What the Panther Showed Me

A descent into the Underworld—

The Obsidian Portal

I was sitting at the edge of a lake in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It was afternoon. The light danced on water in celebration of a day spent immersed in quietude and reflection.

I had been listening to the story of Persephone as I walked from my doorstep to the waterside — how she was taken into the underworld, how she grieved it, how she learned to reign there. How it felt in some ways, connected to what Covid had done to my life. How it led me far from home, to a place I hardly knew, so that I could find the depths of my soul through the connection of body and land.

I had read somewhere that when you sit at the edge of a lake, you can ask her to visit you.

I closed my eyes. I asked.

What happened next changed how I understand the relationship between the inner world and the outer one.

But I need to take you back to the beginning of that day. Because what happened at the lake was only possible due to what happened first, in the dark, beneath the roots of an oak tree, several flights below the surface of the earth.

You cannot find what is buried by looking for it.
You have to descend.
You have to be still enough that the shadow comes to you
on its own terms.

I — THE OAK TREE

It began with drumming.

I was guided through a shamanic journey — eyes closed, drumming music as my anchor — and I found myself standing before an old oak tree. At its base was an opening. Not large. Something about the size of a fairy door, carved naturally into the wood, as if the tree had always held it there, waiting for someone to notice.

I stepped through.

Inside, a spiral staircase descended into the earth beneath the tree. I watched my bare feet find each step — one at a time, unhurried. The air inside was cool, smelling of earth, exotic foliage and the dampness of an ancient site. Above me, the sounds of the street grew faint. Then fainter. Then gone entirely.

Several flights down — more than I expected — my feet found a cold stone landing. River rock, smooth and solid. A doorway stood at its edge, opening outward into something I could not yet see.

I stepped through.

II — THE JUNGLE

The inner earth was nothing like I had imagined.

It was lush. Beautifully alive. Tall trees with leaves so dark green they almost held light rather than reflecting it. Exotic birds called from somewhere I couldn’t see — their voices echoing through the canopy like they were answering questions no one had asked aloud. The air was heavy. Tropical. A jungle.

I was standing on a dry mud path, my bare feet reading every grain of it. There was something about the contact — skin to earth, no barrier between us — that felt like the most honest thing I’d done in a long time.

I began to walk. And almost immediately, I felt it.

I was being watched.

Not threateningly. Not urgently. But with a focused, patient attention that I could feel along the back of my neck and the length of my spine. I slowed my steps. I didn’t search. I simply became aware.

Slowly, the shadows behind the leaves began to move. Something discreet. Something deliberate. Moving in a way that told me it had been there long before I arrived — that I was the one being assessed, not the other way around.

Then it stepped through the majestic layers of heavy leaves.

A panther. Black as obsidian stone. Its coat carrying the same quality of light as polished jet —deep and luminous, like something alive lived just beneath the surface of it.

It moved toward me without hurry. And as it came close — close enough that I could feel the displacement of air around it, close enough that I held perfectly still so as not to interrupt whatever was happening — I felt the silken edge of its fur brush against my leg.

I exhaled slowly. I greeted it in my mind.

The greatest initiations do not announce themselves.
They simply arrive — patient, unhurried,
watching you from the leaves
until you are still enough to be trusted.

III — THE GREETING

The panther looked up at me.

Its eyes were green. Piercing in a way that bypassed thought entirely and went somewhere older. Curious. Contemplative. It was taking me in as fully as I was taking in its energy — and I understood, in that moment, that this was a mutual recognition. Not a vision. A meeting.

Then its attention shifted. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, its gaze turned forward — as if directing mine.

I looked up.

A few feet ahead, a woman was taking shape in the space between the trees. She had been there, I sensed, since before I arrived. Watching. Waiting. She had black, silken hair — the exact quality of the panther’s coat. And green eyes that held the same piercing intelligence, the same ancient knowing.

They were counterparts. I knew it instantly, the way you know things in the inner world — not with your mind but with something deeper and faster than thought.

