about soul initiation
Soul Initiation is the path of remembering, healing, and embodiment. Steph Mac guides you through emotional alchemy, intuitive activation, and sacred reconnection to your truth.
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You don’t come here to be fixed.
You come here to die and be reborn.
In the bottom of the ocean where truth lives in bones.
This is soul reclamation through fire.
Where your illusions burn and your essence is revealed.
Where grief becomes gold.
And the woman you truly are is remembered.
Only enter this circuit if you're ready to lose who you thought you were, to meet who you truly are.
You don’t come here to be fixed.
You come here to die and be reborn.
This is where I hold you, in the deep.
In the unraveling. In the dark night.
In the bottom of the ocean where truth lives in bones.
This is soul reclamation through fire.
Where your illusions burn and your essence is revealed.
Where grief becomes gold.
And the woman you truly are is remembered.
Only enter this circuit if you're ready to lose who you thought you were, to meet who you truly are.
A POEM: RECLAMATION
This small piece of writing that I have created speaks about the process of reclaiming the soul through deep initiation. Like a journey to the underworld, speaking to aspects of Persephone within Greek philosophy, and inspired by 'Running with the Wolves' by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, where a woman goes through a process to reclaim herself, either to reclaim her voice, values, imagination, clairvoyance, stories or ancient memories. But in this particular case, she goes for the deeper and the darker and the less known, and what she finds is the bones. In psychology, this is a way of describing 'solitude as a psychospiritual recovery project'.
It is much like reclaiming our 'inner self' after a process of deep thirst, the idea of saving ourselves, or getting our essence back after losing oneself completely. The process is giving power to who we are after such a fall to bring us into wholeness.
The irony is that the bottom of the ocean changes depending on where you stand. It can be one foot deep, or hundreds of meters deep. She swims to the bottom each time, regardless of how much depth an object or idea has. What's important is that she delves, and resurfaces each time. She understands the life and death cycle intertwined within all of the world, and she allows herself to die, to be born.
Naivety is described as 'not seeing bad in the world and only choosing to focus on the good' but rather innocence, is described as 'seeing both the bad and good in the world and choosing to focus on the good'. This is important because she must be brave enough to open her eyes through her descent, regardless of whether she likes what she sees.
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ABOUT THE PATH OF SOUL DESCENT
Soul initiation is the rite of being stripped to essence. It is the moment life drags (or invites) you beneath the surface patterns you’ve outgrown and asks, “Who are you without them?” In that underworld space you face your own shadow, integrate lost power, and re‑emerge carrying gifts for the collective. Every culture holds a version of this story, below are four key faces of the descent.
Descent to Inanna
Origin: Sumerian myth (c. 1900 BCE)
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, descends to her sister Ereshkigal’s underworld. At each of the seven gates she surrenders a royal symbol, crown, jewels, robe, until she stands naked and powerless before the dark. She is killed, then revived after three days and rises twice‑crowned: still a sovereign of the heights, now also initiated into the depths.
Modern resonance: The stripping of titles, roles, and identities that no longer serve. A reminder that true authority is rooted in both light and shadow.
Kali
Origin: Hindu tradition (first textual mentions in the Devi Mahatmya, c. 6th century CE)
Kali is the black‑skinned, serpent‑haired Goddess of Time, Death, and Liberation. She dances upon corpses, tongue outstretched, wearing a garland of skulls, symbols of the egos she has cut away. Kali does not destroy life; she destroys illusion, severing what binds us to fear.
Modern resonance: The fierce, uncompromising force that ends cycles of self‑betrayal. Kali energy asks: “Are you willing to lose everything false in order to live everything true?”
Hekate
Origin: Greek mythology, later Hellenistic Mystery cults
Hekate is the torch‑bearing guardian of crossroads and liminal spaces: thresholds, moon‑lit paths, and the gates of birth and death. She stands between worlds, guide of souls, keeper of keys.
Modern resonance: The intuitive wisdom that lights your way through the unknown. Hekate reminds us we never walk alone; guidance exists even in the darkest passage if we dare to look for the torch.
Descent work is foundational: without it, every other pillar remains surface‑deep. Here we meet the bones, claim the gold, and rise with the authority of one who has walked through fire. This is not optional shadow work, it is the source‑code upgrade that makes all other initiations sustainable and true.
DESCENT TO SOUL
This is the part of the temple you don’t choose casually.
You find yourself here when nothing else makes sense,
when your life feels like it’s burning down, and every part of you wants to run.
That’s when I meet you. Not to save you, but to sit in the fire beside you.
To stoke the flames. To keep you company while you die,
and to make sure you reclaim every single thread of gold hidden in the ashes.
This pillar is rooted in Persephone’s descent,
in the mythic path of Inanna, and the bones of the wild woman
spoken of in Women Who Run With the Wolves.
It is where you face the full truth of your grief, your rage, your loss,
your longing, your exhaustion, your cracking-open.
And it is where you meet your power.
This isn’t about spiritual bypassing.
This is the end of spiritual niceness.
This is the homecoming through fire, not through fixes.
Not with soothing. Not with shortcuts.
I don’t come to heal you.
I come to witness your power return through the crucible.
Through death. Through rage. Through beauty. Through truth.
This is where feminine reclamation strips you bare
and gives you back to yourself.
“There is no balm when you are about to meet your power.
There is no light when you are feeling every single thing in your body.”
Only come here if you’re ready to stop pretending.
Only come if you’re willing to burn.
SOUL ALCHEMY
A sacred process of descent, purification, reclamation, and re-creation.
1. The Soul Call
Something begins to stir.
You feel the discomfort. The cracking. The longing. Life can no longer stay the same, even if nothing on the outside has changed yet. This is the rumble before the descent, often disguised as crisis, burnout, grief, or existential ache.
Symptoms: restlessness, disillusionment, identity collapse, spiritual fatigue
Sacred Task: Listen. Answer the call. Say yes to the unknown.
2. The Descent
This is the underworld phase. Ego structures fall. Illusions burn. You are brought face to face with your pain, your grief, your rage, your unmet self. It’s the crucible, Kali’s fire, Inanna’s stripping, the dark night of the soul.
Symptoms: emotional intensity, fear, loss, spiritual death
Sacred Task: Stay. Be with what is. Let yourself be undone.
3. The Purification
Everything that is not you begins to burn off. This is not about fixing or bypassing, it’s about allowing yourself to be distilled. You meet your shadow, your lineage pain, your internalized conditioning. And you start to let it go.
Symptoms: fatigue, body detox, grief waves, sacred rage
Sacred Task: Surrender. Grieve. Sweat. Let the fire do its work.
4. The Reclamation
From the ashes, something golden returns. Your essence. Your wild voice. Your inner child. Your womb. Your power. You begin to pull soul fragments back into your field, pieces that were once lost, abandoned, shamed, or suppressed.
Symptoms: memory returns, gifts resurface, deep clarity emerges
Sacred Task: Choose yourself. Say: “This is mine. I remember.”
5. The Restructuring
Your systems, nervous, energetic, relational, creative begin to reorganize. You can no longer operate from old patterns. This is when new boundaries, rituals, and ways of being start to form. You build the foundation for a new way of life.
Symptoms: new priorities, realignments, release of people/projects
Sacred Task: Anchor it. Create new structure to hold your truth.
6. The Embodiment
You don’t just know your truth, you live it. This is where alchemy becomes form. Your frequency becomes your presence. Your business, art, relationships, and voice begin to reflect the inner transformation.
Symptoms: magnetic leadership, authenticity, flow with form
Sacred Task: Move in integrity. Let your frequency lead.
7. The Transmission
What was once a private healing journey becomes a shared medicine. You now carry codes. You are a walking transmission. Your story, your work, your way of being becomes an offering to others, not from the wound, but from the wisdom.
Symptoms: client attraction, leadership invitations, soul work expands
Sacred Task: Share. Serve. Speak. Lead from your spiral.
Soul Alchemy is never just personal.
It is collective. Ancestral. Archetypal.
Each time you spiral through it, you claim a deeper dimension of your wholeness and bring more light into the world.
THE ALCHEMY PHASES
🜂 The 7 Stages of Inner Alchemy (Temple Path)
-
Calcination – Burning away the false
Ego death. The fire that destroys illusion, control, identity masks, survival patterns.
→ Cracking the shell. Initiation into the spiral. Identity collapse.
→ Expressed in: Mother-Code Re-Templating, Voice & Visibility, Awakening -
Dissolution – Melting into truth
Emotional release. The conscious breakdown of structures. Grief, surrender, and softening into the unknown.
→ The wellspring opens. Emotions rise. The client meets the ocean of their inner life.
→ Expressed in: Womb Work, Earth-Root Embodiment, Transmissions -
Separation – Sifting the real from the false
Clarity emerges. The gold is separated from the sludge. Truth from programming. Discernment begins.
→ Boundaries form. “What’s mine” becomes clear. The voice activates.
→ Expressed in: Voice & Visibility, Lineage & Legacy Alchemy -
Conjunction – Union of soul and self
Integration of parts. Feminine and masculine align. Mind, body, and soul begin to sync.
→ The sacred marriage within. Clients begin creating from wholeness.
→ Expressed in: Inner Union Integration, Temple Mentorship -
Fermentation – New life begins
Inspired decay. Composting old identity into fertile ground. A spiritual quickening.
→ A new archetype awakens. Creation from soul begins.
→ Expressed in: The Eye, Magi, Magdalene -
Distillation – Purifying essence
Refinement. Stillness. Vision gets clearer. The soul matures and discards what’s unnecessary.
→ Deep embodiment. Transmission clarifies. Spiritual sovereignty arises.
→ Expressed in: 1:1 Mentorship, Field-Based Guidance, Sacred Business Strategy -
Coagulation – The Great Work embodied
Full integration. Spirit and matter united. The soul lives fully through the body.
→ The client becomes the medicine. Temple leadership is born.
→ Expressed in: Temple Leadership, Legacy-Level Creation, Client-as-Guide Activation
I was once spiritual love and light too.
Until Kali knocked on my door.
Until Hekate would no longer allow my excuses.
Until I was forced to release the grip on everything I thought I knew.
There is no niceness. No nice-nice, when it comes to facing the death.
There is no soothing for what must be felt.
There is no balm when it's a situation when you're about to meet your power.
There is no light when you are facing the moments of feeling every single thing in your body.
We don't take panadol. We don't take plant medicine. We don't have fixes. No fixes.
Nothing can be fixed.
The fire is the thing most are afraid to face,
And it will cut all illusion.
What are you most afraid of?
And will you allow all that isn't you to be burned by the fire?
