Sedna — Betrayal, Descent, and Reclaiming Sovereign Boundaries | S2 Ep.10

Uranus-Sedna conjunction May 2026, patriarchal shadow, Jungian depth psychology, somatic psychoeducation, and the Inuit goddess myth that teaches women how to stop taking responsibility for what was never theirs

Patriarchy is not being subtle right now, and neither is the shift I’m feeling in women’s bodies. When bodily autonomy gets legislated, when women’s pain gets dismissed in public, when power structures show us exactly who they were built for, something stops negotiating. A quieter kind of boundary appears: a line drawn in the sand that says, “I am done taking responsibility for what isn’t mine.”

I take that collective moment into the myth of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the deep ocean, holding her story with respect as a student of archetypal psychology. Sedna is betrayed, cut loose, and forced into a descent that looks like devastation, until it becomes transformation. Through a Jungian lens, her story mirrors the return of the repressed shadow: what was always operating in the dark gets dragged into the light so it can finally be named, faced, and changed.

From there, I bring in somatic psychology and nervous system regulation, including the window of tolerance and a polyvagal-informed clinical map, because you cannot “mindset” your way out of what lives in tissue, breath, and posture. I also share why this week’s astrology matters to me: Sedna crossing into Gemini for decades and a rare Uranus conjunction that speaks to disruption, voice, and finally giving language to what the body has carried. We name the pathology of the good woman, the survival pattern of managing men’s emotions, and the difference between dysregulated discharge and sovereign directness. I end with a grounded practice you can use immediately: “I am not responsible for…”

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Transcript

Welcome To The Spiral

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Priestess Initiations. I'm Casey Dunn, educator, priestess, and professional somatic therapist. In April 2025, I went through a Priestess Initiation of Old and launched the Priestess Initiations podcast six months later. Whatever brought you here today, I invite you to drop into the spiral with me. Let's begin. Welcome back to Priestess Initiations, where psychology meets sacred.

When Patriarchy Becomes Public

SPEAKER_00 0:36

I'm Casey, and today I want to talk about what is happening to women right now. I don't mean quietly in the private chambers of our therapy sessions, in our journals, notebooks, on our altars, or only in women's spaces where we can talk about hard truths. I mean what's happening out in the open, visible, undeniable. The kind of thing that gets named in headlines and legislation and the sudden collective exhale of women who have spent years wondering if they were imagining it. The shadows of patriarchy are surfacing faster than they have ever in living memory. Women's bodily autonomy has been legislated against openly and with confidence. The casual dismissal of women's pain, physical, emotional, political, has moved from private to public, not just in America. We have watched in real time powerful men demonstrate that the structures they built were never designed to include us as full humans. And we've watched other people, sometimes even women, defend those structures. And something in a lot of us has shifted. I'm noticing this vividly on Substack right now, which is which is where you can find me now and some cool writing. But we haven't only shifted into rage. I'm seeing rage, but it's not only rage. The rage is there and it is sacred, and we'll get to that. But for some of us, it's also shifted into something quieter and more permanent. A kind of settling in the bones. A line drawn in the sand. I am done taking responsibility for what isn't mine. That's the line I'm drawing in the sand right now, personally. Through all aspects of my life, and I suspect I'm not alone.

Rage Alchemized Into Sovereignty

SPEAKER_00 2:58

This week I said something to my partner, calmly, from a place of truth rather than explosion. Your happiness is not my responsibility. And his response was, You're right, it's not. And I want to be clear, I'm lucky, I have a partner who can receive that. That isn't everyone's reality, and it wasn't mine in past relationships either. And I know that a lot of the women listening to this have said something far softer than that and been called difficult, needy, overreacting, crazy. But here's what I know clinically, and what I know in my body. There's a difference between bluntness that comes from dregulated rage and bluntness that comes from rage alchemized into sovereignty. One is discharge, one is truth. And we have been gaslit collectively, systemically, for centuries into believing that any version of our directness is the former, that any boundary we name without softening it is aggression. It isn't.

