Bill Plotkin is an American eco-depth psychologist and wilderness guide, founder of the Animas Valley Institute in Colorado and author of Soulcraft and Nature and the Human Soul. In his work, soul initiation is the passage in which a person’s life turns from fitting in and searching for soul to actively living from soul in service of their community, and he thinks few people in modern societies ever make it. He is quoted in the Therapeutic Shamanism books on Soul and on our place in the world, which find the Soul by a different route, shamanic journeying to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer.
Who is Bill Plotkin? #
A psychologist and guide who has spent his working life on what he calls the journey of soul initiation. He describes himself as an eco-depth psychologist, wilderness guide and agent of cultural regeneration. His doctorate in psychology is from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he has also worked as a research psychologist studying non-ordinary states of consciousness, a rock musician and a white-water river guide. In 1979, on a solo winter climb of a mountain in the Adirondacks, he had what he calls a “call to spiritual adventure”, and left academic life in search of his true calling. Since 1980 he has guided people on the journey of soul initiation through the Animas Valley Institute, which he founded in south-west Colorado.1
His books are Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (2003), a practical guide; Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (2008), a nature-based model of the whole human life; Wild Mind: A Field GuideGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this to the Human Psyche, a map of the psyche; and The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (2021).1
What is soul initiation? #
A turning point in a life. In Nature and the Human Soul Plotkin defines Soul Initiation as “the radical transformation in life orientation in which we shift from a focus on social belonging and soul discovery to the active embodiment of soul in our community.” Before it, the ego is “an agent for itself”; at soul initiation it “accepts its role as an agent or handmaiden for the soul”.2
He sets it inside a map of eight life stages, each named after a place in nature, from the Nest and the Garden of childhood through the Oasis and the Cocoon of adolescence to the Wellspring, the Wild Orchard, the Grove of EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this and the Mountain Cave. The journey of soul initiation is the long process that runs from early adolescence, through late adolescence, across the passage he calls Soul Initiation into early adulthood. In a healthier culture, he thinks, it would happen for most people in their teens; in most modern societies it seldom happens at all, and when it does, it begins in our twenties at the earliest.3
What does Plotkin mean by soul? #
Something ecological, not religious. His later definition is that soul is “a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community”, so that every creature, river and mountain has one, not only humans. For a person it is “the particular ecological niche a person is born to occupy whether or not that niche is ever consciously discovered or embodied”, and he stresses that this is a place in the more-than-human world, not in human culture.4 It follows that soul cannot be pinned to a job or role, which is one reason he calls his work “absolutely not a way to find your social or vocational ‘purpose.’”5 See What is a calling?
What is the Descent to Soul? #
The most intense part of the journey, and the subject of his 2021 book. He describes it in five phases (Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis and Enactment) and as an adventure lasting at least several months and sometimes years. He is clear about what it is not: not psychotherapy, not the hero’s journey or a vision quest, not shamanism, and not a rite of passageRite of passage. The deliberate death-and-rebirth (separation → liminal → incorporation, after van Gennep) by which the childhood-built identity is dismantled and a new one, rooted in the Soul, is grown. The lost route to Adulthood. More about this, which he calls probably the most common misunderstanding of it. Nor, he writes, is it “a white person’s adaptation, appropriation, or co-optation of any indigenous culture’s practices or traditions”, but a contemporary Western process his colleagues have tracked and guided for forty years.5
Why does he think so few people become true Adults? #
Because of what he sees as a failure in human development. He thinks the environmental and cultural crises of our time come in large part from “a widespread failure in individual human development”, and that the bottleneck is not between Adult and Elder but much earlier: “the scarcity of true Adults is, naturally, the explanation for why there are so few real Elders.” He does not think a ceremony can solve this on its own: “A weekend or multiday rite of passage does not come even close to providing what is needed to become a true Adult.”5 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism meet his work? #
On Soul, and on why finding it matters to the world. Paul Francis quotes Soulcraft in The Shamanic Journey, calling it “excellent”, for its account of talking with a lizard, an elk or a rock: “a kind of isolation you didn’t know you suffered has vanished.”6 In Finding Your Deep Soul, calling it a “wonderful book”, he quotes Plotkin’s lines that “Your soul is both of you and of the world. The world cannot be full until you become fully yourself.”7 Following Plotkin, Therapeutic Shamanism sees our Souls as “not separate from nature, but part of it”, and as a potential that waits for us to discover and claim it.8 A line of Plotkin’s, which Paul recalls as “the world cannot be whole until you take your place in it”, made him sit bolt upright when he read it.
The diagnosis is close too. Therapeutic Shamanism also holds that, without initiation, most people stay “effectively children in adult bodies” and that “real Adults are rare.”9 See What does it mean to become a True Adult?
How is the Therapeutic Shamanism path to Soul different? #
In where the Soul is found and how. Plotkin’s soul is an ecological niche, met through his Descent with practices such as vision fasts, dreamwork and solo time in wild places. In Therapeutic Shamanism the Soul is a Lower-World Human, “the place, the only place, where their Soul is to be found”, met in shamanic journeys with the help of a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer and Guides.9 See What does rewilding Soul mean and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
Therapeutic Shamanism is also cautious about dramatic experiences as the main way in. Vision quests, sweat lodges and the like “certainly can work dramatically in the short term”, but for domesticated people the effects tend to fade after “A few weeks or months back in ordinary, day-to-day modern life”, so the emphasis falls on a practice woven into daily life.10 This is Therapeutic Shamanism’s general view, not a reply to Plotkin, who says himself that a short rite is not enough. Soulcraft has a section on the ceremonial use of hallucinogens in some nature-based traditions, in which Plotkin stresses the ceremony rather than the substance and warns of the risks; it is something Therapeutic Shamanism does not teach.11 See Do you need psychedelics or plant medicines to practise shamanism?
