Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

by Bill Plotkin

Soulcraft is the skill needed in shaping the human soul toward its fulfillment in its unity with the entire universe.

In these earlier cultures, the universe was experienced primarily as a presence to be communed with and instructed by, not a collection of natural resources to be used for utilitarian purposes.

The Plains Indians of North America identified and sacralized their human presence at any moment by offering the sacred pipe to the four directions, then to heaven above and the earth below. In this manner they knew where they were. They knew also that they were not alone. They were at the center of the universe.

The whole of life was thought of as a celebration of existence. There

In our modern world of scientific insight and technological skills, we have thought that we could do without these spirit powers of the universe. Although we know more about the universe, we have less intimate presence to the universe than any people ever had.

In losing our sense of soul, we have trivialized our existence.

We are frightened, both personally and in our communities, by the least threat to life or security. We seek protection through ever greater control over other humans and over the natural world that we inhabit.

I thought about the psychological comforts of meals, how they allow us to break up and define our days with comforting little events.

In my dream life, at least, I was finding community. And although I was opening to the spiritual in the form of the masculine, upperworld, Zen-oriented, contemplative life, my dream self was still keeping some distance from an older “vehicle” of an earthy, feline, feminine underworld — a life sealed off some time ago. I wondered what exactly in me had been sealed off, and why.

The key appeared to be the feminine — as embodied in the mother and daughter, the woman with cats, the two women at the trailhead, and the presence of nature all around me. Would the sensual, emotionally vibrant, musically resonant feminine powers within me and in nature help me find my place, my gift, my community?

Like an embrace, the butterfly’s vibrant touch and the monk’s sturdy presence began to teach me, in a language older and far deeper than words. They said it was both my opportunity and obligation this lifetime to weave cocoons. “Beautiful contexts for transformation,” they said in feeling-images, “sacred spaces in which people can learn again from wild nature as it exists both inside them and outside.”

The greater service is to create opportunities for people to embrace their destinies using their own natural timing and creative impulses, so that they empower and initiate themselves.

I was told not what delivery system to use, but what was to be delivered. I learned that my calling is to help people enter the turbulent waters of soul, where their lives might be transformed, and that I was to do this by a process akin to weaving cocoons. And the seed of a vision began to sprout, a vision of a contemporary path to initiation for people of Western cultures, a nature-based way to a soul-rooted adulthood and, eventually, elderhood.

The monk has advocated the Zen-like qualities of centeredness, non-attachment, and patience, while the butterfly has sung the praises of playfulness, alacrity, and spontaneity.

I’ve found that my clients’ discontents are often rooted in an unmet longing for wildness, mystery, and a meaningful engagement with the world.

Contemporary society has lost touch with soul and the path to psychological and spiritual maturity, or true adulthood. Instead, we are encouraged to create lives of predictable security, false normality, material comfort, bland entertainment, and the illusion of eternal youth.

Most of our leaders — political, cultural, and economic — represent and defend a non-sustainable way of life built upon military aggression, the control and exploitation of nature’s “resources,” and an entitled sense of national security that ignores the needs of other species, other nations, tribes, and races, and our own future generations. These values do not reflect our deeper human nature.

The book itself is a trail guide for the mystical descent into the underworld of soul: what the descent is, why it is necessary, how to recognize the call to descend, how to prepare for the descent, what the process looks and feels like, and what practices initiate and accelerate the descent and maximize the soul-quickening benefits of the journey.

The final third of the book prepares you to return to the everyday world to live your soul path, carrying what was previously hidden as a gift to others. We

explore practices for living soulfully, including the art of romance, work with our personal shadows, wandering in nature, befriending the dark, cultivating a personal relationship with spirit, and, most important, joyfully offering your soul gift as a contribution to social and political transformation and the care of the environment.

And so we search. We go to psychotherapists to heal our emotional wounds. To physicians and other health care providers to heal our bodies. To clergy to heal our souls. All of them help — sometimes and somewhat. But the implicit and usually unconscious bargain we make with ourselves is that, yes, we want to be healed, we want to be made whole, we’re willing to go some distance, but we’re not willing to question the fundamental assumptions upon which our way of life has been built, both personally and societally. We ignore the still, small voice. We’re not willing to risk losing what we have. We just want more.

