Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

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Summary: Swimming deep in our souls
Review: This is a book whose poetry will sing to your soul. The poetry opens you up to the rest of the messages contained in this book. If you are ready and willing to submerge yourself into the mysteries of life, then this is the book for you. It is dense with pratices that will open you up to your own soul song and teach you how to sing the song to the rest of the world. Are you ready?

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Summary: A Lighthearted Review of Bill Plotkin's book, Soulcraft
Review: 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 and does transform the ego, especially when we cooperate (surrender) during dreamwork." He goes on to suggest that when we dream, we are "dipping into a stream, a Great Underdream, that is always flowing even when we are not having what we normally call a `dream.' ... The Underdream is what the soul wants the ego to embody in the dayworld," trying to help us see the important points about the deeper life waiting and longing to be lived.

This deeper, sometimes "disquieting" soulful relationship to life is not an easy or a fun task. In an insightful analogy, Bill likens deep soul work and the call to the journey into the West to the advertisement that Ernest Shackleton placed in the London papers for his expedition to the South Pole in 1914: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success." Jungian analyst and author James Hollis's comment that "therapy will not heal you, make your problems go away, or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting" makes a compelling coda to what Bill is presenting in his book. The work being offered, the ad our deeper selves are longing to read and answer, is simply to respond to what we know we are here for, without regard to outcome, the only reward being the knowledge that we did not, in Mary Oliver's words, "end up having simply visited this world."

Throughout the book, a practical gift that Bill gives us is a description of approaches he has discovered over the years that enable and enhance a direct experience with soul. These are broadly categorized into "Practices for Leaving Home," "Pathways to Soul Encounter," and "Cultivating a Soulful Relationship to Life." This is a rich compost pile of approaches and skills and attitudes that helps nurture growth of the relationship to soul, whether it be an early sprouting, a sending out of new shoots, or a sinking of deeper roots. Among my favorites are "Welcoming Home the Loyal Soldier," "Healing Work with Sacred Wounds," "Making Peace with the Past," "Soulcentric Dreamwork," Self-Designed Ceremony," "Symbolic Artwork," "Soul Poetry," "The Vision Quest," "The Art of Being Lost," "Befriending the Dark," "Confronting Your Own Death," "The Art of Shadow Work," and The Art of Soulful Romance." Rich stuff, all of it, and those are just a baker's dozen of more than forty that Bill offers up in the thirteen chapters of his book.

A good friend of mine turned 50 just last month. Knowing where he was in his life and where he wanted to try and end up, the book was an easy choice for a gift. As he thanked me for it, he laughingly hoped that this book would answer all of his important questions. No, this book won't answer all our questions, but it goes a long way to creating a soulful approach to reconnecting with Nature and Psyche and helping the reader discover just what the important questions in life might really be.







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Summary: Blends philosophical and spiritual goals
Review: You don't have to be Native American to successfully utilize the idea of initiation to transform your life: that's the message of Bill Plotkin's Soulcraft, a remarkable title which covers modern day initiation and ceremony, telling how to use these facets to integrate personal and spiritual goals into a life. Soulcraft is an essential experiential guide which blends philosophical and spiritual goals.