By Noraleen Danforth

About This Session:

What if your crashouts aren’t signs of failure, but sacred initiations? In this session, Noraleen Adele reframes emotional breakdowns as part of the spiritual process of clearing trauma imprints. She’ll share how intensity arises not to punish us, but to transform us—showing that when we allow ourselves to be fully present with our emotions, we’re not just surviving them, we’re alchemizing them into power. This is where collapse becomes communion, and breakdown becomes the opening to embodied sovereignty.

Take a deep breath with me.
Notice your shoulders.
Notice your chest.
Notice your belly.
Wherever you're listening from, just let yourself feel where your body is touching the ground or the
chair beneath you now, as it feels comfortable in your body, notice where you're holding tension.
Maybe in your jaw or your chest or your stomach.
Maybe there's tension behind your eyes.
Notice if there are tears or pressure or even just numbness.
And let's just stay here for one more breath in and out.
Okay, here's the question I want to ask you.
What if your breakdowns are not proof of failure, but they're proof that transformation is
happening?
I know that might sound unbelievable, especially if you're in a crash out, if you're sobbing on the
floor or your mind won't stop spinning or you feel completely shut down, the last thing that it feels
is holy.
It feels like collapse.
It feels like you're ending.
But what if collapse is actually part of the initiation?
Before I go further, I want to introduce myself.
I. I'm Noreen Adele.
I am a writer, a space holder, and a guide in shadow work and spiritual sovereignty.
My work weaves myth, depth psychology, and lived experience to help you meet the parts of
yourselves that you've been taught to avoid and to discover the power that's hidden there.
I hold spiritual space, holding sessions, write regularly on Substack, and share offerings like My
Priestess Awakening Process, which are all rooted in one truth.
Your intensity is not a flaw.
It's a doorway into devotion.
And I know that because I've lived that.
So let me tell you a story from my own life.
When I became a single mother, everything that I had ever tucked away or tried to avoid or
bypass, the childhood abuse, the toxic relationships, and the ways that I had abandoned myself
over and over again, all of it rose to the surface at once.
And I had been and continued to work so hard to manifest a different life for myself.
And I really believed in the vision.
But I thought that if I could just think the right thoughts and stay high vibe and hold the image in
my mind, that everything would shift.
So the downside of that is, whenever I didn't feel light or confident or certain, I turned that blame
inward onto myself.
And I thought I was doing it wrong.
I thought that I was wrong.
So I would spiral into shame or fear or exhaustion.
And I got so burned out.
There was one night in particular when my daughter was finally asleep and I was curled up on the
floor in the fetal position, sobbing.
My chest was tight, my head was pounding.
And the story that kept running through my head was that I was failing.
I. I was ruining everything and I would never get it right.
That was a crash out.
I have had so many crash outs, and at the time I took it to me that I was failing.
I was failing at healing, at motherhood, and most of all, I was failing at manifestation because I
wasn't doing the right things to earn what I wanted.
But now when I look back, I can see that that moment was not a failure.
It was initiation.
And the crash out wasn't the end of the path.
It wasn't a dead end or a wrong turn.
It was the path.
So one of my favorite myths is an ancient story that mirrors this truth.
It's the Descent of Inanna.
So Inanna is the queen of Heaven and Earth, and she chooses to descend into the underworld.
There are seven gates between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
And at each gate, she has to remove something that is on her person in order to be granted
passage through the gate.
So at the first one, she gives away her crown.
At the second one, she gives up her necklace.
At the third, her breastplate, and at the fourth, her staff.
Every single gate requires her to give up something that defined her power.
So by the time she gets to the underworld where her sister is in power, her sister Ereshkigal, she's
completely naked and she's totally vulnerable.
And her sister Ereshkigal, who rules the underworld, kills her.
And it would be easy to get to this point in the story and say, see? See? She failed.
She shouldn't have gone down there.
She lost everything and the bad guy won.
But her death is not the end of the story.
Eventually, Inanna is revived, and when she rises, she is not who she was before.
She is transformed.
The descent, the stripping, and the collapse was her initiation.
When I first heard this myth, I realized this is exactly what my crash outs feel like.
Every gate is another piece of me that has fallen away.
When I lost the illusion of being a perfect mother, or when I lost the belief that manifestation meant
ignoring my hard feelings, and when I lost the fantasy that someone else was going to save me, all
of those were my journey to meeting my own underworld.