She looked at me for a long moment. And then she nodded.

Not a bow. Not a welcome in any language I could name. Simply: you may proceed.

The honor of it moved through me like a current. I had been seen, assessed, and accepted — not because I had done anything to earn it, but because I had been willing to descend. Because I had been still enough for the shadow to come to me. Because something ancient inside of me knew what was to come.

I knew they would stay close. I knew I was not alone here. And somehow, that knowing changed everything about how I moved through what came next.

IV — THE LAKE

The jungle held a lake at its edge.

I walked toward it — the panther moving somewhere nearby, the woman a presence at the edge of my awareness, the birds still calling from the canopy above. The water looked the way water looks at the border between evening and night. Deep. Still. Holding something.

I found a rock at the water’s edge and sat.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. That was perhaps the most honest thing I could say about that moment. I had no agenda. No question. No list of things I was hoping the underworld might hand me.

I simply sat. With the water. With the land. With the impossibly alive quiet of a place that operated by entirely different rules than the surface I’d left behind.

And that was enough. More than enough.

I felt welcome. I felt held. I felt — for the first time in longer than I could name — that I was sitting exactly where I was supposed to be. On the edge of the unknown, but never alone. My guides were nearby. I could feel them. The panther somewhere in the trees. The woman somewhere close. Both of them patient. Both of them certain I would find what I needed.

When I felt ready to return, I didn’t need to be told how. I simply rose, walked back through the jungle, found the doorway, and climbed the stone stairs — one flight, then another, then several more — until I stepped back out through the base of the oak tree into the room I’d been sitting in.

At the threshold, I bowed.

They stood there. Both of them. Still. Watching me go with an ease that told me they had always known I would return when I was ready. That they would be there when I did.

What they gave me was not a message. Not an instruction. Not an answer to any question I had thought to bring.

They gave me an image. The panther and its counterpart — seared into my mind so completely that they have accompanied me on every journey I’ve taken since. Not as memories. As presences.

The underworld does not give you what you think you need.
It gives you what you’ve buried.
And sometimes what you’ve buried
is the very thing that was trying to protect you all along.

V — LAKE GENEVA

That afternoon, I walked to the lake.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Real water. Real rock. Real light moving across a real surface in the way that light does in late afternoon when it’s decided to be generous.

I had been listening to the story of Persephone. The myth of her descent — how she was taken into the underworld, how she learned its geography, how she came to understand that what had been done to her without her consent had nonetheless given her a power nothing on the surface could have offered. She knew both worlds. She moved between them. She reigned.

I had read that if you sit at the edge of a lake, you can ask her. That the water is a liminal space — a threshold between what is seen and what is not — and that she is at home in liminal spaces.

I found a rock at the water’s edge. It looked like steps leading into the lake — naturally formed, as if the land had arranged itself into an invitation. I recognized it immediately. It was the rock from the journey that morning. The same quality. The same feeling. The inner world and the outer one, rhyming.

I closed my eyes. I asked.

What came was not dramatic. It was precise.

I felt a tunnel of energy form between myself and the water’s edge — a corridor of presence, narrow and specific, like a channel that had always been there but required asking to open. And through it, she came.

Her frequency was different from my jungle guide. Where the woman in the inner earth had been fierce and certain — green-eyed, direct, testing — Persephone arrived softly. Almost gently. There was a regality to her that didn’t announce itself. It simply was. The way old power tends to be.

She met me in the liminal space between the rock and the water. And when she was close enough, she reached forward and placed something around my neck.

I looked down.

An amulet. The shape of a cone, tapering to a point that rested directly over my heart. Metal detailing around its edges, intricate and ancient-feeling. And inside it, something. A vessel. Something held within it that felt like it carried intention, like it had been made to contain.

She didn’t speak in words. She communicated in the way of the inner world — in knowing, in felt sense, in the kind of understanding that arrives whole rather than being assembled piece by piece.

She was showing me what I was going to make.

