INSTRUCTIONS R the
UNDERWLD
INSTRUCTIONS R THE UNDERWLD
LEARN TO SEE THROUGH THE DARK
Begins 22 September | Then every Thursday from 1 October to 31 January
5-7pm UK Time + 3 x Immersive Workshops
Instructions for the Underworld is a 4 month immersion
in remembering how to dream, how to honour the Gods and how to listen to the myths.
This is the heart of experiential Depth Psychology.
You will be initiated into a circle devoted to soul.
Together, you will co-create the Underworld through shared embodied practice, ritual and group process.
There are accessible payment tiers and plans to suit your needs
It’s time to descend and remember the old dreaming ways
Heroines of Descent
“Today, we need heroes of descent not masters of denial. We need mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to ageing, who show soul without irony or embarrassment… The legendary heroes of the ancient world — Odysseus, Psyche, Persephone, Orpheus, Dionysus and even Heracles - all descended into the Underworld to learn other values than those that rule the daily business of sunlit life.
They came back with a darker eye that can see in a dark time.”
James Hillman
INSTRUCTIONS R the
UNDERWLD
This is for the beings who are ready to reclaim the dreaming ways of old. The ways that the upper world has forgotten, but that our souls still remember. The ways of descent, reverence and transformation. The imaginal path, the embodied terrain, the devotional trust that what descends will also ascend. That life emerges from death.
Throughout this four-month immersion in the Underworld, we will dream weave with myth, ritual, animism, creativity, embodied practice and Depth Psychology to create a communal testament to the Deities of the Dead, to life, and the mystery at the heart of it all.
The great myths don’t ask to be studied, dissected and analysed. They want to be re-animated, embodied and given the chance to guide you to the heart of your own myth. To the heart of your longing, desire and dharma.
Together, we will reimagine the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, co-create the Underworld in community and remember how to dream. We will answer the call of Hades and follow him down to his kingdom in search of eros, soul and belonging.
Who is this for?
The artist in you who longs for a container to nourish their creativity in the dark season, so that you ascend in spring astonished and brimming with inspiration.
The one standing at the threshold of loss, grief, or transformation who longs to trust the descent and listen for what truly wants to emerge.
The student of life who yearns for both depth and embodiment: a rich curriculum of myth and psychology alongside ritual, movement and community.
The space holder, therapist or guide who gives so much and needs a place to be held - to let die what is ready to die and to prepare for what is longing to be reborn.
The Mothers who hold, love and tend tirelessly, who also need to be tended and return to the great capacity of their own strength, support and soul.
The devotees to life, to the mystery and to our bleeding world. This is an invitation to also devote yourself to yourself.
And more than anything, this is for the Dreams.
The Dreams which know, which endlessly create masterpieces to guide us.
The Dreams which long to be offered, honoured and felt.
Does this sound like you… but you have some questions?
I’m here… book a free 20 minute discovery call and we can talk through whether this is right for you, right now.
This immersion is both ancient and modern: a remembering of the old ways of soul-making and a living, breathing response to what we most need now.
To remember that your pleasure, creativity and dreams are the greatest revolutionary power you hold to resist the agony of the times we are living through.
Whilst what we uncover will undoubtedly inspire your work and your offerings, ultimately this immersion is for you. For you to incubate your dreams and your capacity to dream down in the fertile ground of the Underworld. So that you become skilfull in the ways of descent… and ascent.
For you to step into your own myth and live your life fully, freely and wildly.
With trust, devotion and an expanded capacity to feel, create and dream.
This is a devotional journey and we will honour the Deities of the Dead: Demeter, Persephone and Hades.
The recording of the free workshop devoted to Demeter is below:
What You Will Receive
Over our four months together, you will be held in a deep circle of myth, ritual, dream and embodied practice. This is does not mean learning about the mysteries but entering them, reimagining them, so that they transform you.
Deep excavation in the mythic: We will spend time getting intimate, nerdy and erotic with the epic myths of descent including the stories of Persephone, Psyche, Orpheus and Odysseus.
