12 Questions Worth Asking in the Lower World

The lower world answers the question you actually asked, not the one you meant to ask.

A lower world journey is a drum induced trance in which you travel downward through an opening in the earth to meet power animals and other helping spirits. What you bring back depends far less on how vivid the images were than on the question you carried down with you. Open questions that begin with what, where, who or how tend to come back full. Questions that can be answered with yes or no tend to come back empty, and so do questions that ask a spirit to make a decision that belongs to you.

You have already done the part that most people find hard. The drum did its work, the tunnel opened, something met you at the bottom, and you came back up with a picture: a fox on a riverbank, a door in a hillside, a hand holding something you could not identify. And then nothing. You wrote it down, you looked at it for a week, and it stayed a picture.

In my work with people who journey regularly, this is the most common complaint, and it is almost never a technique problem. The trance was fine. The drum was fine. What went down with them was a wish, not a question. A wish sounds like show me something. A question has an edge on it.

So what is actually worth asking down there? These twelve have earned their place, and the first one is the one almost nobody wants to ask.

1. What is here that I have been refusing to look at?

This question feels invasive when you say it out loud, which is exactly why it works. Most people go down carrying something they have already decided is not the issue. The failed thing, the person they no longer speak to, the version of their life they quietly gave up on around the age of thirty.

Asked in the lower world, this question rarely produces a dramatic scene. More often you are simply led. A helper turns and walks, and you follow, and the landscape becomes a place you did not choose. That is the answer. The refusal shows up as the direction you would not have taken on your own.

Practically: ask it early in your journeying life, not late. People tend to save it for a crisis, and by then it has been answered anyway, painfully, by circumstance. Ask it on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing is wrong. Write down the first place you are taken, even if it seems irrelevant, and read it again a month later.

What comes back is often not yours at all, which leads directly to the second question.

2. Whose voice am I still carrying?

There is a sentence you say to yourself that you did not invent. You know the one. It has a rhythm that does not match the rest of your inner speech, and it usually shows up when you are about to do something new.

The lower world is unusually good at this question because it does not deal in psychology. It deals in form. Ask it and you may be shown a coat, a kitchen, a hand on a doorframe, a face at the wrong age. People often report being surprised at who turns up. It is frequently not the obvious villain of the family story but someone peripheral: a teacher, a grandmother’s sister, a neighbour.

What you do with it afterwards matters more than the identification. Say the sentence out loud in your own voice, then say it again in theirs. The difference is usually audible within two attempts. After that it loses a good deal of its authority, though not all of it, and not immediately.

Once you know whose voice it is, a stranger question becomes available: what was it protecting?

3. What did this part of me need that it never got?

If you have ever met a younger version of yourself in a journey, you have probably done what most of us do: tried to comfort her. It is a decent instinct and it usually produces nothing, because comfort is what you would have wanted, not necessarily what she is asking for.

Ask this question instead and stop talking. The answers that come back are almost always smaller and more specific than the story would predict. Not love in the abstract. To be allowed to finish a sentence. To be left alone for an afternoon. To not be the one who noticed everything.

The reason this question belongs in the lower world rather than in a journal is that the lower world will not let you answer on her behalf. In a journal you will write what you think she needed. Down there she tends to correct you.

Then give it to her, in whatever form the journey offers. And when you come back up, do the same thing for yourself once, this week, in ordinary life. That last step is the one that gets skipped, and skipping it has a cost that shows up in the next question.

4. What am I protecting by staying tired?

Exhaustion is rarely only exhaustion. It is often a wall with a room behind it, and the room contains something you would have to act on if you had the energy to see it clearly.

This question tends to be met with resistance, both from the person asking and, oddly, from the helpers. Journeys on this theme often come back short and blunt. One image, no elaboration. Take the shortness seriously rather than repeating the journey until you get something prettier.

What people commonly find: the tiredness is holding a decision in place. Leaving a job, ending an arrangement that suits everyone else, saying a plain no to someone who has never heard one from you. As long as you are too tired, the decision stays theoretical, and staying theoretical is the point.

If this lands, do not overhaul your life on the strength of one journey. Name the decision in a single sentence and write it somewhere you will see it. Naming is enough for now, because there is something underneath it that has to be asked first.

5. Where did I first learn that this was not safe?

Replace this with whatever you have been circling: being seen, resting, wanting something openly, taking up room in a conversation.

The lower world handles origin questions well because it is not bound by chronology. You may be shown a moment you have no memory of, or a moment you remember as unremarkable. Both count. What matters is the physical detail that comes with it: the temperature, what was in your hands, where the light was coming from. Those details are the part your body kept.

Do not argue with what you are shown, and do not build a family theory out of it either. One scene is one scene. If the same scene comes back across three separate journeys, then you have something worth sitting with. If it comes once and never again, note it and move on. This is where the snake often appears, which people find alarming and which is usually just the shedding doing its work.

The next question is the one I have found hardest to ask, for reasons that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand.

6. What would you have me stop doing?

Nearly every question we bring to the spirits is additive. What should I start, what should I take up, what practice, what discipline, what next. Asking what to stop reverses the direction, and the answers tend to be unwelcome in a specific way: they are usually about something you are proud of.