I had been exploring sacred jewelry — drawn to it, circling it, feeling that there was something there I hadn’t yet reached. She was reaching it for me. Showing me how to infuse an object with the energy of an intention. How to make something that carried a frequency. How to create a vessel that held, the way her amulet held, the way the hive holds honey — containing something precious so that it can be carried and offered.

She placed it around my neck and told me, in the language of the liminal: take it with you.

So I did.

This is what the Obsidian Portal teaches, if you are willing to descend into it.

Not the confrontation you imagine — the one where you face your darkness alone, where the shadow is something to be defeated or integrated or managed. The real confrontation is quieter than that. It is the moment you stop performing the search and simply become still enough to be found.

The panther was always there. The guide was always watching. Persephone was always at the water’s edge, waiting for someone to ask.


The buried power the Obsidian Portal promises is not something taken from you that you have to fight to recover. It is something that has been waiting — patient, unhurried, tending itself in the dark — for you to be ready to receive it.


You don’t descend to confront your shadow.


You descend to be introduced to it.


And when you are — when the shadow steps out of the leaves and brushes against your leg and looks up at you with green eyes that see everything you’ve tried to hide — you will understand that it was never your enemy.


It was your guide.


It has always been your guide.

It was simply waiting for you to come down far enough to meet it.

Arrive. Remember. Rise.
— Martine Wareham

Photo By: Thomas Williams

Wisdom of the Bees

What I asked for. What arrived instead. What I finally learned about receiving.

The bees had been finding me long before I formally invited them.

There was the bee necklace — the one Tracey Cunningham saw that caught my eye and surprised me with after a whirlwind work trip through Spain. I noticed it the way you notice something that is meant to be noticed: not with the mind, but with the body. A small recognition. A quiet turning into the heart.

And the Gucci bee slippers in Monaco, on a trip I took back to myself several years later. I stood in front of them longer than made sense. The bees embroidered in gold on the black italian leather. From the moment I bought them, walking through the streets of Monaco for the first time — it was like stepping into a new life.  

I understand now that these were not coincidences. They were the beginning of a correspondence I did not yet know I was having. The bees were leaving signals the way they leave traces of pheromone on the flowers they want others to find. They were marking me. They were saying: when you are ready, we will be here.

I became ready while writing Book 2.

The Invitation and the Expectation

In the writing of Reign: The Modern Priestess Codex, I found myself drawn into the ancient symbolism of bees and the hive in a way I had not anticipated. I was writing about the heart as the hive of divine discernment — the idea, carried across Hindu, Greek, Islamic, Christian, and Orphic traditions, that the heart is the place where raw experience is transformed into wisdom the way nectar is transformed into honey.

I wrote: Honey is the distilled truth of all experience.

I wrote about the Thriae — the three bee-nymphs of Mount Parnassus described in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, who delivered oracular truth only when fed on honey. They did not speak from their own minds. They spoke only what passed through them from a divine center. They were the bee-oracle — heart-receivers of wisdom who could not access the truth unless they had first been fed.

And then I closed the document, turned to the bees themselves, and asked them to share their ancient wisdom with me.

I waited for something warm. Something soft. Something that would arrive gently, like a fuzzy kiss on the cheek as I nodded off to sleep.

What arrived instead was a week that felt more like a season, or a year.

I asked the bees for their wisdom. They gave me an initiation.

First: The Silencing

I was on a work trip. The kind that comes loaded with expectation — to perform, to support the team, to carry the message. I arrived ready for anything.

Except what happened next.

My voice disappeared.

Not suddenly. Like smoke vanishing into the sky after the campfire goes out — slow, incremental, until you realize there is nothing left where the warmth used to be. I am not someone whose voice abandons them. I speak to rooms of every size. I lead circles, lectures, conversations. My voice is among the most reliable things I own.

But it left. And the manner of its leaving was its own teaching.

It felt like a vine slowly wrapping around my neck throughout the day — as if to choke me gently into submission. Not violence. Patience. Something that understood it had all the time it needed.