Sedna’s Betrayal And Descent

SPEAKER_00 4:15

And there's a goddess who has something to say about that. And her name is Sedna. And so today we're talking about Sedna, and Sedna's story comes to us from the Inuit people of the Arctic. And I want to name that clearly. This is not my tradition or heritage. I'm coming to Sedna as a student of archetypal psychology through a Jungian lens, and I want to hold her myth with respect for the culture that has carried it for thousands of years. There are variations of the story. Myth always moves and breathes, but the essential arc is this. It's usually both. And toward the end of the myth, she ends up in a boat. And the men who were supposed to be her safety become her perpetrators. She is thrown overboard and she grabs onto the edge of the boat, trying to hold on, trying to survive. And her fingers are cut off where she clings. She falls into the ocean, she descends. And in the descend, she struggles and fights drowning, as anyone would. But through that betrayal wound, something happens. Her severed fingers become the creatures of the sea. The seals, the walruses, the whales. She becomes the goddess of the deep ocean, the sovereign of everything beneath the surface. She claims her power only after realizing no one is coming to save her. And in doing so, she becomes one of the most powerful goddesses in Inuit of traditions. And we know this because the Inuit fishermen and shamans had to maintain a relationship with her, had to tend to her if her hair got tangled in their nuts, because she was the one who decided whether they ate or starved. She held that kind of power. The woman who was betrayed, who fell, who lost everything she thought would hold her, she became the one who holds the power. That is not coincidence. That's the myth telling us something true about how feminine power is actually forged.

Jung’s Shadow And The Return

SPEAKER_00 7:06

So Carl Jung wrote about what he called the shadow, right? The parts of ourselves and our culture that we push into the unconscious because they're too uncomfortable, too threatening, sometimes too inconvenient to acknowledge. And the patriarchal shadow, the domination, the dismissal, the violence, has been operating largely in shadow for most of Western history. It existed, it always existed. Everyone who has lived inside it and felt the oppression knew it existed. But it wasn't named publicly. It wasn't visible. It was the water we all swam in and pretended wasn't that murky. So what's happening now collectively is what Jung would call the return of the repressed shadow, right? The shadow is forced into the light. And this is always destabilizing. It feels like the world is getting worse. But from a depth psychology perspective, what's actually happening is that what was always there is finally being seen, finally being named, which means it can finally be worked with. The myth of Sedna shows this so well. The patriarchal betrayal was always there in the boat, in the marriage, in the structures that were never designed to hold women as full humans. Sedna's descent into the ocean is the journey into the unconscious, into the place where the shadow lives, where what has been lost, including the wild feminine, the instinctual body, the sovereign self, waits. And when people tell Sedna's story only as a wound narrative, this piece gets lost. The descent is not the end of the story, it is the transformation.

The Body’s Trauma Map

SPEAKER_00 9:18

So in somatic psychology, we talk about the window of tolerance, which is the zone where the nervous system can process experience without shutting down or exploding. Trauma pushes us outside that window. The body freezes, dissociates, collapses, fawns, or fires into fight or flight. Right. Deb Donna, whose work on the polyvagal informed approach, has shaped how a lot of us think about this clinically. And she describes the autonomic nervous system as a surveillance system, basically. And what that means is that your automatic nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger. Am I safe? Am I not safe? And that shapes our states long before conscious thought gets involved. Long before we know that we're doing that. And so I want to name that there's been some recent debate, too, in the literature around polyvagal theory. And it's not about, my understanding at least, is that the debate is not about whether these nervous system states are real, because that's pretty well established. But the debate is whether around the vagus nerve is actually the mechanism of action in the way Stephen Porges originally proposed. And so that is happening, the neuroscience is still being refined. But what holds is the clinical map. The states are real, the body keeps the record of betrayal, and you cannot think your way out of what lives in the tissue, in the held breath, in the jaw that aches before your feet hit the floor in the morning. And so Sedna at the bottom of the ocean is a woman whose nervous system has been through something real. She is not fine. She's not above it. She's not bypassing it. There's no spiritual bypassing the Sedna. She is in it. And the shamanic tradition that holds her myth understood something that modern psychology has taken until very recently to articulate, which is that you can't bypass the descent. And Carl Jung knew this too. But there are very few people that still practice any aspects of Jungian psychology. And even fewer who are Jungian analysts, and I am not a Jungian analyst. There are some great ones out there. That's a very extensive training. And there are a few people that are still practicing that. But what I do know is you have to go down. You have to go into the shadow. My way of doing that as a somatic psychotherapist is through the body. But and this is important, going down, going into the shadow is not the same as staying there. It's the rise. We descend and we emerge. That's Persephone's cycle. Descent and emergence. And right now, we're actually in Sedna's emergence as goddess of the sea.

Sedna Enters Gemini In Astrology

SPEAKER_00 12:56

So I'm going to talk a little bit about astrology and then I'll get back to the psychology. But this astrology feels personally significant to me. And this episode is timed to the astrology. So if you're listening after the week of May 20th, 2026, that's actually totally okay. This episode is still super relevant. Sedna's crossing into Gemini now, but she's staying there for about the next 43 years. So this episode is relevant for the next 43 years. And my south node is at 14 degrees Taurus in the fourth house. So those are one degree apart. That's called a conjunction. It's a natal conjunction when it's in your birth chart. And so Sedna, one degree from my south node, that's been part of this karmic work in my whole life. It's probably part of why I became a trauma therapist. And for those less fluent in astrology, the south node represents your karmic inheritance. The patterns you came in carrying, whether they're yours or ancestral, they're what you're in this life to release. So mine's in Taurus, which is the sign of the body, groundedness, security of what we grip because it feels like survival. And you take the gifts of your South Note with you. You're releasing the shadow. And you take the golden shadow too. So the gifts of the shadow. But for me, it's in the fourth house, which rules home, foundation, ancestry. Um, and so what I'm releasing in this lifetime really feels like an overattachment to relational security at the cost of my own sovereignty. That's the pattern of making myself small, making myself palpable, managing other people's emotional feelings and whether to keep the peace in the house. If you're also an eldest daughter and that resonates, I hear you. Eldest daughters often learn to be keep peacekeepers really early on, and all daughters do to some degree, right? This is a socialized pattern. This is a socialized gender pattern. And this pattern of peacekeeping at all costs is finally breaking. So Sedna's already in Gemini. She crossed out of Taurus in April, and she's been moving through Gemini at like zero to one degree. But this Friday, Uranus is meeting her there. And that's on Friday, May 22nd, 2026, at exactly zero degrees, and where she's at one degree, Gemini. That's a conjunction. That's the ignition point. And that's why this week we're talking about Sedna. She's relevant all year, especially, and for years to come, but this conjunction is pretty rare. Sedna moves so slowly that a conjunction with any planet at a sign ingress point, a sign ingress point means like zero degrees, is a once-in-many lifetimes event. And so Taurus is fixed Earth, the body, what we hold on to, because letting go feels like dying. Gemini is a mutable air sign. It's the mind that can finally speak what the body's been carrying. My moon's in Gemini, which is a cool, strange placement for so much Scorpio in my chart. I'll probably talk about that at some point. But what this conjunction is moving toward is the voice that finds language for what has been wordlessly living in the body. So collectively, the astrology this Friday is Sedna, the goddess who found sovereignty at the ocean floor after betrayal, after descent, after the descent. And now she's moving into the sign of intellect, of voice, of us being able to translate those wounds. And she's being met by Uranus, who's called the Great Disruptor. Uranus doesn't ask permission. He breaks what has outgrown its form so that something true can move through. Which feels in my body exactly like what this episode's about. The wound is not the destination, the crossing is. So we're going to move back into myth and psychology in just a moment. But first, for those of you listening, if you want to know where this is in your own chart, almost everyone alive today has a natal Sedna in either Taurus, if you were born after 1965, or in Aries, if you were born before 1965. And you want to check your house placement because that's what makes it personal. That's where the myth is alive in your particular life. But you should be able to know what your sign is. And the simplest entry point, if you're newer to chart reading, to figure out how this particular transition is affecting you, is to find the house in your chart that holds the end of Taurus and the beginning of Gemini. So depending on your house system, that might be one house or it might be two, but that's the territory that this transit is moving through for you. The area of life where the wound has been living, and now where that something new is beginning to emerge. For me, it's the fourth house crossing into the fifth. And the fourth house is home, foundation, ancestry. And the fifth house is creativity, expression, aliveness, which means what I've been carrying in Sedna's wounds deep in the bones. The patterns I came in with are being alchemized into creative expression. In this episode, actually, right? How cool. That's what's happening. I am right now alchemizing Sedna through my astrology. Um so if you want to go deeper into your own goddess placements where Sedna sits natally, where the other goddesses are moving in your chart, I do have a mini course on my website that walks you through how to run your own chart for goddess asteroid bodies. And that link is in the episode description. And so this week, the Uranus Sedna conjunction is the centerpiece of what's happening astrology-wise. Um, but the sun is also moving through Gemini, and that adds another layer of illumination, right, of sun to what's already being cracked open. And the sun represents the self. So that means that this process that we're seeing in the world is happening internally right now with super ignition. That's the moment the myth describes as the crossing. Where something says, enough looping, enough circling, enough waiting at the bottom of the ocean for someone to come pull you out. The crossing isn't getting rescued. It's the moment you realize you have become something the descent couldn't destroy. And the power you have now is sovereign in a way that it never was before. Because it doesn't depend on the boat, it doesn't depend on the man in the boat. The power that you're finding now came from losing your grip on the boat.

