Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

I am currently translating this book into the German language. It is the most exciting translation I have done in the last years. Even though I am only copying it down it has already changed my life in a profound way. I am very thankful for the destiny that put this book on my desk - and I know that there was no coincidence involved. The book provides several practices and approaches that help to address the problem a lot of people encounter in the middle of their lifes - or sometimes even earlier: The moment when you notice that things that have always made sense all in a sudden don't carry any meaning for you any more. It is the first book I ever read that does not only promise to, but actually really helps you finding out what you are here for and how you can act according to this insight. It brings you on your path - the soulpath. Work your way through the practices, exercises, and ceremonies in this book and your life will never be the same again. Seriously, I see a lot of books on new age and nature spirituality going over my desk, but this one definitely outdoes all I have been reading and working on during the last ten years.

What do you get when you cross a Jungian-oriented depth psychologist, an ecotherapist, and a wilderness guide of the highest caliber? And then what do you do? The answer to the first question is Bill Plotkin, director of Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org). The answer to the second: spend 20+ years creating a way to approach soul in a culture that over the years has lost its ways of soul connection that once were as natural as walking upright. Half guidebook, half storybook, and half pure poetry, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin describes his lifelong work in discovering and developing nature and the outer wilderness as mirrors for our inner nature and inner wilderness. In Soulcraft, Bill tries to compile and present approaches to the mystery of our souls and what Mary Oliver calls "our place in the family of things." Of the many fruits one can take away from the stories and practices Bill describes in Soulcraft, I think four of the juiciest are: (1) his distinction between "spirit" and "soul", (2) his approach to dreamwork, (3) his belief that soul work, while not promising any easy answers to the harsh realities of life, certainly makes life more interesting, and (4) the practices that lead to cultivating a soulful relationship to life. Bill explains, "By soul I mean the vital, mysterious, and wild core of our individual selves, an essence unique to each person, qualities found in layers of the self much deeper than our personalities. By spirit I mean the single, great, and eternal mystery that permeates and animates everything in the universe and yet transcends all. Ultimately, each soul exists as an agent for spirit. ... Soul is what is most wild and natural within us." It is coming to know of this wild and natural within-ness that he seeks- through wilderness (outer and inner) exploration into the "sweet darkness" of the underworld journey of Shadow, Mystery, Love, and Death. He does not ignore or discount spirit in Soulcraft, but he recognizes that the path to the large openness of spirit necessarily goes through the darker singularity of the underworld journey of the West on the Medicine Wheel. Each person's individual journey, the hero's journey, serves all of life. Bill's method of dreamwork, characterized as "soulcentric dreamwork," diverges from other approaches in its premise that every dream "is an opportunity to develop our relationship to soul ... Each dream provides ... a chance for the ego to be further initiated into that underworld story and those underworld desires." Bill coaches us to approach each dream reverently and very slowly, "permitting yourself the sometimes disquieting luxury of hanging out among the rich symbols and events ... twisting slowly in the breeze of its seductions and abductions." In other words, allowing the dream to dream us into being- allowing the dream to be the agent that helps to align us with our soul's deeper wisdom. "The dream can

I have long held a deep interest in and have studied ecopsychology, and I currently work with EarthLinks, a Denver-based non-profit organization that provides experiential earth education, specifically creating a healing context for at-risk homeless adults and others on society's margins -- thus I was naturally drawn to a new book by Bill Plotkin titled Soulcraft. In it, Plotkin, a depth psychologist, ecotherapist and wilderness guide, takes the reader on a wilderness journey of their own soul -- as the subtitle states: "Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche." The current environmental devastation and sustainability challenge we face is due in large part to the dominant post-industrial consumer-culture's way of creating a 'disconnect' of ourselves from our own soul and from the natural world. As Bill Plotkin says: "When we become alienated from soul -- our inner nature -- we lose respect for outer nature, resulting in pollution and degradation of the environment." Soulcraft offers us an experiential guide to help re-awaken our contact with the soul and helps us rekindle a closer relationship with the natural world, where such wounds, both inner and outer, can be tended and healed. Deep learning can come from close contact with the inherent wisdom of nature -- and a deeper understanding of that wisdom is just what earth literacy is about, reading the 'book of nature.' Soulcraft is a engaging guide to discovering the wilderness of Earth as mentor to and mirror of our own inner wilderness. I recommend Soulcraft as essential reading for anyone wishing to delve deeper into their own inner journey and into the larger journey we all strive for as we transform our culture toward a sustainable future, and a mutually enhancing human /earth relationship. -- Mary RomanoEditor, Earth Literacy Companion

Bill Plotkin's Soulcraft, grounded in the author's formal training as a clinical psychologist, and in his decades of experience as a wilderness guide who guides his clients through both inner and outer wilderness, provides readers with an experience-based, intellectually stimulating, and potentially life-altering antidote to mainstream Western civilization. Based on the premise that virtually all of us live lives that attempt to satisfy the ego's needs while ignoring the soul's deeper yearnings, Plotkin guides us to a severance from our ego-based lives, through an encounter with soul, and finally into a return, with new knowledge of the gifts we carry to our people--family, friends, co-workers and community. As he encourages us to grow from our necessary and valuable uninitiated adolescent need to be accepted by society, into our initiated adult need to live authentically these gifts we carry, he treats us to his own story and the stories of others who are doing the work of authenticity. More than 30 practices validate the presence of the word "craft" in the book's main title. Whether the reader is drawn to meditation, drumming, dream work, deep imagery, befriending the dark, wandering in nature, working with shadow or any one of more than a score more approaches to living a soul-based life, Bill Plotkin challenges us to live our true callings, and provides us the means with which to do so. Soulcraft engaged me both experientially and philosophically, calling me to both act and think. It's no accident that Thomas Berry wrote the foreword, or that Brian Swimme, Angeles Arrien, Robert Johnson, and Derrick Jensen, among others, praised the book before publication. Bill Plotkin, in the words of David Whyte, whose poetry graces many of these pages, carries "what is hidden as a gift to others." For this we should all be grateful.

Every now and then a book is birthed into the world that is destined to irrevocably alter the spiritual face of modern culture. Bill Plotkin's Soulcraft is just such a book. Charting a course through the underworld pathways with the heart of a shaman, mapping the powers of myth and psyche with all the soul and interpretive skill of Jung or Campbell, Plotkin's guide to the journey of initiation is to nature-based soulwork what Huxley's Doors of Perception was to consciousness studies. This book is an immense treasure that will provide wisdomseekers, psychologists, shamanic practitioners, and seasoned wilderness guides alike with a fresh heart-opening soul language, a new mythos for fathoming the depths of change, as well as time-tested practical methods for navigating the landscape of authentic transformation. In essence, Soulcraft is Plotkin's "soul gift," a user's manual for the journey of the human soul, as well as a guide to the futurescape of why we are all really here. It is the book I wish I could have had at my fingertips when I began to feel the ancient call for rites of passage in my early youth. It is required reading for anyone guiding other people in soulwork, or delving deep into their own. As philosopher Parker Palmer has said, "The way to God is down." Plotkin shows the way.- Frank MacEowen, author of The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers