She Keeps Showing Up
On Longing, Fear, Signs, and the Goddess Who Found Me
There is a longing that lives deep in my body, and right next to it brews my fear. These sensations live in my gut with paradoxical movements of expansion and contraction. When I sense this I know something is changing, shifting, growing with anticipation inside me.
Signs, pointing me in one particular direction, are showing up in my life over and over again lately, to the point where I cannot not pay attention.
She keeps showing up.
Inanna is one of the oldest known goddesses in human history, worshipped in ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq) over 4,000 years ago. She is the goddess of love, war, beauty, justice, and political power - and her most famous myth, The Descent of Inanna, is among the earliest written stories ever recorded.
She keeps making an appearance in my life - in stories I am reading, poems I glance at, and random reference points. Too many times to ignore.
So, I am listening. I am creating. I am designing.
She Who Descends & Rises: A Women's Initiation in the Way of Inanna
This is not an hour long talk, this is a 1-2 year initiation into weaving the ways of Inanna into your own life, your own breath, your own healing.
I have learned through years of my Mindfulness practice, through my own descents and returns, through sitting with women and children in their most tender places - that my body knows before my mind does. That signs arrive before I am willing to mentally acknowledge them. And that when I finally stop and say yes - something ancient and alive begins to move in me and I must follow.
Inanna has been moving around me for months now, and I am stopping to listen and invite her fully in.
Her story is not mythology. Not really. It is one of the oldest maps ever drawn - of what it means to be human. To be a woman. To lose everything you thought defined you, to hang in the dark not knowing if you will return, and to rise — not back to who you were, but into who you truly are, underneath it all.
I know this journey. I continue to live and learn it cyclically. It never truly ends.
I suspect you recognize something about this too.
The descent shows up in our lives in a thousand ordinary ways — in the moment a relationship ends, a role disappears, an identity no longer fits. In the diagnosis. The loss. The midlife unraveling that no one tells you is actually an initiation. In the morning you wake up and do not recognize yourself - and do not know yet that this is the beginning, not the end.
Inanna walked through seven gates. At each one, something was taken. Her crown. Her wisdom. Her dignity. Her armor. Her authority. Her discernment. Her very self. And at each gate, when she asked why — the answer was the same:
The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.
The stripping is not punishment. It is the path.
And so I am building something - with her. With Inanna.
A space for women who are ready to stop running from their own descent - and to walk it together, consciously, with ancient guidance and most importantly, with one another’s witnessing.
She Who Descends & Rises is a women’s circle — a one-to-two year initiation journey through the seven gates of Inanna and back into life. Gate by gate. Layer by layer. Together.
We will sit with each stripping - not to rush through it, but to mine it for everything it carries. We will learn to recognize the gates as they appear in our ordinary lives. We will practice witnessing one another the way those two small beings witnessed Ereshkigal - without fixing, without fleeing, without silver linings.
And through it all, we will rise. Not as we descended. But as women who have been through the fire and know - in their bones — what we are made of. So when we return to these descent cycles as we will - we are more aware now, we are more supported now, we do not fear them anymore.
Inanna has been waiting 4,000 years for us to remember her.
I think it is time.
If this is calling you - If this is landing in your body as a yes - even a quiet, uncertain one — I invite you to reach out to me directly. We will begin when the circle is whole.
More is coming.
Molly Holsen, M.S., is a mindfulness educator, coach, and the founder of MS Mindful Molly. With over 30 years in education and a Master of Science in Mindfulness, Yoga and Social Emotional Health, she teaches mindfulness to children in schools and walks alongside adults in their own return to themselves through personalized 1:1 coaching.
She is currently building She Who Descends & Rises — a one-to-two year women’s initiation circle in the way of Inanna. She lives and teaches from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she continues to learn — cyclically, humbly — what it means to descend and rise.
I get it. I'm scared of the descent but I'm ready.