About
The Darkening Path: Journeys into the Irish Otherworld™ is a self-paced, five-module online programme for the weeks between Samhain and the Winter Solstice. It walks the pilgrim’s road through the Irish Otherworld - a time out of time when thresholds thin, the dead are near, and the land invites tending. It carries over 35,000 words of original work - hearth-tellings to read aloud, clear rites set out step by step, and lived rituals with hedge, stone, water, fire, and neighbour. You move in your own time, and you can return each winter; access does not end. The path begins at the Samhain gate with Nera’s night-walk, turns toward the shadow with Deirdre, crosses to Tír na nÓg with Oisín, sits at the winter hearth with the Cailleach, and stands for the sun’s pause at Drombeg in West Cork, carrying a small flame back to the home-place. Each module offers the story in full, practices of breath, stillness and gesture, land-rooted work for the week, a no-kit way for city ground, and quiet notes for keeping safe with fire, water, fields, and stones. Many choose to walk it across seven winter weeks, with two hearth-weeks left quiet for the work to settle. This curriculum is written by an Irish native who lives and works within her own indigenous tradition. It draws on more than four decades of clinical practice, on work as a birth and death facilitator, on years of group work and teaching, on study and research, and on a lifetime of lived experience on Irish ground. The language is rooted, the methods are elegant. Nothing here is for display - it is for intimate keeping. It suits those who feel the pull of Samhain and would meet it with steadiness rather than spectacle, those who honour ancestry and place, and those who prefer small faithful acts to big claims. You begin where you are - at a threshold, by a hedge-gap, under a west window - and you walk at a natural pace. Let the learning root in you; let kindness be what moves into the world.