'As we enter a future where humans and the natural world are more intimate with each other, we will surely be powerfully influenced by this new guide into the mysteries of nature and psyche.

He has bound them into a book that is immensely practical, alive with ritual intelligence, thick with useful tools from a host of courageous comrades.'ĭavid Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous Plotkin has wandered again and again into the nourishing darkness, and has returned with this earthly bundle of insights and images talismanic tools for awakening to the outrageous depths both within us and all around us. 'Here is an abundantly wise and carefully crafted survival guide for the wild soul currently dozing (or dying) at the heart of your civilized life. 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. 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.Ī 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. 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.

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.

Soulcraft bill plotkin