Reclaim your dreaming: Learn practices to remember, honour and live from your dreams, so they become guides for your creativity, your healing, and your soul’s unfolding.
Trust the descent: Instead of resisting life’s inevitable losses and thresholds, discover how to meet them as initiations that reveal hidden richness and prepare the ground for rebirth and ascent.
Reclaim eros and soul: Awaken to the deep pulse of vitality, creativity and love that arises when we allow ourselves to surrender, to soften and to listen to what is truly longing to emerge.
Embodied transformation: Through movement, ritual and somatic practices, ground the mythic into your body so that change becomes not just an idea, but a lived reality.
Community & belonging: Enter a circle where extraordinary wisdom beings gather. You will be partnered with a Soul Friend and contribute to an outpouring of poetry, potion, and presence. This is a rare opportunity to walk this path together, witnessing and being witnessed.
Depth & soul nourishment: Lectures, readings, and conversations that weave Depth Psychology, animism and mythology, giving you rich ground to study and live from.
JOIN US
PAYMENT PLANS & TIERS
Persephone Tier
High Income
Pay upfront or by instalment
Includes:
90 minute 1:1 integration session
1 hour 1:1 Embodied Dream Weaving Session
70 minute Natal Chart reading
£1111
Thank you for choosing to pay the Persephone Tier. By paying full price, you support someone else to join for less. And you also support me, thank you.
You will be enrolled immediately and I will send out a form to capture details about you, where you are at in life and what you are longing for in the coming week.
Hades Tier
Medium Income
9 spots at this price
Pay upfront or by instalment
Includes 90 minute 1:1 integration session
£888
Thank you for choosing to pay the Hades Tier. By paying the medium rate price, you support someone else to join for less. And you also support me, thank you.
You will be enrolled immediately and I will send out a form to capture details about you, where you are at in life and what you are longing for in the coming week.
Demeter Tier
Low Income
1 spot remaining at this price
Pay upfront or by instalment
£777
Thank you for signing up for Instructions for the Underworld.
You will be enrolled immediately and I will send out a form to capture details about you, where you are at in life and what you are longing for in the coming week.
Instructions for the Underworld offers flexible and tiered pricing. If you are able to pay the higher tier, know that you are creating the means for someone else to access a lower tier. And, know that you are supporting me and my work as well as my capacity to offer discounts. In this way, we support and honour one another and help make this work accessible to more and more people.
If you can pay more, thank you for your support. Payment plans are available and you can choose to spread these over 6 or or 10 months. Please get in touch if you would like to create a bespoke payment plan. Please see our payment and cancellation terms.
SCHOLARSHIPS: All scholarships have now been allocated.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR the UNDERWLD Includes
The Descent as Initiation:
The Underworld will not devour you but awaken your magnificence. See what is waiting to be birthed from the fertile dark.
Grief Tending:
Space to honour the Dead. The beings who have passed on, the selves shed, the agony of the times we are living through. Your grief will walk alongside side you… and lead you down to Charon.
Dream & Eros:
Through somatic, mythopoetic and spiritual practice, Eros comes back online and life force leads you back. You will reclaim the erotic pull of the depths through movement, story and attunement. Let dream animate your longing.
Myth Making:
We will study, embody and re-animate the great stories of descent: Persephone, Psyche, Orpheus and Odysseus. To support you to step into the centre of your own myth.
Embodied Ritual:
To honour the Gods. Both how they live as you, and to revere and remember them as real, powerful and essential energies.
Devotion to the Mystery:
Devote yourself to something bigger than the life you’ve been living. We will explore traditional devotional practices and define new ones for the wisdom of now.
Guardianship:
Come into intimate relationship with the unseen forces that guide you forward, down and through. Know the ways that you are infinitely held and supported.
Liberated Soul:
By consciously inhabiting the realm of the Dead, we meet the true nature of Hades. Your descent to the domain of soul will liberate the enslaved soul of the Upperworld. For the benefit of all beings.