Silence was how I was to enter this journey. The bees had heard my request. And they were ensuring I arrived at the threshold without the one instrument I most rely on to manage my world.

The Descent

Then the fever came. And the aches. And the body that had been asking politely for months suddenly stopped asking and simply insisted.

We can outrun our body’s signals for a long time. We are remarkably skilled at this — at interpreting rest as weakness, slowness as failure, illness as inconvenience. But the body, when it has been patient long enough, stops whispering and starts shouting. And when it shouts in a hotel room in a city where you have nowhere to be but present with it, you finally listen.

My mind slowed to a pace I had not experienced since childhood. No podcasts. No films. No phone games or comfortable distractions. Even noise-canceling headphones with no sound playing were the only way I could find peace. The silence I had been asked to enter was becoming total.

Forty-eight hours in that hotel room. And then the harder surrender — telling my team I could not be their champion in the work I had come to do. That I had to go.

I braced for what that admission would cost. I have spent years learning that putting myself before my work has consequences. In my past, it was held against me so consistently that I had internalized the threat and avoided it at all cost.

Every member of my team let me go with grace. Not a single word of judgment. Only understanding, and something that felt like relief on my behalf — the relief of being in the presence of people who actually want you to care for yourself.

The grace of that release was its own medicine. And I received it — perhaps more fully than I have received anything in a long time.

Six Nights Without Sleep

Home. Dark room. The vine that had been wrapping itself around my throat becoming something more — lungs that struggled for air, over and over, for hours with no relief. I resisted asking for help for five days. Five days of doing it on my own terms, which is the particular stubbornness of a woman who has spent a lifetime proving she does not need to need anything.

When I finally conceded and called the doctor, the inhaler was waiting on the other side of my pride. I was offered steroids and declined because it felt too needy. I am noting this without pride. I am noting it because it is the precise shape of the pattern I was being asked, that week, to finally see.

The nights were their own world.

Every time I would begin to drift into sleep — approximately fifteen minutes in, with a precision that felt almost architectural — I would wake with a jolt of suffocation. The choking cough that would not let me lie down. My body saying, over and over: hold on. Stay here. You cannot leave yet.

Six nights of this. I do not think I have ever slept so little over such a sustained period in my life.

But the nights were also where something else was happening.

In the few brief flashes of half-sleep I could access, I was dreaming in tablets. Horizontal rows of them, stretching as far as I could see. Each one covered in writing that I could read fluently in the dream state — words that looked like no language I know when I try to remember them now, but that felt, in the moment of reading, like instructions. Like code. Like something being transmitted directly into the part of me that does not require translation.

I would read a tablet, swipe to the next. Read, swipe. Over and over.

I thought of the Thriae. Those bee-nymphs of Parnassus who could only receive divine truth when they had been fed on honey. Who spoke not from their own knowledge but from what passed through them from a sacred center. I was being emptied of everything I usually used to navigate the world. And into that emptiness, something was arriving.

The moon kept me company. The stars. The intimate magic of the night sky witnessed through a window from a room I had no strength to leave. There are worse companions for an initiation.

The Honey

My throat became desert. Gallons of tea, water, electrolytes, lozenges — nothing reached it. I researched home remedies in the small hours of the night, scrolling through my phone in the dark.

The answer that kept appearing: raw honey. Dripped directly onto the tongue. Allowed to coat the throat.

I stopped on that recommendation for a long moment.

The day before the illness began, I had written that honey is the distilled truth of all experience. I had written about the Thriae being fed on honey before they could receive divine knowing. I had written a meditation in which the heart operates as a hive — transforming what it receives into something that heals.

And now, in a hotel room in the dark, the only thing that would reach the place that hurt was honey dripped directly onto the tongue.

It worked. Of course it worked.

I had written that honey is the distilled truth of all experience. Then honey, literal and warm, was the only thing that could reach the place that hurt.

I want to be honest about what I felt in that moment, which was the particular quality of recognition that comes when the teaching you have been writing arrives in your body without warning and without the possibility of being intellectualized away. Especially, since not one person I had been in close proximity with throughout the entire illness contracted it. Not one.

