Your Enchanted Dwelling
Guided Audio Journey for Creativity
Hello, lovely Celtic Creatives,
Today I share an audio practice for your Celtic Creatives Toolkit that will guide you on an imaginal journey to discover your ‘Enchanted Dwelling’. This is an otherworldly dwelling from where you can engage in your creative work or craft. I have used this technique with many clients (and daily myself) to cultivate a deeper connection with the co-creative energies of the Otherworld that can inspire and enable our soulful work.
It is inspired by a childhood memory of when I was 8 years old and armed with twigs and my imagination, I tried to build a fairytale home in the park across from my house in a working-class north Dublin suburb. What we dream as children, those seemingly lost memories, often knock on our creative door years later (something we can explore more of here in time).
Like Virginia Woolf and Maya Angelou who advocated for a room of one’s own, here you will discover an enchanted dwelling of your own.
How it Works
You will press play on the audio provided and enter the imaginal realm where I will guide you to your enchanted dwelling. You will then press pause on the audio, don’t worry I will tell you when to do so, and engage in your creative work or craft.
When you are finished tending to your creativity, you will unpause the audio to close down the energy. As you will hear, I remind you to do this and tell you that I’ll be waiting until you do, so don’t leave me hanging! This sounds kind of creepy lol but it’s just my voice guiding you back to ground.
How to Prepare
Prepare whatever creative work or craft you want to do ideally in the space in which you’ll engage in this practice but that’s not entirely necessary either, I did this practice walking by the sea yesterday before dawn and it was like being in a dreamscape.
Make sure to have your journal and pen to capture images, symbols, and insights that emerge. I’ll include initial journalling prompts below. Over time you may begin to notice synchronicities between your enchanted dwelling, your waking life and your night dreams.
Decide how you would like to ground afterwards. I have listed suggestions below under ‘guidance for working with the creative imagination’.
When you are ready press play on the audio.
Guidance for working with the Creative Imagination
This may seem longwinded and you might be like, get me to the practice already! But, in due diligence to the Otherworld, I’ve made suggestions on how to work with the imaginal realm, which applies to any guided journey or active imagination you engage in.
Living bits of soul:
The Otherworld is both soul and land in Irish mythology (because these things aren’t separate). When we engage with the Otherworld through a guided journey, we do so through the imaginal realm of the soul. The imaginal is a living space within our psyche that offers us a way to relate to the Unconscious (where the Otherworld emerges from), a bridge if you like. This allows for a depth of creativity that includes the conscious ego but moves beyond it. When we embark on an imaginal journey, the images and symbols that emerge are gifts from the Unconscious. As the audio describes, they are “living bits of soul” and must be valued as so.
Remember your heart:
Irish mythology and folklore are full of tales of people who enter the Otherworld with a greedy mentality and suffer consequences as a result. This is a lesson about the heart. As James Hillman says by engaging with the soul of the world through the Unconscious, “We can be in the world through the heart rather than the head.”1 Anytime you engage in an imaginal journey, tune into your heart and set an intention for yourself from this wise and honest place. The old friend who never steers you wrong.
Focus on the archetypal image: