WALKING THE ROSE

A year-long pilgrimage with Venus and Inanna
A living journey through myth, beauty, descent and relationship

1 October 2026 - 26 August 2027

13 two-hour Venus journeys • 5 integration gatherings • a two-hour class on the myth of Inanna Online •

The Venus Journey is an invitation to walk alongside one of our oldest celestial maps

Month by month we follow Venus through her changing relationship with the Sun and Earth. As Venus rises, disappears, descends and returns, her rhythms offer a way of noticing the same movements within our own lives: of radiance and uncertainty, desire and loss, revelation and surrender, forgetting and return.

Venus, who dances with the Moon: seer of feminine mysteries, lover, regeneratrix, life-giver and death-bringer. She is an entire cosmology of water and earth, birth and rebirth.

This journey is a pilgrimage. An initiation.

An invitation to trust what cannot be seen. To listen beyond words and beyond knowing; to trust the centre of your being and surrender, like Inanna, to being carried by the laws of the Underworld.

Trust the descent.
Trust radiance, and the darkness.
Trust the body, your perception, your belonging. Trust what is being relinquished. Trust the return.

Maybe you've met this story before, but often people only know the main details, missing all the richly symbolic other characters, of Ereshkigal, Dummuzi, Ninshubir and the curious genderless beings who gift compassion. We'll explore them too.

This journey is more mythic than astrological.

Earthy and body-centred.
Star-blessed.

It is Venus as a practice of perception: slowing down enough to notice what our lives are actually revealing, and allowing myth, sky, body and lived experience to speak to one another.

Venus gives us a rhythm slow enough to live inside.

Within the intimate chalice of a closed group, we will travel one petal of the Cosmic Rose together.

Month by month we travel with the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and her descent through the seven gates.

Rather than receiving an insight and immediately moving on, we have time to live with each threshold and let it resonate through our being and our lives.

We return.

We notice what is changing.

Our dreams, questions, stories and discoveries travel with us from gate to gate.

Over the year we will work with sacred story, some Venus astronomy and astrology, meditation, imaginal journeying, somatic enquiry, reflective writing, ceremony, creative exploration and conversation.

Together we look to the sky, but continually return to the body. We enter the ancient myth of Inanna's descent and explore what it illuminates in our psyche and lives.

No previous knowledge of astrology or mythology is needed.

VENUS TEACHES ORIENTATION

Venus shapes her Cosmic Rose over eight years, and we now enter the final petal of this long cycle.

Venus teaches orientation:
a continual turning towards what is true.

Towards the body.

Towards what we feel and know.

Towards beauty, love and presence.

And when we become distracted or lose our centre, she reminds us to reorient ourselves.

Venus does not teach us how never to lose ourselves.

She teaches us how to return.

THE SCORPIO SEED

This new Venus cycle begins in Scorpio, infusing the whole cycle with its questions.

Here Scorpio is less about destruction than about love entering the places we might rather exile.

Beauty entering darkness.

Relationship entering uncertainty.

Life meeting death.

And from this has emerged the guiding thread for our journey:

TRUST

A deeper, gutsy, embodied kind of trust.

Can I remain in loving relationship with life when I cannot see what comes next?

Venus highlighting Scorpio asks:

What happens to love when we enter Mystery?

Scorpio says, come closer, beloved.
It brings an intimacy with the hidden.

It deepens the question.
Reveals our exiles.
Asks us to discern what really matters.
It deepens our devotion to life.

INANNA & THE SEVEN GATES

Alongside Venus we travel with the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, who crosses seven thresholds on her journey into the Great Below.

At each gate something is relinquished.

Crown. Vision. Voice. Heart. Authority. Desire. Security.

We will live with each threshold slowly, allowing it to reveal itself through our own body, relationships and life.

Inanna's myth offers us a way of navigating descent, not by escaping the darkness, but by learning how to enter into relationship with what we find there, guided by beauty, presence and relational awareness.

Venus offers us a map.
Myth offers us a guide.

THE JOURNEY

FOUNDATION CLASS

INANNA: DESCENT TO THE GREAT BELOW
Sunday 13 September

A two-hour mythic immersion into one of the world's oldest surviving stories of descent, transformation and return. Included in Walking the Rose.