And the point of the myth is not that Ereshkigal wins and Inanna loses.
They are not really two separate individuals.
When Inanna dies Ereshkigal, her own inner darkness takes over.
The part of her that lived only in the light above ground, in the waking world went offline so that
her inner queen of dark was darkness.
Could be expressed.
And the part that I love is that Ereshkigal doesn't shame or mock Anana when she's killed her.
And she doesn't say, you should have been stronger or you failed.
She's not gloating and celebrating her death.
She begins to wail.
She's literally screaming in her grief and clawing at her hair and tearing at her insides.
And it is just a picture of raw intensity.
And another important part of the story is that before Inanna left for the underworld, she planned
for her descent.
She told other gods what was going on, and she asked them to send help for her if she didn't return
in a certain amount of time.
So she wasn't back within three days.
And another God sent these little helper beings down into the underworld to look for her.
They found Ereshkigal just in total anguish.
And what's so powerful is that they didn't fight Ereshkigal and they didn't try to sneak past her to
rescue Inanna, and they didn't tell her to calm down or that she was overreacting.
And they didn't give her a lecture or, like, pass blame on her.
They didn't call her a murderer.
They just sat with her and they mirrored her pain.
And she was screaming and crying and saying, my insides hurt.
And so they would say, oh, our insides hurt.
And Ereshkigal was so moved by this presence, by the way that they were holding space for her,
that it snapped her out of her misery.
And she offered them a gift and they chose Inanna.
So that's how Inanna returned to the land of the living.
It's not because she overpowered death or fought Ereshkigal and won, but because Ereshkigal's
darkness was witnessed.
Inanna was revived because Ereshkigal was seen.
And that's the secret of space holding.
It's not about fixing and it's not about bypassing or arguing with the intensity.
We mirror that intensity and we honor it and let it be what it is.
And that presence is what unlocks resurrection, not just in a mythic sense, but in a literal sense in
us.
We resurrect the parts of ourselves that we've suppressed or that others have said were too much.
The inner children that were never loved and never witnessed in ways that we deserved when we
were younger.
And our crash outs work the same way.
They're not proof that we're broken, but they're how we descend into the underworld and where
the stripping and the collapse are actually Sacred.
When we meet ourselves there, and when we allow ourselves to be met there by others and
witnessed, we find the keys to our own resurrection.
So I invite you to take a moment with me now and think of a time when you were met in your own
intensity.
Maybe someone just sat with you while you cried and they didn't try to fix anything, but their
presence made it bearable.
And just remember how that felt in your body and how that still lives in a part of you that is the
medicine of being witnessed.
And that's what makes the crash out sacred.
So what exactly is a crash out?
From the lens of trauma, it's when old imprints surface through intensity.
So our body is saying it's time to move this grief and this rage and this fear, it's ready to be
expressed and released.
And it's not a punishment or proof of brokenness.
It's just our psyche and our nervous system trying to complete a cycle that we never got to finish.
And often it's not just our pain.
Sometimes what rises in us is the grief or rage that's been carried through our family line for
generations.
It's pain that never had space to be expressed, so it was just passed down generation after
generation in our bodies, just waiting to be seen.
So in these moments of crash out, we are hosting something so much larger than ourselves.
This current that has never been witnessed and held and allowed to move.
And we're giving it a voice so that the energy can be expressed.
And I have felt this so many times when the shame of my childhood abuse has come roaring back.
And when I collapsed in grief after my marriage ended, and when I let myself rage over all of the
ways I had been made and had made myself small in order to survive, those crash outs didn't just
belong to me.
They felt older and heavier.
And I could feel that they were threads that I had inherited from my family line and echoes of the
systems that had shaped us.
Because we don't just carry our own personal stories, we are also grieving the very real systems of
oppression and limitation that shape our lives.
And these structures were never designed for our liberation.
Our crash outs surface collective grief too.
Because our bodies know the truth, that these systems are not natural and they do not define us.
The biggest truth is that we are so much more powerful than the systems that tried to contain us.
And when we allow these emotions to move through our bodies, whether they belong to our
lineage, our culture, or to our own personal stories, we are reclaiming our own power and our
collective power that was never really lost.
So this is how we stay rooted in the truth of ourselves as infinite creator beings, by honoring the
impact of real systems on our physical bodies, while you remember that those systems are not
bigger than us and we are endlessly supported by the universe, because we are the universe in
motion, remembering itself over and over again.