The bees had not sent me a warm and fuzzy revelation. They had sent me a week that stripped me of my voice, my breath, my taste, my smell, my sleep, my productivity, and my ability to manage anything — and then healed the deepest wound with the exact medicine I had been writing about.

The Question That Came in the Dark

On one of the worst nights — lungs fighting, throat raw, the darkness complete — a question arrived that I could not push away.

"Am I anything at all — or am I just a body that is about to be emptied?"

I want to sit with that question for a moment. Because it is the question I had just written about. In Part VI of the book I was completing, I wrote about the difference between asking “Am I” and asking “Can I.” I wrote that the “Am I” question quietly places the self on trial. That it narrows the moment. That it evaluates rather than opens.

And there I was, in the dark, asking “Am I anything” — in its most stripped-down, most primal form. Asking whether I was real. Whether I had substance. Whether the spirit I had spent my life trusting had any purchase in a body that could not breathe.

The teaching had arrived inside me before I had any distance from it.

What came back — not immediately, but eventually, in the way things come back when you are too tired to resist them — was not an answer. It was a steadying. The same thread I have held through every rupture of my life, pulled taut once more. The deep knowing that this was not the end of the story. That I was not being emptied. That I was in the amniotic sac, and what surrounded me was not death but labor.

The womb of creation was all around me. And I was inside it, with labor pains, waiting to be born into whatever came next.

What I Finally Learned About Receiving

I have believed for most of my life that I was good at receiving. I have accepted a great deal. I have been gracious in the face of difficulty. I have said thank you. I have opened my hands.

But acceptance is not receiving. And this is what the week taught me.

Receiving requires the complete cessation of management. It requires the hands to stop arranging and simply open. It requires the voice to go quiet — not as a choice but as a surrender. It requires the mind to slow past the point where it can reach for its usual distractions, past the point where it can narrate its own experience, past the point where it can maintain the story of who it is.

It requires, in other words, exactly what that week gave me.

I could not speak. I could not perform. I could not manage my team, my image, my recovery, my productivity, or my discomfort on my own terms. Every instrument I normally use to move through the world was taken, one by one, with a patience and precision that could only be described as intelligent.

And in that emptiness — in the dark hotel room and then the dark bedroom and then the long impossible nights and the days of one breath at a time — something was finally able to arrive that could not have arrived any other way.

The bees do not produce honey in the field. They gather from many flowers and return to the hive, where the transformation happens in the dark, warm, ordered interior. They cannot transform what they have gathered while they are still in motion. They have to come home first.

I had to come home first.

Not to a place. To myself. To the silence beneath everything I use to avoid myself. To the breath that was available even when nothing else was. To the body that had been trying to tell me something for weeks, possibly months, and that finally — with infinite patience and no small amount of creative force — made sure I listened.

Some of the Honey I Gathered

I am still integrating what that week gave me. I do not think integration is something that happens quickly when the lesson has been that complete.

But here is some of what I know now that I did not know before:

That receiving is not the same as accepting. That genuine receiving requires the emptying of what you thought you needed to hold onto.

That the body is a more faithful oracle than I had given it credit for — even after writing an entire chapter about it. Knowing something and being willing to live it are different continents.

That the Am I question — in its most stripped-down form, at 3am with lungs fighting for air — is still the same question I wrote about on a phone call with a girlfriend. It still narrows. It still places the self on trial. And the answer to it is still not found in the mind but in the body’s capacity to keep going one breath at a time.

That honey, dripped warm on the tongue in the dark, reaches places that nothing else can. And that this is both literally true and also precisely the teaching.

That the bees, when you invite them, will come. And they will not send what you expected. They will send what you need. And what you need will be exactly as uncomfortable and exactly as transformative as the soul that is asking for it requires.

I asked for their ancient wisdom.

They gave me a week I will never forget, and a knowing I will spend the rest of my life unpacking.

That is, I suppose, the nature of honey. It keeps.