The Artemisian in Review [2025 Reflections]

A painful descent and the promise of a new rising...

Portrait of Diana the Huntress by Guillaume Seignac

My birthday was last week, January 1st. Though deep in the heart of winter, cold nights and long periods of darkness, we celebrate the arrival of a new year. Joyous, with champagne-inflated enthusiasm, we touch once more into a sense of potential, rebirth, and opportunity for all the coming months may offer us.

I’ve sometimes wondered if being born on such a day makes one more intimately connected to the liminal space between endings and beginnings. Celebration really begins the night before, in the final hours before midnight, stretching all the way till dawn and the rising sun. In some ways, my birthday doesn’t really happen on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day; they mix into one another, lines blurred, personal and collective.

It’s been nearly four years since I began writing here on Substack. Not very consistently at first, nor cohesively, but through the process, something vital began to emerge. And though 2024 felt like an exciting upswing and finding a clearer voice, 2025 brought me back to the liminal realm—I have arrived, yet I’m so far away from my goals. It’s working, no…it’s all falling apart. Is it ending before it ever truly began?

A steady downturn of engagement and growth awakened a fear I hadn’t yet felt. But when I had the capacity to sit between the threshold of what is and what is becoming, I remembered that flux is the marker of being deeply engaged in the creative matrix of life.

…The Tower is a revelation, one that we can begin to see more clearly when we truly accept the destruction as integral to the creative process. Things never stay the same, they shouldn’t, for what would life be if we hung in stasis with a veil of illusion of goals complete, arrival with no next chapter, our sense of becoming complete? It doesn’t really sound like living to me.

— Excerpt from The Tower’s Lessons

The all encompassing overwhelm I felt as the descent began should have alerted me to how enmeshed things had become. Without realizing it, personal and professional goals, values and stability had become intertwined, a confused mass of longings and desires that I was forced to reconcile.

The most popular essay I wrote this year was on the alchemical nature of relationships, how only separated, well differentiated components can come together to form a stable union. Though the article is focused on interpersonal dynamics, all things we are in relationship to—like work or hobbies—are subject to these principles.

Uninitiated into the alchemical mysteries, we approach our relationships with a fervor and intensity of unrefined desire. Layer upon layer do we weave ourselves into the other. Whether built on romantic passions or a deep familial kinship, the boundaries between one another become murkier. Soon we find ourselves confused, asking, “Is this issue mine or yours? Where do the lines begin and end? When did things become such a tangled mess?” It is, as Hillman puts it, a premature conjunction, a union hastily formed without the careful work of differentiation.

— Excerpt from The Alchemy of Relationships

To be honest, I’m not sure any of us can circumvent the relational tangle. After all, we only have so much awareness of what is stirring within, of what an outer aspect draws out of us. The premature conjunctions, followed by painful dissolutions and differentiation, are where the magic of the work really is—where you find clarity, new ground, strength of self. This is where the crucible grows hot and intense, pressure that forces new modes of being from you. Refinement, evolution, individuation…that’s what is emerging even in the most painful and challenging moments.

Through the squeeze, I began taking more creative risks, experimenting with multi-month workshop programs like the Dreamwork Foundations series. I launched the All-Access tier and played with fun live-stream formats like mini lessons, dream interpretations and tarot readings. It forced me to also come back to center, to understand what it is I am doing here and why.

Naturally, I felt it was time to begin communicating some of those fundamental ideas and visions; a manifesto of sorts. What does it even mean when I say we explore the archetypal nature of the psyche, how it impacts inner work and our studies in the membership?

Archetypes are the dynamic forces of the psyche, foundational structures that reveal themselves through image, symbol, and patterns of experience. They are the vessels of creation that energize life, timeless and eternal. To be in relationship to them is to meet the generative field of the soul.

Archetypal perspectives give us a way to see into the fabric of experience, where symbolic threads weave through seemingly disparate moments, coalescing into a world rich with depth, meaning, and insight. In this strata of the psyche, we encounter metaphors and images that awaken the imagination, that expand our sense of being.

This builds the vital link between conscious and unconscious, making us a being of the liminal worlds — the seen and unseen, the literal and the symbolic, within and without. No longer do we feel alone, rather, we are held in an archetypal constellation. It is here that integration becomes possible, where individuation unfolds and a steady center of the personality is formed.

— Excerpt from An Introduction to Archetypal Inner Work

This article sits as the flagship in the Essential Readings of The Artemisian, and perhaps I will continue to come back and refine this vision as things crystallize for me. I do think 2026 will be a time of foundational building and teachings here.

The heavy darkness of the descent also revealed where I had abandoned parts of myself, left them wandering in the underworld without a chance to see daylight once more. My favorite class I taught this year was Persephone’s Ascent and Springtime Renewal. We don’t often give as much attention to this part of her mythology, of what the psychological requirements are to complete the descent/ascent cycle.

In essence, we have to let ourselves be irrevocably changed while in the grips of the underworld. We have to be stripped of our tightly held beliefs, to sacrifice something vital, to walk boldly into confrontation and be washed anew in the river Styx.

I realized I had allowed myself creative freedom and experimentation within a narrow lane that felt safe. I so desperately clung to the idea that success would be defined by one rigid idea, and anytime reality tried to defy that, I pushed it away. I abandoned all else, and so the cycle of transformation was stalled.

As this dawned on me, I began to take it all in. Like Persephone and her pomegranate seeds, I swallowed each painful truth and felt it change the fabric of my being. Strangely, as the internal process ignited, outer aspects began to shift too. Once again, psyche and its mysterious inner workings reached through the veil in a stroke of synchronicity.

The Artemisian began to move again, new students and readers curiously joining and sharing their amusement. I received invitations to teach at a few new venues, both locally and online. And the great inspiration for a book I had been holding for a few years suddenly struck with a thundering boom. A promise of a new rising filled my spirit, a tentative hopefulness that this descent/ascent cycle was reaching a place of relative completion.

Yet I know, even as the end of this chapter of The Artemisian closes and a new one begins, that ebbs and flows will continue. I will feel the power and excitement of expansion and the painful hit when it all contracts. Perhaps, in the next turn around the great creative wheel of life, I’ll be a bit more prepared, a bit more grounded, more liminal and initiated to these dark and light pulls.

Until next time,
~Alyssa

What was your favorite class or article of the year? What would you like to see from The Artemisian in 2026?