Behind our house in Portugal there is an old cistern with a concrete lid that has never quite fitted. In summer it hums. I used to sit on it in the late afternoon because it was the coolest surface on the property, and because the sound underneath reminded me of a drum being played in another room. One afternoon I went down with a list. Eleven questions, written in a notebook I still have, on a page that curls at the corner. I got through two. On the third, the landscape below me went completely still and I heard, plainly: “You are talking.” That was the entire message. I sat there on the warm concrete with my notebook and my ballpoint pen and felt ridiculous. Then I closed the notebook. What came in the following ten minutes I have never managed to write down properly, and I have stopped trying.

Ask this one when your practice feels busy. Busy is the tell. And when you get the answer, do not negotiate it down to a compromise, because there is a related question that will expose the negotiation anyway.

7. What is the smallest true thing I could do this week?

People arrive in the lower world wanting the large instruction. Move country, leave him, start the training, sell the house. Large instructions are rare down there, and when they do come they usually arrive uninvited rather than in answer to a question.

What the helpers give reliably is the next step, sized correctly. A phone call. A door left open. One meal eaten sitting down. It disappoints people, and the disappointment is worth examining, because a step you can actually take this week is worth more than a vision you will admire for a year.

There is also a practical reason for the small scale. Trust between you and a helping spirit is built the way trust is built anywhere, through small things that were followed through on. Ask for the enormous thing before that trust exists and you will get silence, or something so symbolic you can interpret it any way you like.

Do the small thing. Then go back and say you did it. That single sentence changes the relationship more than most people expect, and it makes the next question possible to ask honestly.

8. What am I asking you to decide for me?

This is a question about your own question. Ask it at the start of a journey, before the real one, and watch what happens to the real one.

A surprising number of journey questions are handovers in disguise. Should I take this job means please take responsibility for this so that if it goes badly it was guidance. The spirits, in my experience, decline. Sometimes politely. Sometimes by simply not appearing, which people then interpret as a blocked journey.

Reframe the handover into something answerable. Not should I take the job but what am I not seeing about this job. Not is he right for me but what do I keep doing in this relationship that I also did in the last one. The information you get from the second version is usable. The information you get from the first is a coin toss with a drum.

Once you stop outsourcing decisions, a much older question tends to surface on its own.

9. What did I lose that I never grieved?

Not everything worth grieving looks like a loss from the outside. A version of yourself you retired quietly. A friendship that thinned out over four years without an argument. A country you left for good reasons.

Ungrieved losses behave strangely in the body. They show up as flatness rather than sadness, and as a mild irritation with people who are still enjoying the thing you gave up. In a journey they often appear as objects rather than scenes: a folded item of clothing, a set of keys, a chair.

The instruction that usually follows is not to reclaim the thing. It is to hold it long enough to say what it was. Grief that has never been named cannot finish, and it is remarkable how much energy an unfinished thing consumes. This is the point in shamanic journeying where people often cry for the first time, several journeys in, about something they thought they were fine with.

And once something has been properly put down, your hands are free, which raises an obvious next question that almost nobody thinks to ask.

10. What am I ready to give back?

Journeying is lopsided by default. We go down to receive: guidance, protection, power, answers. Reciprocity is talked about a great deal in modern practice and performed rather less.

Asked sincerely, this question produces some of the most concrete answers you will get. Not offerings in the ceremonial sense, though those have their place. More often: attention. Care of a specific piece of land. A skill used for someone who cannot pay for it. Silence kept about something you were told.

There is a version of this that goes wrong, and it is worth naming. Giving back is not penance and it is not a transaction meant to buy better journeys. If the answer you receive makes you feel indebted rather than steady, you have probably brought guilt down with you and handed it over as a question. Go back another day.

Do what you are given. Then, at some point, you will notice a gap in what you are being told, and that gap deserves a question of its own.

11. What are you not telling me yet, and why?

Helpers withhold. Anyone who journeys for long enough runs into it: a clear sense that there is more, and a closed door where the more is kept.

Most people react to this by pushing, and pushing produces material that is usually your own mind filling the gap. Asking directly works better, and the second half of the question is the part that matters. Why is what turns a refusal into information.

The reasons that come back tend to fall into three groups. You are not steady enough yet to hold it. You already know it and are waiting to be told, which would let you skip the part where you admit it. Or it is not yours, and you have wandered into something that belongs to someone else in your family or your community. All three are useful answers. None of them are rejections.

This is where the raven tends to be blunt in a way that stings for a day and then reads as kindness. Accept the closed door and ask one final question before you come back up.

12. What should I ask you next time?

Ask this at the end of every journey and your practice stops being a series of unconnected visits and becomes a conversation with a thread running through it.

It also solves the most boring problem in journeying, which is not knowing what to bring. People stop journeying far more often out of aimlessness than out of fear or difficulty. If you always come back holding the next question, that particular exit closes.

Write the answer down before you write anything else about the journey, while it is still exact. Then leave it alone until you go down again. Do not workshop it, do not improve the phrasing, and do not decide it is too simple. Questions that arrive from below have a habit of looking obvious on paper and behaving very differently when you carry them into the tunnel. If the change that follows feels slower than you expected, that is normal, and the butterfly is a fair reminder of how long the unglamorous middle stage actually takes.

Twelve questions is more than enough for a year of practice. Take one. Take it down on Sunday. Let it be badly phrased if it has to be.

Now it is your turn

Two questions, and the second one is harder than the first.

Which of these twelve would you take down this week? And which one did you skip over quickly while reading, without quite deciding to?

Write it in the comments. You do not need to explain it. If you want to learn this properly, with the drum, the map of the three worlds and a group that journeys alongside you, that is what Elements of Shamanism is built for.