32. Depth Psychology and Soul Initiation – with Bill Plotkin from Animas Valley Institute

Written By alexa firmenich

“Systemic human development oppression I’ve come to understand is the core oppression in the world. All the other oppressions — racial, sexual, gender, ethnic, class — stem from arrested human development.”

- Bill Plotkin

 

SYNOPSIS:

In this episode I sit down with Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Institute. Over the past 40 years, Bill has developed intricate, nature-based models of human development and education that challenge dominant psychological frameworks and invite us into a maturation process rooted in wholeness, wildness, and the more-than-human world.

We explore their three major maps of a person’s “soul-centric journey” and cover topics including:

  • Why most modern humans remain developmentally stuck in early adolescence

  • The 8-stage Soulcentric Developmental Wheel and how it mirrors nature’s rhythms

  • The four cardinal facets of the psyche, and the inner protectors that distort them

  • Whether other species undergo their own versions of soul initiation

  • Why the path to a mature culture will not come from the strategic mind, but from descent, mystery, and imagination

This is a deep-dive into a body of work that’s revolutionizing the lives of thousands of people, and how to think about adulthood, education, and healthy human cultures.

 

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GUEST BIO:

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution. As founder of western Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute in 1981, he has guided thousands of seekers through nature-based initiatory passages, including a contemporary, Western adaptation of the pan-cultural vision fast. Previously, he has been a research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide.

In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack peak, Bill experienced a call to adventure, leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. Bill is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (an experiential guidebook), Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (a nature-based stage model of human development through the entire lifespan), Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (an ecocentric map of the psyche — for healing, growing whole, and cultural transformation), and The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (an experiential guidebook for the descent to soul). He has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

QUOTES:

  • To the Wild Indigenous One, every emotion and part of us is good and valuable. We learn something from every single emotion. There’s no such thing as a toxic emotion to the Wild Indigenous One.

  • Systemic human development oppression I’ve come to understand is the core oppression in the world. All the other oppressions — racial, sexual, gender, ethnic, class — stem from arrested human development.

  • At bottom of our human psyches, we’re all lovers of the world. We’re born as exactly the kind of creatures that can fall in love with any place and any being.

  • One thing we start noticing when we get past the projection phase is that what we notice about the other surprises us. When we’re projecting, it doesn’t so much surprise us.

  • All human children do this, especially when we get old enough to start wandering alone outside the family home, like at age 4-6. We start falling in love with the birds and the squirrels, the butterflies and the trees and the flowers, and we start imitating them. That’s what a normal native little kid does.

  • Any soul work, any delivery system of an initiated human adult, is by definition subversive to contemporary society, because it’s offering something that enhances life, and contemporary society is destroying life.

  • The initiatory practices and ceremonies of healthy cultures are so essential because the elders recognize that our humanity, because of our mode of consciousness, can go wrong. And it can go wrong in really, really bad ways.

  • One of the things we need to go through, and that people in healthy, intact indigenous traditions never have to go through, is what I call ecological awakening. Ecological awakening is that point in our life where we have the visceral or somatic experience - not just intellectual, but a somatic experience - that we are a member of the Earth community. And that everything is in relation to us.

  • We’re born ecologically awakened, and then by age five or six (certainly once we start going to school) it gets suppressed. And by age six or seven, we’ve forgotten that we can talk to the birds and so forth.

  • Between now and several generations from now, we’re going to need eco-religions or eco-spiritualities. We’re seeing that in Christianity, we’re seeing it in Judaism, we’re seeing it in Buddhism. We’re discovering how to grow up our spiritualities by rooting them again in nature.

  • How do humans learn to once again become a life-enhancing presence on the planet and become conscious partners with evolution?

  • There’s something that’s helping us beyond the everyday human realm, and that is soul, or mystery, or spirit - or what Rupert Sheldrake would call the morphic field of the human species.

LINKS:

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