Welcome to Adventures In The Otherworld
The Otherworld in Celtic mythology is the inner world, the deep world, the underworld, the realm of the non-ordinary. It’s where to go to access ways of knowing beyond the rational, logical mind. It’s where we go to interact with the more-than-human. It’s full of adventure, mystery and the unknowable.
We may get there through story, ritual, psychedelics, meditation, prayer or countless other gateways humans have discovered. How we arrive is less important than how we navigate once we find ourselves there, it’s helpful to have some type of map or guide. Learning the language is important - metaphor, symbol, image, sensation. The Otherworld is fraught with pitfalls and strewn with treasures. It’s inhabited by allies ready to help us and tricksters bent on misleading us.
Adventures in the Otherworld is a safe place to share our experiences in the non-ordinary, without pathologizing or shame of being “weird”. It’s a place where we can mythologize our lives, find meaning in what is happening and uplift each other.
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What to Expect
I publish either a written piece or an audio recording each week including:
Notes from the Forest’s Edge: a delve into the liminal. Explorations from the edges of things. That threshold space between what is known and unknowable. Between nature and culture, the wild and the domesticated, the conscious and the subconscious, between this world and the Otherworld.
Celtic Medicine Stories: a podcast of myths, wonder tales and folklore from the Celtic lands with an eye to personal transformation.
Gateways to the Otherworld: explorations in passages from the ordinary to the non-ordinary, and safely back again. Techniques for accessing the Otherworld are embedded in our myths, folklore, wisdom traditions and science, here we explore them mindfully.
Learning the Language of the Otherworld: the wisdom of the non-ordinary tends to be communicated in code, symbols, metaphors, stories, feelings, memories, knowings. Here we look at various ways to work with the messages we receive so we can implement them in everyday, consensus reality.
The Celtic Worldview: explorations of how the ancient Celts saw things and how that might be relevant today.
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About Me: Kat Houghton PhD
I wander the liminal spaces between Western Psychology, Celtic Mythology and animism. I am an oral storyteller in the tradition of the British Isles, a Wilderness Rites of Passage guide with a PhD in Psychology and certificates in eco-therapy, hypnotherapy and transformational coaching.
My most profound teacher has been Grief. I am still reaping the treasures of my initiation through loss and the journey through the Underworld into which it catapulted me.
I was raised in the borderlands of northern England and southern Scotland and am now am rooting into the ancient mountains of the Southern Appalachians in North Carolina looking for ancestral connection to post-materialist science.
I co-steward a forest farm focused on mushrooms and woodland medicinals.
