The Role of the Nervous System in PTSD in the Myth of Inana

There is an ancient Sumerian myth that lives in the bones of many women. She came before the Greeks spoke of her as the simply beautiful Aphrodite—her name is Inanna.

She is the Queen of Heaven and Earth, radiant and sovereign. But one day, she hears the call to descend. Not out of punishment, but because something in the deep calls to be met.

Inanna enters the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal—her forgotten, grieving shadow.

At each of the seven gates, Inanna is asked to remove something she carries: her crown, her jewels, her robe. All symbols of who she thought she was. She descends naked, vulnerable, and is ultimately struck down and hung on a meat hook. Silence.

My teacher Jalaja Bonheim, one of the foremothers of women’s sacred circles, teaches that Inanna’s descent is not a fall—it’s a rite of passage. This is the journey of trauma, of PTSD, of the soul breaking under unbearable weight. Many women have known what it is to be stripped bare, left for dead in places where no one comes looking. To dissociate. To split from the body. To live suspended, like Inanna on the hook. But in the myth, Inanna is not forgotten. She is mourned. She is missed. And with the help of others, she is brought back—not to the life she had before, but to something more whole. She rises with the wisdom of both heaven and underworld.

The myth does not rush healing. Another teacher of mine, Chameli Ardagh says that there is another archetype in the story Ninshubur, who bangs the drum while Inanna descends into the underworld. She sees it that Ninshubur, Inanna’s loyal servant, advisor, and confidante is not unlike the therapist in long-term depth therapy work!

Inanna remains in the dark until Ereshkigal, the sister who rules the underworld, groans her grief. She is witnessed. Two tiny beings come—not to fix, not to rescue—but to sit with her, echoing her cries. "Oh, your pain is great. Oh, your sorrow is deep." And something begins to soften. Ereshkigal gives them the gift of life in return.

This is women’s work.

The sacred holding.

The being-with. It’s not linear. It’s not clean. It’s messy, slow, and sacred. Healing begins when we are no longer alone in our pain.

If you have known descent—into trauma, into frozen silence, into the loss of who you thought you were—you are not broken. You are on the mythic path of return.

Like Inanna, you are not meant to come back as you were. You are meant to be reborn through the wound. What I have learned in circles I've participated in with Chameli and Jalaja and through my legal psilocybin sitting is that it’s through sisterhood, through soft witnessing, through allowing the body to speak in groans and tears and trembling, that we rise.

Not above, but through.

This is not a story of triumph. It’s a story of truth. And truth, when spoken gently and held in love, becomes medicine.