Bill Plotkin

Since 1980, depth psychologist Bill Plotkin has been guiding women and men into the wilderness — the redrock canyons and snow-crested mountains of the American West — but also into the wilds of the soul. He calls this work soulcraft. There’s a great longing in all people to uncover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find the unique gift we were born to bring to our communities, and to experience our full membership in the more-than-human world. This journey to soul is a descent into layers of the self much deeper than personality, a journey meant for each one of us, not just for the heroes and heroines of mythology. A modern handbook for the journey, Soulcraft is not an imitation of indigenous ways, but a contemporary nature-based approach born from wilderness experience, the traditions of Western culture, and the cross-cultural heritage of all humanity. Filled with stories, poems, and guidelines, Soulcraft introduces over 40 practices that facilitate the descent to soul, including dreamwork, wilderness vision fasts, talking across the species boundaries, council, self-designed ceremony, nature-based shadow work, and the arts of romance, being lost, and storytelling.

Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

Soulcraft

Laura Mei

The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully 

 to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find 

 to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift — your true self — is the most you can do to serve the world.

Life invites us to grow in many ways — physically, emotionally, interpersonally, and spiritually. Spiritually, we can grow in two directions: toward spirit, on the one hand, and toward soul, on the other. Soul embraces and calls us toward what is most unique in us. Spirit encompasses and draws us toward what is most universal and shared.

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 shows us how we, as individuals, are different (in a community-affirming way) from everybody else. Spirit shows us how we are 𝘯𝘰 different from 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 else, how we are one with all that exists.

The journeyer in the underworld might be known — in a soul-oriented community — as a candidate for initiation, a seeker, an aspirant, an exile, a pilgrim, a solitary, a Wanderer. This is the time in life when a person is most intensely in search of her deepest self, a self she knows she will not find reflected back to her from within the familiar arenas of her merely human culture. She reaches for the seeds of her destiny in the more diverse, wild, and mysterious world of nature. She no longer conforms to nor rebels against society. She chooses a third way. She wanders, beyond the confines of her previous identity. The Wanderer crosses and recrosses borders in order to find something whose location is unknown and unknowable. The wandering time is neither easy nor painless. It tests what you are made of. It reveals you to yourself, down to the marrow.

Each person suffers from at least one significant emotional wound. This might not be an accident, and it might not be unfortunate. Perhaps the soul sees to it, to catalyze a special type of personal development that requires trauma for its genesis. It may take a whole lifetime to complete the healing of such a wound, but the point is that we must begin — and there is a treasure inside. The treasure created by the wound may be an extraordinary sensitivity to others' emotions, or to the nuances of the natural world. It may manifest as exceptional compassion for others, an artistic flair, a healing genius, a talent to inspire, or an uncanny knack to see the light side or to extract a shining jewel from the dark. In all cases, to release the full potential of the treasure, the wound must be uncovered, delved into, healed to some degree. Doing so renders that wound sacred. Psychologist Jean Houston reminds us that sacred wounds can occur anytime in life, and the value of the wound is that it breaches the soul; the psyche is opened so that "new questions begin to be asked about who we are in our depths." These fomenting questions facilitate the death of our old story and the birth of a larger story, a soul story, one revealed by the wounding itself. Such a wound becomes an invitation to our renaissance.

Nature has always been the essential element and the primary setting of the journey to soul. The soul, after all, is our 𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳 wildness, the intrapsychic terrain we know the least and that holds our individual mysteries. When we truly enter the outer wild the soul responds with its own cries and cravings. These passions might frighten us at first because they threaten to upset the carefully assembled applecart of our conventional lives. Perhaps this is why many people regard their souls in much the same way they view deserts, jungles, oceans, wild mountains, and dark forests — as dangerous and forbidding places. Nature depends on us to embody our souls. The world cannot fully express itself without each of us fully expressing 𝘰𝘶𝘳 selves; diminished human soul means diminished nature. Just as nature longs for the embodiment of our souls, our souls long for a world in which nature can embody itself fully and diversely. 

The soul is like an acorn. Just as the acorn gives instructions to the oak about how to grow and what to become, the human soul carries an image or vision that shows us how to grow, what gift we carry for others, the nature of our true life. Unlike oaks, however, we humans are the one part of creation capable of ignoring or refusing the flowering of our own souls. Even in our synthetic, egocentric society, the soul stirs in our subterranean depths, endlessly calling, pushing up like a flower through the cracks in the concrete pavement of our lives. We catch glimpses in our dreams and in fragments of poetry and song, in the distant howl of a coyote or in a bird's sudden flight, in sunsets and the rapture of romance. Many are beginning again to hear the soul's call and want to follow it into the unknown. But there are fears. What will happen to me? What will others think? When the soul is heard but not engaged, we fall into a type of sorrow, a soul depression. Many people fill their days with a thousand and one distractions in an attempt to muffle the cry of their souls.

The pull toward soul feels like an earthquake in the midst of your life. The journey of descent begins with a 

, a stirring declaration from the depths, from the gods and goddesses, that it is time to leave behind everything you thought your life was supposed to be. The call to adventure is the prologue to the journey of descent. It comes when it is time to inherit a greater life, to plunge yourself into the limitless expanse and depth the world affords. The old way of life has been outgrown. The familiar goals, attitudes, and patterns of relationships no longer fit your developing sense of who you truly are. The time has arrived to step over a threshold into a new way of being. As Joseph Campbell writes: "This first stage of the mythological journey — though unknown, surprising, and even frightening to the conscious personality — signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. What formerly was meaningful may become strangely emptied of value".

Archetypal forms and patterns exist not only in the human psyche but also in the outer world of nature. The Earth so effectively mirrors our soul powers simply because our souls are elements of earth's soul. We observe in the patterns of nature the essence of courage, love, sacrifice, desire, faith, belonging — all the possibilities of our own humanness in their primary and most vital forms. In time, we encounter reflections of our deepest individual natures and perhaps hear our true name spoken for the first time. We come to understand that what is reflected by nature is not just who we are now but also who we could become. As we open ourselves to the element of wildness, we discover a quality of our own soul that longs to be embodied in the world, sung to the world, danced, cried, celebrated. The earth provides us with not only the means to be physically born into this world but also the spiritual means to recognize our deeper identities. During the most life-changing soul encounters, nature holds up a mirror and shows us the face we have longed to see but have been terrified to behold.

The Wanderer must go off in search of the one life she can call her own. Joseph Campbell reminds us: "The differentiation of sex, age, and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world. The image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments. We think of ourselves as Americans, children of the twentieth century, Occidentals. We are virtuous or sinful. Yet such designations do not tell what it is to be a man, they denote only the accidents of geography, birth-date, and income. What is the core of us? What is the basic character of our being?"

Mary Oliver suggests that, in Western society at least, when a person finally goes off in search of her core, it is, psychologically, "already late" in her life and it does not happen in a quiet, sunlit, or easy moment, but rather in the middle of a "wild night," when there is darkness and chaos all about. At times like these, her greatest need is for the company of her own true voice, yet she is not likely to hear that voice until she has progressed some distance down the road. She must leap into the night with blind faith or not at all.

Distinguishing authenticity from deception — at any stage of life — requires the ability to access and understand your emotions, desires, and values. But the more advanced practice of 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 authenticity over social acceptance requires something more: you must tell yourself and your intimate others the truth, all of it, as deep as you can, especially when it is difficult. What you express is from the heart and intended to serve both yourself and others. You must adopt the practice of making all your actions align with what you know to be emotionally and spiritually true. A key authenticity practice is to stop pleasing others at the expense of your own integrity.

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