for there are no guarantees—it rarely looks like what we imagined. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t lift us out of life. It reveals something—perhaps faint at first, but unmistakable. And if it’s rightly understood, that glimpse, that shift, marks only a beginning. The first step in a much longer walk: the slow weaving of soul into life. The person we were—the name, the role, the history—still exists. We go back to our relationships, our work, our ordinary rhythms. But something has changed in the undercurrent. We begin to live with a quiet awareness that another depth is present. And how we live from that depth—how we let it shape our choices, soften our perceptions, open our hearts—is not something that can be prescribed. It is wholly individual. And at the same time, it is not ours alone. It is part of the same unfolding that moves through myth, through nature, through silence. A Divine matter. A soul matter.
Reference:
The Race Problem-Money, Julia Seton Sears, Edward J. Clode, 1914
The Psychology of the Solar Plexus, Julia Seton, M.D., Edward J. Clode, 1914
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, D.T. Suzuki, Erich Fromm, and Richard DeMartino, Grove Press, 1960
Iron John, Rober Bly, Addison-Wesley, 1990
Descent Of The Soul and The Archaic: Katabasis and Depth Psychology, Bishop, Dawson, Gardner, Routledge/taylor-francis, 2022
https://beezone.com/current/knot.html