“Scent is the ancient movement existence itself, where the fall into shadow and depth is not a mere cline but the hidn opening fm which new life and meaning n arise.”
- EM OWEN
Why this will be extraordinary
Because we will not simply study the myths. We will embody them. We will honour them.
We will let Persephone’s descent mirror your own, let Demeter’s guardianship teach us how to be held and reimagine the Eleusinian Mysteries. This doesn’t mean ‘knowing’ so much as trusting, as the great mysteries reanimate in your dreams, through embodied imaginal practices and through the group mind of the community of souls who gather to descend together.
You will find and follow your own longing in Hades insatiable love for Persephone. Hades does not long to devour Persephone but to awaken her to her magnificence.
What parts of you are ready to awaken in the depths of his kingdom?
The stories are not there to dictate your own life, your own descent, but to invite you to step right into the centre of your own myth.
You will ascend not only with practices and teachings, but with a somatic knowing:
How to trust the descent.
How to listen to your dreams as messages from soul, soil and the stars.
How to co-create the imaginal, embodied and infinitely beautiful terrain of the Underworld within a creative community of like minded beings.
How to find abundance even in seasons of loss.
How to rebirth yourself - and your work - whilst remaining rooted in love, soul and imagination. To carry the magic back with on when ascending.
This is an invitation to gather in mystery, to be nourished in community and to remember the old dreaming ways.
We begin on 22 September for an Equinox Opening Ceremony.
Then, we meet online every Thursday at 5pm UK time for two hours.
There are 3 full day workshops throughout the immersion to deepen into this work together. These are: 18 October, 13 December and 31 January 1-7pm UK time.
The immersions runs 22 September to 31 January.
Each week will be an offering of ritual, embodied practice, dream circle, group process, storytelling and/or collective seminar. This schedule is for example only and the curriculum will shift based on what is alive within the group.
Curriculum
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22 September, 5-7pm BST
We will open our time together and you will make your offerings to the gate of Hades.
I will carry these offerings, by hand, to that gate the following day. Everyone is welcome to meet me there, at Eleusis. -
Week 1: Persephone: Queen of the Underworld
Week 2: Eleusinian Mysteries & The Imaginal Realm
Week 3: Seeing in the Dark: Introduction to Depth Psychology
WORKSHOP 18 October, 1-7pm BST
Week 4: Dream Descent
Week 5: Group Process * Samhain -
Week 1: Psyche and Eros: Embodied Myth
Week 2: Where is Eros?: Coming into Relationship with Dream
Week 2: Dream Embodiment
Week 3: Dream Circle
Week 4: Depth Psychology: Study of Soul -
MYTHOPOETICS & EMBODIMENT
First three Thursdays in December, 5pm
Week 1: Orpheus: Embodied Myth
Week 2: Coming into Relationship with Dream
WORKSHOP 13 DECEMBER, 1-7pm GMT
Week 3: Solstice Ceremony: Deities of the Dead -
Week 1: Odysseus and Teiresias: Embodied Myth
Week 2: Nothing and Nobody
Week 3: The Return to Land, Body and Love
WORKSHOP & CLOSING CIRCLE: 31 January, 1-7pm GMT
“While you are here, you will be queen of everything that lives and moves and will have the greatest honours along with the immortals”
Meet Your Guide
I’m Libby Rose Waite, creator of Embodied Dream Weaving and steward of Instructions for the Underworld. I’m a psychotherapist, somatic storyteller and Dream Witch. I’m devoted to the great stories, to inviting beings deep into the fertile recesses of body and to helping the world remember how to dream. I have spent a decade immersed in the tradition of Depth Psychology, have a Masters in Psychology and am a licensed therapist.
You can read more about me and my work here.
I am offering free 20 minute discovery calls if you are on the edge but would like some holding to take the leap.
The Underworld is not a place of punishment. It is the place beneath the surface.
In the deeper recesses of body, earth and the animate.
The place where seeds dream and souls remember who they are.
Why Descend, Why Dream?
In every descent, something calls us down. It might be a loss, a longing, a season of transition, or the quiet ache that there is more to this life than what resides on the surface. The Pagans knew this as the Underworld. Not a place of punishment and decay, but of fertility, creativity and soul-making.
In this immersion, you will follow the throb of Persephone’s longing to slip down into the Underworld; which is to say, into land, earth, body. This is a journey of dream, embodiment and meeting what is longing for you, down in the depths.
Through devotion, descent and dream you will learn to soften into the dark, to listen for what is ready to be shed and to nurture what is calling to be birthed.
This is the path of eros: not simply desire, but the deep pulse of life-force that animates us, connects us and insists on our becoming. When you reclaim eros, you reclaim your capacity to create, to love, to live from soul and to fully taste the pleasure of life. Not as an escape from the agony of it, but in defiance to the forces of empire which seek to devour us.
You are being invited to come and create your own empire down in the Underworld, one that is carved by dream, embodied insight and creative inspiration. We will spend intimate time exploring the great myths of descent. You will meet the Gods Demeter, Persephone and Hades and be in devotion to their fertile holding. You will meet Psyche, Orpheus and Odysseus - the humans who descend to the Underworld - and let their stories illuminate our own myth of descent.
Instructions for the Underworld is not about bypassing the dark. It’s about meeting it with reverence, curiosity and in community - so that the descent itself becomes the initiation and what returns is a life more whole, more rooted, more alive.
The Practical Stuff
Our first live call is on the Equinox, 22 September. I will be in Athens and will carry your offerings to the Gates of the Underworld the following day. Everyone who can is welcome to meet me there at Eleusis.
We then meet every Thursday at 5pm UK time for two hours online from 1 October to 31 January. There is a month off for Christmas for integration and then we return in January to close our time together. There will also be space in this window for 1:1 sessions.
We have three full day workshops to deepen into the process. These are Sundays, 18 October, 13 December and 31 January 1-7pm UK time.
All sessions will be recorded and you will have access to an online portal which holds all the content and bonuses.
The sessions will traverse Ritual, Somatic Storytelling, Embodied Movement, Dream Circle, Deep Dives into Depth Psychology, Mythopoetics and Animism.
We will also have ceremonies to mark the opening, closing and the turnings of the Wheel of the Year.
You will be supported by different deities, somatic practices and the holding of the group.
There will be a reading list for those who want more.
If you are signing up on The Persephone Tier, you will receive three 1:1 sessions throughout the course and if you sign up on the Hades tier you receive a 1:1. These will be incredibly supportive to your process and integration.
I will be there with you all the way, listening to your needs, tending to your soul.
TESTIMONIALs
Instructions for the Underworld felt like coming home. I felt deeply supported and held throughout the entire journey, both by Libby and by the beautiful community that came together for the immersion. What made it so unique was that there was space for the myths to breathe. The journeys with Hades, Persephone and Inanna unfolded naturally within, making the experience deeply embodied rather than intellectual.
I returned from the Underworld with a deeper trust in the cycles of life and death and a strengthened knowing that love doesn't disappear when something ends.
More than anything, the immersion left me feeling very alive and in tune with myself.
Taj
The depth of soul that is awakened through Libby’s work is transformative. So much of what has been dormant within me has been brought alive through the processes Libby facilitates. The richness in her presence, integrity & deep love for soul ripples into every aspect of these containers. The alchemy that organically occurs here is truly magical.
Madeleine
My intrenched avoidance, my terror of being seen and of not being good enough were met with a deep desire to show up and sit soul to soul with a group of sisters I never believed I could have. Libby is the most responsive, wise, eloquent, creative and playful teacher. There’s no one better to accompany and guide you through the deepest of transformational work.
Charlotte
Look for the caper berries at the mouth of the cave - and beware. They will cut those who approach without caution.
Softly softly surrender and they will show you the way through, inside, under.
The optimum time to descend is in the pregnant pause before the blossoming, so that they may outstretch their blank canvas petals whilst you are down, down here. So that you may paint your dreams across them upon awakening.
There are eyes reaching for you from beneath the depths: reach back reach back reach back.
Place your pomegranate at the perceived opening and wait to be claimed.
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There are three payment tiers available, depending on your personal circumstances:
Demeter — Supported Tier: £777 (plans spread over 6 or 10 months). 5 places available at this rate.
Hades — Supporter Tier: £888 (payable up front over 6 or 10 months). 10 places available at this rate. Includes a 1:1 integration session.
Persephone — Full Price Tier: £1111 (payable up front over 6 or 10 months). Includes two free 1:1 sessions.
Choose the tier that feels most aligned with your current resources.
BONUS: Sign up in the opening 48 hours for a bespoke incantation to Hades, offered at the entrance to the Underworld on the Equinox.
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The immersion runs 22 September to 31 January.
We meet online via Zoom at 5pm UK time. Please check your local timezone here.
Each session is 2 hours.
Note: the clocks change in the UK on the last weekend of October, so your local time may shift.
We begin Tuesday 22 September (the equinox) then meet every Thursday 5pm from 1 October to 28 January. There is a month off over the winter solstice from 17 December to 14 January.
We also meet for full day workshops 18 October, 13 December and 31 January 1-7pm UK time. These will be important for your process and it’s highly recommended you clear your schedule on these days. and attend live. -
This immersion is open to seekers, space-holders, therapists, facilitators, artists and guides who are ready to enter the mysteries with devotion. To support your journey, you’ll need:
Some experience with somatic practices or body-based awareness.
To feel psychologically resourced, with the capacity to meet deep material in community.
A willingness to engage with myth, dream and ritual as living presences.
Curiosity, devotion and openness to being surprised by what the descent will reveal.
This work is not about mastering content, but about surrendering to process. The more you bring your longing, the more the Underworld will offer its gifts.
I will send out a form once you sign up to get more details about you, what you’re longing for and what’s happening in your life, so I know how best to support you. -
The course is led by me, Libby Rose Waite. I’m a BACP-licensed psychotherapist, somatic storyteller, embodiment guide and Jungian researcher. I have a Masters in Psychology and years of devotion to depth work, ritual and the body. I hope to bring devotion and heart, academic rigour and soulful imagination to all my offerings. I am also a tantrika, weaving eros and soul into my work with myth, dream and ritual.
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It is recommended that you join as many live calls as possible to receive the fullness of the container and community. However, all sessions will be recorded and uploaded to a private platform, so if you can’t attend live, you’ll be able to catch up in your own time.
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Places are non-refundable.
Spaces are limited — if you take a place, you are committing to pay for it.
If something arises and you need to defer, you are welcome to join future immersions on arrangement but payments must still be honoured.
The payment plans are to support people to pay for the course; please honour this and the spirit of service in which it is offered.
You commit to paying the full amount if paying by payment plans and will be added to a payment subscription.
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This immersion is for you if…
You are an artist, guide, space-holder or seeker longing to be nourished by myth, dream and community.
You want to reclaim eros and soul through devotion, descent and dream.
You feel yourself in a season of change or loss, and you want to learn to trust the descent, the death, and the eventual rebirth.
You are dreaming vividly (or want to begin), and are ready to honour, embody and work with those images.
You love depth psychology, animism and mythology, and want to feel them not just as ideas but as lived experience.
You hold space for others, and are yearning for a place where you can be held.
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This immersion is likely not for you if…
You are looking for quick fixes or surface-level inspiration.
You prefer to stay in the head and are not ready to engage with the body, ritual and the imaginal.
You are currently in a psychological crisis or need more acute, individual support (this is not a substitute for personal therapy).
You are not open to engaging in community or collective ritual.
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