Desperately Seeking Persephone by Janet Rudolph, Book Review by Carolyn Lee Boyd, Part Two

In Part One of this review (posted yesterday), we learned how Janet descended into the Underworld, like Inanna and Persephone, after child abuse and rape, and how she began a decades-long journey back to our own world, healed and empowered. To learn more about her return from the Underworld and how she became the shaman and author she is today, I invite you to join the journey in Part Two as we continue to explore “Signposts” that marked her ascent.

Signpost #3. Be aware, be free, be focused, be here, be loved, be strong, be healed.

Janet’s teachers at the Mystery School had brought together shamanic traditions from throughout then world. Among them was Huna, or Hawaiian Adventure Shamanism as practiced by Serge Kahili King. A summary of Huna is shown in a mantra: Be aware, be free, be focused, be here, be loved, be strong, be healed (114) and “focus on the gifts that come to us through adversity” (116). 

Huna’s principles (exhibited in the mantra above), again given to us as a gift by Janet, and which you’ll need to read about in more detail in the book, are: 

• The world is what you think it is/ life is a dream and we can change our experience by changing our dreams.
• There are no limits.
• Energy flows where attention goes and attention goes where energy flows.
• Now is the moment of power.
• To love is to be happy with.
• All power comes from within.
• Effectiveness is the measure of truth.

Janet was beginning her return to the World Above. “I was learning that the places where I felt most broken were the very places I could use, like a roadmap, to reclaim my own power” (117).

Signpost #4. There is always another way to do things.

After almost 20 years at the Mystery School, it was time for Janet to leave. She had begun to find her own voice, but when she used it, she and her family were ostracized by her teachers and the other apprentices. Yet, Janet still had not learned to “recognize the gift of my own medicine” (14). And so, next the Hellies led Janet to Susana, an Ecuadoran Medicine Woman, who had a very loving energy and attitude, and who saw and treated Janet as an equal. They quickly became “soul sisters, comrades of spirit” (145). Janet was at last no longer an apprentice, but also a teacher. Susana showed Janet how to “bring together the energies of spirit for healing for ourselves and others” (146). Specifically, she encouraged Janet to sing, to practice sound healing. In the Mystery School, Janet had been kept from rising to the highest levels of shamanic practice and ceremony because she could not sing to her teachers’ satisfaction, leading to feelings of failure. Janet learned that there are always other ways of doing things, of progressing, and of transforming energy.

Signpost #5. The secret is in the seeds.

Finally it was time for Janet to ascend back into wholeness, into her own spiritual power to influence her world and teach others her wisdom. But she had one obstacle. She still could not forgive her parents for her father’s abuse of her and her mother’s unwillingness or inability to protect her. The abuse had caused her to forget, so her next journey was through her own memory, gaining clues as to what had actually happened. She looked to her own body and what areas were sensitive to touch. She asked relatives about strange stories she had heard about how she stopped eating at age two. She pieced together her own story, the one that began this journey that was now beginning to become a return. 

In one odd circumstance after another she also discovered and reconnected her relationship with her mother, now many years gone. By coincidence, she came into contact with Suzu, a woman who was her roommate immediately after her rape, when Janet was so distraught she completely forgot this important friendship. Suzu reminded her that decades ago Janet had encouraged her to discover Huna through Serge Kahili King’s book. Through Suzu, Janet tracked down a dancing teacher, someone who had helped found modern dance, that earthy and corporeal art form. She realized that her mother was responsible for this opportunity by befriending her teacher and creating an arts school at which her teacher offered lessons, a spectacular act of love by her mother from whom she had only remembered coldness and the inability to provide protection. 

And in one final gift from the Norns, she realized that in a world where ordinary time prevails, she could not have recommended Serge’s book about Huna to Suzu, as it had not yet been published. Perhaps, according to Serge, “the two of you grabbed it from the future” (241). The Norns had bent time just to show Janet how “people from 40 years ago popped up just like that and at the perfect time when I was ready to accept them and the messages they held” (240). Even the spirits of Father Ted and Sr. Compassion came back into Janet’s life when she felt compelled to return a painting Sr. Compassion had given her and was directed to someone who had been seeking information about Father Ted and his disappearance, reconnecting her to Father Ted’s healing spirit. Through these experiences, Janet realized she had never really been alone in her travails and neither are any of us, no matter how isolated and abandoned we might feel.

All through the decades of her journey, seeds had been planted in Janet’s life that would eventually lead to her healing and metamorphosis into the shamanic healer she is today. And she found the secret of returning to the everyday world from the underworld. “All this time I wanted to know how to get out of the underworld. I wanted to leave it behind. But that’s not how it works. Once you’ve been there, you carry it. It doesn’t leave you. You transform it. You use the roots, the vibration to grow out, the first sprout of green above the soil that then grows. I am the root, I am the stem. I am the flower that blooms. I am the seed that drops back into the earth. I become the root again” (246).

Signpost #6. All our lives are myths.

The last signpost is not one Janet learned, but that her story teaches us, her readers. It would be easy to look on all our experiences separately, to think of each encounter, each new teacher, as a coincidence, something that just happened when it did. But when you look instead at your life as an arc, you realize your own storyline is every bit as meaningful and dramatic as those of Persephone or Inanna, or Janet. You see the connections between events decades apart, some clearly causal, some miraculous time bends, and comprehend how you have indeed descended to the underworld and come back to our ordinary lives, or rather our extraordinary lives, not by leaving behind the underworld but by transforming our experiences there and living with them in a way that helps us grow. 

And where are Janet’s seeds flourishing now? Janet is one of the co-weavers of FAR, but she has also written a number of books, including When Moses Was a Shaman and When Eve Was a Goddess. You can find more of her work at /mysticpagan.com/ . You can order each of the books by clicking on the links including this book: Desperately Seeking Persephone.

Source: Rudolph, Janet. Desperately Seeking Persephone, FlowerHeartProductions