Cave Space
Attuning to the Underworld Within & Without
Cave Space is a 4-week offering across Scorpio season for those turned on by my astro-mystical approach to transmuting shadow, shame, and trauma into love and aliveness.
What is a “cave space?”
~ A RETREAT. A space to come home to yourself. To rest. To listen. To hear your inner guidance. The Hermit’s cave.
~ AN EXPERIENCE. The underworld journey described since ancient times, when we die to some parts of our conscious self and ascend renewed and changed.
~ A PRACTICE. An alchemical one. Of consciously allowing yourself in a regular way to listen in the dark, to the songs of the lost or forgotten self, and bring them home.
Many of us grew up in communities without resonant rituals, aesthetics, or libations for honoring death and rebirth initiations. We often feel alone, fucked up, despairing, and marginalized when we go through periods characterized by what astrology calls the cave space: the 8th House.
I am inviting you into CAVE SPACE to initiate your own belonging to the underworld. Here you’ll find tools, nourishment, humor, and clever tips for navigating your way there and back again.
Become strange unto yourself so that you might remember how wondrous you are.
Resource yourself with life force that’s too long been hidden.
Tap into the truth that we live to die and die to live. We can renew. We can rebirth. We can regenerate.
I have found it to be true that wild aliveness pulses at the liminal interstices between who we have been and who is emerging in us.
This is Emergence Astrology.
I’m inviting you to know yourself where your skin peels back, revealing the shiny, slithering revitalized form of yourself that you both deeply fear and deeply desire to know.
I’m inviting you to know yourself at a cackle place.
Scorpio season is energetically the ideal window of the year for learning, experiencing, and practicing how to engage with the Underworld: within and without.
The Underworld within refers to the parts of you that are hidden from your conscious self. The taboo. The repressed. The grieving. The fragmented. The forgotten.
The Underworld without refers to the realm outside of you which includes the dead, our ancestors, spirit guides and psychopompic beings who guide us to and from the above world across the veil to the other side.
If you’ve found your way to this course page, you know that I am a weaver of multiple disciplines and dimensions. I will be your lantern holder into the cave, showing the ways I’ve learned for traversing these pathways, and encouraging your own self-trust and inner knowing so that you can navigate these worlds any time of the year.
Just as caves bring us inside of the planet’s body, so Taurus-Scorpio govern the openings of our human bodies: the mouth-throat and the genitals.
It is the nature of shadow work that when you illuminate and bring home the hidden, you then have increased access to the more throbbing and erotic parts of yourself.
CAVE SPACE IS FOR YOU IF…
- You love synthesizing astrology, myth, magic, and ritual
- You are engaged with your healing path
- You are open to tapping gently at your unconscious realm, where you may have stored trauma, uncomfortable memories, “shadows,” and fears, because you trust in your ability to alchemize these into life force energy for a more integrated self
- You are drawn to or are ready to explore autumnal themes of death and decay
- You want to learn more about Pluto and how Pluto’s invitations run through you and around you
- You trust my stewardship and feel good about saying Yes
At the heart of my approach to Cave Space is compassion, brave honesty, and good humor. If you’re new to exploring what we often call “shadow work,” you can trust that I will not push you anywhere you don’t want to go.
I have found that the most gentle approach is the most effective.
Most of our time will be spent at the mouth of the cave, as in these photos. We will gather there and settle in to the feeling of being inside the earth a bit, with less light. We’ll explore stories by the lantern light, and let the visions of the stories light up the cave walls for inspiration, understanding, and truth consciousness.
You will be the one who decides how deep – if at all – you want to explore the pathways down and in.
CAVE SPACE CURRICULUM
There are 6 live sessions total. Each 2 hours. There is no “late” or “behind” in Cave Space. If you want in after Scorpio has begun, this is not a problem.
Meetups will be a mix of transmission, ceremony, ritual, discussion, reflection, and quiet. Each one will be unique. Once you’re inside the container, you will learn more about what to bring and expect.
Attendance is not mandatory and all teachings will be recorded and work beautifully as replays.
All times listed are Central Standard Time.
Monday, October 23, 5-7 pm (First day of Scorpio season)
Initiation: Libra to Scorpio: On Becoming the One Who Can Stand What You See
Saturday, October 28, 10 am – 12 pm (Full Moon in Taurus eclipse)
“Who Will Plow My Vulva?”: Inanna, the Bull of Heaven, and the Throat-Genitalia Axis
Wednesday, November 1, 5-7 pm (Samhain)
Unshaming the Signs: Scorpio (also open to the public)
Wednesday, November 8, UPDATED! 3-6 pm (Moon in Virgo aspecting outer planets)
3-4:15 with BONUS guest teacher Luis Mojica of Holistic Life Navigation on The Alchemy of Trauma Releasing!