The Pathology Of The Good Woman

SPEAKER_00 21:01

And so I want to come back to the psychology here for a moment because there's more happening with women right now that deserves to be named clearly. Um, and I'm not getting into specific political events right now. There's so much happening out there. It's hard to pick any one thing. Um, but this piece of conditioning is a thread that runs through it all. And I am calling it the pathology of the good woman. But essentially, it's that we have been trained, and not as metaphor, this is classical conditioning that begins in infancy and is reinforced by every system we move through to manage the emotional states of the people around us. Everyone's emotional state. But especially men, particularly the men we love or depend on. Um Psychologists, therapists, we call this emotional labor. But I want to go deeper than that term because I think it's become a little too neat almost. What I'm talking about is the way women learn very early that their safety is contingent on the emotional state of the men in their environment. So that means like if dad is angry, the house isn't safe. If your partner's upset, the relationship is at risk. The child's nervous system learns, scan him, regulate him, make sure he's okay so you can be okay. That's a survival adaptation. It made sense once, it was even wise in the environments where it developed, but it becomes a chronic pattern that outlives its usefulness. What we call in somatic psychology a survival pattern. And the body keeps doing the thing that once kept it safe long after the original danger is gone, long after the pattern itself feels like a cage. And here's what's a little insidious about it, honestly. Women who are running this pattern are often called the good woman. Nurturing, emotionally intelligent, attuned. The very qualities that are symptoms of overadaptation get praised as virtues. The woman who has never stopped monitoring other people's nervous systems is told she's empathetic. The woman who never expresses a need without softening it into oblivion is told she's easy to be with. And what Young tells us is that the persona always has a shadow. The parts of the self that couldn't fit into the mask get pushed into the unconscious. And so Sedna's shadow, the part she couldn't show her whole life, the part she certainly couldn't show in the boat, is the part that knows this is wrong. I deserve more than this. I'm not responsible for what he does. That shadow becomes sovereign at the bottom of the ocean. That's the transformation.