And the old phrase is true.
What we resist persists.
So when we fight our grief or our shame or our rage, it just circles back harder.
But when we let it move, and we're willing to let ourselves feel without rushing or fixing or
bypassing, that is when alchemy happens.
So it's like water.
When you think of water being dammed up, the pressure builds and eventually the wall bursts and
the flood looks destructive.
But what it's really doing is restoring flow.
And our emotions work the same way.
A crash out isn't the dam breaking against us because we deserve it and we're supposed to be
annihilated.
It's the dam breaking for us and spirit making sure that flow returns.
So how can we work with this in real life?
This is a map that I have returned to over and over again.
First, name it.
So when you are in a crash out, acknowledge it.
Just say it out loud to yourself or even in your head.
This is a crash out.
This, this is intensity. Moving through me.
And being willing to name it brings your awareness to it and it interrupts the shame spiral.
Secondly, stay with it.
So take a breath ground into your body.
Notice one place where you feel the intensity.
Maybe there's heat in your chest or a knot in your stomach or a lump in your throat.
And stay with the sensation for just a moment without trying to make it leave.
And it's okay if this feels like a really slow process.
We are not socialized, especially if you're here.
A lot of us didn't have the privilege of being socialized to be accepting of these really intense
emotions.
And it can feel really, really uncomfortable to stay with yourself in these moments.
So even if it's just.
Just for a couple seconds longer than you normally would before you turn to something external to
comfort you, that small moment is stretching your comfort zone and stretching your your capacity
to be with yourself in discomfort.
So you can consciously connect with whatever sensations you're feeling and then let them move.
So if it's anger, then rage and scream and throw something or punch something safely, and if it's
grief, then let your body sway and wrap your arms around yourself or curl up into a ball, just let
yourself be with your body in ways that Feel right.
And again, I mean, it might feel deeply uncomfortable.
If it feels uncomfortable, you are doing it right.
And it will get easier, I promise.
But even taking the smallest step towards expression physically is going to move mountains in
your psyche.
So the third step is to harvest.
Ask after you've been with the emotion and allowed it to move and you feel like you've crested the
wave and you've come down, what did this strip away that I didn't need?
And what power came online in me afterward?
So what's really important here is not to pressure yourself to feel.
Figure this step out on a timeline.
You can hold this tenderly.
Know that you will be in the intensity as long as you need to be.
And the more you lean into it, the less it will grip.
So the more you run away from the intensity, the longer the process will drag out.
Sometimes it takes hours or days or weeks to see what the gift of your crash out was.
But being willing to host the sensations in your physical body, rather than staying in your head and
trying to analyze what's happening, is what creates the space for revelations and breakthroughs.
And know that you will get through this and be willing to move into the discomfort and stay with it
just a little bit more than you have before without expecting the answers to come on command.
So let's reflect together.
Think of the last crash out you had and remember what it felt like in your body.
And ask yourself if you can notice what it stripped away from you and what power, even if it was a
very, very small shift came online after this experience.
You can pause and I invite you to journal if you have the time and the space to do that.
These are really, really powerful reflections.
And this is what turns collapse into communion.
So I'll leave you with this.
What feels like breaking is often opening.
What looks like collapse can be the doorway to communion.
And what you have thought of as failure is actually your initiation.
In myth, every descent leads to return.
And in life, every crash out carries the seed of sovereignty.
May you trust yourself enough to meet your intensity.
May you remember that your emotions are not blocks, but guides.
May you know that the power you've been searching for is already waiting in the place you least
want to go.
Thank you for walking this spiral with me and thank you for showing up for yourself.
This creates ripples of change in reality in ways that we cannot even comprehend.
And it will show up in your own life as such beautiful and deep magic.
If you want to keep doing this work and going deeper with it, I would love to share more with you.
My free gift is called Priestess Awakening, and it's a devotional process that will take you step by
step through what I've described here in more detail, and it will guide you through more options for
the physical and somatic aspects of this process, and you'll be able to go deeper with the reflection
and the journaling questions.
You can also find me on Substack where I write regularly about shadow work and spiritual
sovereignty, and on YouTube where I share readings and teachings.
And if you feel called to more personal support, my one on one spiritual space holding sessions are
always open and just another reminder that your devotion to yourself changes not only your own
world, but it massively shifts the collective consciousness and the fabric of reality.
So thank you so much for showing up for this work.
I love you. Keep going.