4:30-6 Fear & Desire, Grief & Wonder: Vulture Magic & the Emergent No
Monday, November 13, 5-7 pm (New Moon in Scorpio)
Greeting the Unwanted: Inanna, Ereshkigal, & the Underworld Journey
Tuesday, November 21, 1-3 pm (Last Day of Scorpio)
Scorpio Dreams of Sag: Preparing to Face the Solstice
It’s the nature of the hidden that you don’t know what you’re looking for. This can feel frightening to the parts of us that like to control, to know, to have guarantees.
When you join Cave Space, you are giving your Yes before you have certainty about what you’ll receive there. Your Yes comes from curiosity about a feeling, an instinct that there’s treasure ahead.
Cave Space will not only help you find this unknown treasure, it will offer you an opportunity (root of opportunity is the same as portal – a doorway) to build your own pathway for your Future Self to find more treasure on your own.
Because you say Yes on trust and instinct alone, you are guaranteeing a magical experience. Magical because what unfolds will be charged with the wonder of the unexpected.
What you discover for yourself in Cave Space will be more valuable to you than the cost of admission. This is the nature of an investment (a very Scorpionic word). To invest means to put something valuable in so that it may flow back to you in new form. You invest money, time, attention, and trust into anything, and what flows back astonishes you in its trans-form-ation.
Tuition
Regular: $222 or 2 payments of $111
Current Client/Student: $178 or 2 payments of $89
Equity: 3 payments of $55
Current Clients refers to Transformation clients currently in the container with me.
Current Students refers to those in Moon to Moon or Vulture Coven.
Equity pricing is reserved for those who identify as BIPOC, disabled, trans or non-binary, and/or living with CPTSD.
Early Bird Gift: Register by Wednesday night, October 18, and I will send you a 10-minute recorded reading of the Underworld guidance I see in your chart by the end of Scorpio season.
There is no deadline for regular registration. You can join anytime and catch up, or don’t catch up. Up to you.
“The way Britten uses the language of astrology as a tool for confronting the hidden, unloved aspects of ourselves is exactly what I didn’t know I was coming for.”
– M. B., previous Cave Space student
YOUR UNDERWORLD GUIDEs
BRITTEN LARUE
I am a transformational guide, astrologer, author, and teacher. I am known for describing the complicated ancient art of astrology in ways that feel profoundly heart-opening, connecting, and inspiring.
I am the founder of Emergence Astrology. Here we speak astrology as a technology of wonder and an ecosystem of support while we co-create our pathways in the dark. Emergence Astrology disrupts the horoscope economy to empower each of us to listen to the data of what is present. We turn to the cosmic teachers who have just the right curriculum. In Emergence Astrology, everything is unfolding right on time.
Born with Persephone in Pisces in the 12th House next to her Sun, Mercury, and Venus, I have learned to see my grief as my service and my vulnerability speech as a pathway to wondrous expansion.
I am a trauma-informed practitioner and an openly wounded healer. Some say I am a lantern lighting the way.
As the host of CAVE SPACE, I am calling in an experience that awakens consciousness to parts of you that have been hidden in the dark long enough. I trust that the skills and exercises in this offering will deepen your relationship to your wholeness, sovereignty, and power. I am quite certain we will also have fun.
LUIS MOJICA
Luis is a somatic practitioner, nutritionist, podcast host, and artist. Through Holistic Life Navigation, he educates and teaches humans how to feel safe in the body through “the language of release.”
For Cave Space, Luis will be dropping in as a guest teacher on November 8 to help us explore the somatics of the Underground.
Some Background Behind My Interest in Cave Spaces
Since before I found astrology, I have been fascinated by underworld stories, aesthetics, and experiences. In fact, my doctoral dissertation was going to be titled The Visualization of Atomic Science in Popular Culture. I had a whole chapter written on the ways the U.S. government sold folks on the military’s building of missile silos under sparsely populated prairies and deserts all over the country.
Our land is literally littered with underground weapon spaces! And I wondered what future humans would say about the ruins of these “cave spaces” when they found them.
In the process of of my research, I studied the underground as a context of myths, science fiction, and fantasy in the history of literature. I ended up writing a paper on Alice in Wonderland. Alice fell down a rabbit hole, which was a hidden silo for dreaming an alternate reality where the world becomes “curiouser and curiouser.”
For this project I learned a powerful term: katabasis, whose roots mean “going down.”
The katabatic journey describes a narrative structure that includes a threshold crossing, a descent, an inversion, and then a re-ascent. Any time we move through periods of change, we often feel like we’re undergoing katabasis.
At the center of the mythology of Scorpio is the myth of Persephone and all of the related stories of journeys to the Underworld. In these Cave Spaces, we witness characters who inspire us with ways to reframe our struggles with magical language.
“Therapy” comes from the Greek therapeia meaning “attendance upon the gods.” This suggests that what we seek in therapeutic modalities are the right deities, archetypes, principles, or stories to bring in for integration and healing. This is part of why I love astrology and the tarot, and their related myths. You can call on the archetypes to “attend” to you: to help you awaken into your full self.
The spirit of Cave Space is to cultivate the head-back cackle. The guttural sound you make when you find all life erotic and hilarious.
Questions? Reach out at britten@brittenlarue.com.