Discharge Versus Sovereign Directness

SPEAKER_00 25:29

And this is gonna hit some people the wrong way, and you're gonna think I'm softening. But to me, this isn't softening, this is clear communication. And there's a difference between speaking from a mostly regulated nervous system, mostly, and speaking from a dysregulated, flooded place. Both might use direct words, both might name something hard, but they're not the same thing. And conflating them is one of the ways that women actually get gaslit into silence because we're told they're the same thing. And dysregulated discharge is the first one. And I'm gonna use that term, dysregulated discharge. That's the explosion, the reactive discharge, the words from flung from a flooded nervous system. It's real. It happens. It's not clear communication. And it does tend to land as aggression because the nervous system state underneath is one of threat, of reactivity, and the energy is pushing outward. And women do this to each other. You will have felt this at some point in your life by some woman in your life. And so when we're too dysregulated, that's when we go too far, say things we don't mean, and we activate the people we're talking to. And that actually makes it harder for them to hear us. And so I'm not telling you to overly soften yourself, but your truth deserves to be heard. And the best way to do that is through what I'm calling sovereign directness. And so sovereign directness is the calm, clear, grounded truth. And it comes from a different nervous system state. And I want to be clear that your delivery doesn't have to be perfect, it's more energetic. It's the energetics of saying no as a clear boundary line that constitutes this sovereign directness. Right? In dysregulated discharge, the energy is pushing out. In sovereign directness, you're drawing a line in the sand. A hard fucking line, but it's a line in the sand. And you can feel that difference in your body if you make those gestures with your hands pushing out and drawing a line, right? Um, and so with sovereign directness, the prefrontal cortex is still online. That's the front part of your brain, helps us make decisions. And you can observe what's happening in your body in real time. It takes work to get here, but the words are translated from your body and chosen thoughtfully, stated as grounded truth, creating that line in the sand. The truth is the line in the sand. And those words land differently, they land as information rather than attack for people that are able to receive it, even when the content is hard. You've probably not experienced this with men, frankly, but you might have experienced this with women in your life who are able to hold boundaries with you. Because even when you speak with sovereign directness, some men will call you difficult. But that's on them, not you. You delivered your truth, and some men will be able to receive it. Your happiness is not my responsibility. Said from a grounded, clear place is kind of a gift because it releases the other person from a dynamic that wasn't serving them either. And so the work of Sedna, the work of the descent, is precisely this: it's the death of the persona that needed to manage everything, and it's the emergence of the self that can speak from the ocean floor, steady, clear, not performing softness she doesn't feel, not softening truth into palpability. It's just real.

A Practice For Releasing Responsibility

SPEAKER_00 29:56

And so I want to offer you something you can actually use, something to do in your body. And so this practice is about finding a truth you've been carrying that isn't yours, a responsibility you've been holding that belongs to someone else, and saying it out loud. That's the body Taurus moving into Gemini, the mind. And you can all you can just say it to yourself or to someone safe or in your car on the way home. And so before you begin, grounding yourself, if you're not driving, right, like feet on the floor, a few slow breaths. One more feel the weight of your body in the chair on the earth. Let yourself arrive. Ask your body, what have I been holding that isn't mine? Don't reach for it, just letting it surface. Maybe it's someone's emotional state you've been managing. Maybe it's a failure at work that got quietly handed to you. Maybe it's the unnamed labor of holding a relationship together that two people are supposed to hold. Maybe it's the chronic background hum of making yourself smaller so someone else can feel bigger. Notice it in your body. Notice where it lives, the chest, the throat, the shoulders. And then slowly, out loud, complete this sentence. I am not responsible for. Say it like you mean it. Not lashing out, not apologizing either. Say it from the ocean floor, from Sedna's place of sovereign knowing. I am not responsible for. And what I know from the other side of a 75-foot fall from 22 skin grafts, from the kind of shattering that can do nothing but remake you, is that what survives the descent is always more sovereign than what went into it. You are Sedna. She is within you. You have always been Sedna. The question isn't whether you can survive the descent. You already have. The question is whether you're ready to stop trying to climb back into the boat. The ocean floor is yours. The creatures of the deep are yours. The power you've been waiting for someone to hand you has been living in you all along.

Closing And Safety Disclaimer

SPEAKER_00 35:50

Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode. Trust the spiral. This podcast offers spiritual and psychological education and priestess wisdom. This is not therapy, counseling, or mental health treatment. If you need mental health support, please contact a licensed provider and in a mental health emergency in the U.S., call 988.