if you wish to attend the Inanna class only see HERE

THE 13 VENUS GATHERINGS

1 Oct 2026 · The Liminal Gate
Soul Star - a stillpoint of listening before the descent.

22 Oct · The Dark Face
Inferior Conjunction - the seed in darkness; trust, intimacy, surrender and the unseen.

12 Nov · New Dawn Rising
The Morning Star re-emerges - courage, first light and a new orientation.

10 Dec · The Crown Laid Down
Knowing, spiritual identity and humility; what knowledge cannot accompany us further.

4 Jan 2027 · The Seer's Gate
Vision, discernment and the eye of the heart.

4 Feb · The Living Voice
Voice and silence; speech as sacrament; speaking from what is deeply known.

4 Mar · The Unarmoured Heart
Love, attachment, grief and compassion; loving without possession.

1 Apr · The Flame
Will, authority, agency and control; acting without domination.

6 May · The Waters of Desire
Eros, creativity, longing and pleasure; desire as a well of revelation.

3 Jun · Rooted in Life
Safety, survival, body and belonging; what truly holds us.

1 Jul · The Ground Beneath the Ground
Earth, ancestry, place and belonging.

29 Jul · The Liminal Threshold
Disappearance, relinquishment and preparation for the Great Below.

12 Aug · The Hidden Sun
Superior Conjunction - Venus beyond the Sun; underworld mystery, dissolution, seed and return.

INTEGRATION GATHERINGS

26 Nov 2026 • 21 Jan 2027 • 18 Mar • 20 May • 26 Aug 2027

Five additional 90-120 minute circles for conversation, dreams, questions, creative exploration and what the journey is revealing in our actual lives.

Thee are less about teaching.

More about deepening, witnessing and integration.

WHAT YOU WILL RECEIVE

13 live two-hour Venus journeys
A weaving of teaching, sacred story, contemplative and embodied practice, writing, ceremony and shared reflection.

5 integration gatherings
Spacious circles for conversation, dreams, questions and deeper listening.

Inanna: Descent to the Great Below
The two-hour foundation class is included.

A private Discord home
For conversation, writings, art, resources, replay links, meditations and discoveries between our gatherings.

Recordings of every session with lifetime access

Practices to carry between the gates
Simple contemplative, creative and embodied enquiries to allow the work to be lived rather than simply understood.

Nothing is compulsory. Across an eleven-month journey there will be times when life is full. You can return through the recordings and enter the next gathering from exactly where you are.

WHY A CLOSED CIRCLE?

Continuity changes the quality of the work.

Over time we develop a shared language, a strengthening community, and trust. We don't need to begin again each month.

We become witnesses for one another, and the myth has time to deepen and integrate through lived experience.

After the October threshold, the circle closes to new participants.

The intention is for us to create a reliable, heart-centred hearth to return to.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

This journey may call to you if you long for a slower spiritual rhythm.

If mythology, body, Earth and sky speak to you.

If you are living through change or threshold.

If you want to deepen trust in your own perception.

Or if you simply feel something when you see Venus shining and want to know her more intimately.

Perhaps Venus has only just begun to call you, or perhaps you are already intimately connected.

Each cycle is different.

COST FOR THE PROGRAM

Full price · $595 AUD

Middle price · $495 AUD

Supported price · $425 AUD

Choose the level that best reflects your circumstances.

Payment plans and monthly payments are available.

Because this is a closed, long-form circle, registration is a commitment to the full program fee, including when paying by instalments.

If, after the first two classes, you find the program is genuinely not for you, you may withdraw before 22 October 2026 and receive a refund of monies paid, less a $50 administration fee.

Group numbers will be limited for greater intimacy.

For eleven months, we will walk one petal of the Rose.

We will look towards the sky, enter an ancient story, and continually return to the body, the Earth, our personal mythos and what is seeking expression through our lives.

When we live inside a sacred story long enough, it can change the way we live.

Message Jacqui for more information and payment plans.
Booking through Humanitix adds on a ticket fee.

YOUR FACILITATOR

Jacqui Bushell has been dancing with the mythic imagination for much of her life, through her love of the archetypal wisdom held in fairy tales and her work as a spiritual herbalist, listening for the voices and stories in plans, rocks and landscape. She is passionate about encouraging others to explore their own mythology at the borderlands of psyche, body, culture and land. She has been facilitating women’s circles, ceremonies, retreats, workshops and courses in Australia and internationally for 30 years.

Jacqui guides people in awakening their creative soul through connecting with the mysteries of the earth and their own sacred nature. She weaves together plant spirit alchemy, energetic healing, embodiment practices, storytelling, journey work and earth connection to inspire transformational shifts in the way people see themselves and their world. Her work is always empowering and experiential, inviting you to come home to a deep sense of belonging and kinship with nature.

“I was so moved by your exquisite approach to the Goddess so eloquently expressed. Yours is the voice of the essential feminine wisdom without which we cannot heal ourselves and our planet. I learned so much! You have ignited a mini revolution of my spirit in the places where my art and healing meet the sacred within me.”

- Kayley B, USA

“Jacqui - your use of language is exquisite ... you took me right into my body & beyond!! I admire your ability to hold space, & to really allow people to be in their experience ... what you offer, & the mastery with which you offer it, is rare & awesome. High love & gratitude.”

- Hayley A, SA

Contact the host of WALKING THE ROSE- A VENUS JOURNEY