What is Soulcraft™?

Soulcraft™ is a synergistic set of contemporary, nature-based practices designed to evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter and soul initiation. Your soul is the unique, wild essence at the heart of your being. Wilderness and soul guide Bill Plotkin, PhD, synthesized Soulcraft™ practices from their roots in nature-based cultures and integrated them with modern depth psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage.

Here is Bill Plotkin’s description of Soulcraft™ from the introductory chapter of his book Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche:

For over twenty years, I’ve been guiding people into the wilderness — not just the redrock canyons and snow-crested mountains of the American Southwest but, more essentially, into the wilds of our own souls. I call this work soulcraft.

As a psychologist, I’ve found that my clients’ discontents are often rooted in an unmet longing for wildness, mystery, and a meaningful engagement with the world. Psychotherapy’s traditional methods, regulated relationships, and confined offices are inadequate to address this craving for the untamed terrain of the soul — its jungles, cataracts, labyrinths, and feral creatures. A radically shifted perspective, an expanded cache of strategies and roles, and much wilder environments are needed to recover the innate treasures, the secrets of destiny, buried beneath the surface of our daily routines. Soulcraft is an approach to the psyche and the world that embraces both wild nature and the depths of our souls; it could be called an eco-depth psychology.

For more information on Soulcraft™ or to order Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche and Bill Plotkin’s second book, Nature and the Human Soul, go to Animas Valley Institute’s (AVI) website: www.animas.org. Soulcraft™ is a registered trademark of William Plotkin.