The Underworld

There’s a place within yourself you can visit only if you dare.

I call this realm the Underworld, which sits three layers deep in your mind.

The first layer is your Conscious Mind, handling thinking, planning, choosing, rationalizing, and is responsible for language, movement, and short-term memory. 

This is the only layer that you’re consciously aware of.

Second, like the current beneath an ocean wave, lies your Subconscious Mind: the quiet, automatic executor of habits, patterns, routines, stored knowledge, emotional reactions, belief systems, memory filing and retrieval. 

This layer shapes your life without asking permission from your Conscious Mind.

Finally, we arrive in your Unconscious Mind—where your instinct comes from, traumas live, inner archetypes reside, sex and survival drives take root, and repressed memories or unprocessed emotions are held against their will.

The Unconscious layer silently pulls levers that affect what you’re drawn to, what you avoid, how you react, and who you think you are.

Put another way:

Your Conscious Mind is the weather, your Subconscious is the soil, and your Unconscious holds the tectonic plates underlying everything about you.

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The Unconscious Mind = The Underworld.

Few ever make the trip.

In part because of the difficulty, in part due to fear of what waits in the deep.

Ignorance certainly can be bliss…

But do you really want to remain ignorant of who you truly are?

Real transformation only happens when all three layers align and are in dialogue with each other—which is rare, but achievable through practices like shadow work, dream analysis, ritual, somatic awareness, devotion, and storytelling. 

These are all keys to unlocking your deepest, most honest expression of self.

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Your Conscious Mind might decide to change, for now, that fickle bastard.

Your Subconscious Mind will resist change until safety and repetition are established.

Your Unconscious Mind will test you… through dreams, symbols, shadows, and instinctual impulse—which is why the Underworld is tricky to work with.

The Underworld doesn’t speak with words or action, but in subtle feeling.

The Underworld is the only place where change, growth, and evolution root.

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I fucking looove descending into the Underworld. 

I’ve visited so many times that my Unconscious Mind isn’t deep, dark, and terrifying anymore, but velvety soft, rich purple, and overflowing with the kind of obvious, felt, soothing comfort that only appears when you’ve truly come home to yourself.

(At least that’s how my Unconscious looks and feels. Yours will be different.)

This comfort didn’t come easily, and has been earned through being willing to let myself dissolve into the psychedelic realm, allowing deep truths to bubble to the surface while letting false gods and idols die; through countless hours of deep, uncomfortable self-examination; after laying so many old, tired identities to rest: 

The hockey player, the bodybuilder, the copywriter, the entrepreneur, and more.

(Obviously I adore psychedelics and their transformative powers—but they’re not the only key to the kingdom, nor are they enough on their own. Breathwork, meditation, yoga, journaling, heat and cold exposure, and dance are but a few examples of embodiment practices that can help lead you into the Underworld. 

You don’t have to partake in all of them. 

Choose what calls to you, then devote yourself to them.

That’s the only way.)

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The whole point in plumbing the depths of your Underworld is to find and reclaim your unfiltered inner signal—essential for genuine, felt clarity, intuitive decision-making, and living from a place of embodied truth.

But because most humans are shaped by external voices rather than their internal truth, their Unconscious Mind is overwritten long before it's ever understood.

So most people’s inner signal isn’t clean, having been battered, swayed, and influenced by the expectations and pressures of parents, family, friends, society.

Which isn’t their, or your, fault.

This is just the reality of where most of us begin.

I was no exception.

But something not being your fault doesn’t mean you’re not responsible.

You have a choice:

To take responsibility for yourself, your inner world, and do the work to eradicate your blocks, identify your blind spots, shed old skins, and become who you’re meant to.

Or… not.

If you choose the latter, the rest of your life will look and feel similar to how things have unfolded for you so far. If you’re happy and content here, if you don’t wish to rock the boat and ask big questions of yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that.

If you choose the former, well, you can change literally everything. 

This is not an easy path. 

This deep, internal reconstruction is work that will bring you face to face with your past, your doubts, fears, insecurities, shadows, and more. You will grow and evolve… if you’re willing to truly let go of all the things we humans love clinging to, despite not being in our best interest. 

Most find comfort and suffering preferable to the unknown and real growth.

The choice is yours.

Always has been.

With love from the forest,

~ Alexander