They imply we each must undertake the journey of descent if we are to heal ourselves at the deepest levels and reach a full and authentic adulthood, that there are powerful and dangerous beings in the underworld who are not particularly friendly or attractive, and that we are forever changed by the experience. In

If and when you embark upon the underworld adventure, it begins the same way it does in myth — by leaving home.

Your underworld encounters help you in two ways. Some of them further undermine or defeat your former understanding of self and world, while other encounters provide you with helpers or magical aid, supporting your more soul-rooted way of being. At the climax of the journey — it’s actually a nadir on an underworld excursion — you undergo a supreme ordeal that puts a decisive end to your old self-image (ego death) and leads to your reward, the recovery of your core soul knowledge.

Returning to the middleworld, you are now more consciously aligned with your soul’s purpose.

The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift — your true self — is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.

For thousands of years, we have been living in a culture that “protects” us from the hardships and dangers of the descent, a world in which everything is more or less predictable and where most people emulate those getting the greatest socioeconomic rewards. It is a world from which the true elders have largely disappeared, the elders who once possessed intimate knowledge of soul and who waited for us at the underworld threshold to guide us across.

Thomas Berry, the cultural historian and religious scholar, reminds us that the word nature comes from the Latin natus, “to be born,” and that the nature of a thing “has to do with that dynamic principle that holds something together and gives it its identity.”

Soul and nature are only slightly different ways of talking about the essence of a thing, whether a stone, a blossom, or a person. The soul of a blossom is its essential nature. Our human souls consist of those aspects of self that are most natural, that are most of nature — the aspects of self to which nature herself gave birth.

Through ordeals and ecstasies, we come to know what we were born to do, what gift we were meant to bring to the world, what vision is ours to embody.

After years of wondering and exploring, I began to suspect there were actually two realms involved in spirituality, not one.

One realm of spirituality turns upward toward the light, aids us in transcending our (ego’s) insistence that the world be just a certain way and not any other, helps us to disidentify from the commotion of the strategic mind so we can reclaim the inner quiet, peace, and wholeness of our true nature, and assists us in cultivating the blissful experience of being fully present in the moment and one with all of creation.

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 embraces and calls us toward what is most unique in us. Spirit encompasses and draws us toward what is most universal and shared.2

core powers, our deepest and most enduring powers, those central to our character and necessary to manifest our soul-level uniqueness.

core values are the ideals for which we would be willing to die and for which we in fact live.

Our core abilities are the natural talents or gifts indispensable for performing our soul work; these abilities are developed effortlessly or are capable of being honed to exceptional levels.

core knowledge consists of those mysterious, soul-level things we know without knowing how we know them and that we acquire without effort; they are the fact...

Even though the soul is at our very core, soul appears to the conscious self as mysteriously other.

Your soul may desire, for example, that you sing your heart songs, or that you assist others through major life transitions, but maybe you don’t have a clue about this. Or, if you do have a clue, you might refuse that desire out of fear, a sense of unworthiness, or any number of other “good” reasons. As you delve into the mysteries of your soul, you discover your core powers and learn to integrate them into your daily choices and actions.

Soul is ultimately an agent for spirit.

The soul path is often associated with the setting sun (and thus the direction of west), the descent to our earthy roots, into the wildness of the soil and the soul, a journey into the underworld, a voyage into darkness or shadow as in the apparent destination of the sun as it sinks below the western horizon.

A holistic approach to spirituality interweaves the ascent and the descent, rendering balance to the experience of both the upperworld and underworld.7

Spirit realization and soul embodiment, together as spiritual pursuits, contrast with a third realm of human development, the healing and growth of the everyday personality — the ego — and its relationship to the human body and to other people.

The middle realm of ego growth includes the healing of emotional wounds, the development of personal bonds, the cultivation of physical grace and emotional expression, and the blossoming of empathy, intimacy, and personality-level authenticity. A healthy ego is skilled in imagination, feeling, intuition, and sensing, in addition to thinking.

In contemporary society, when ego growth has faltered or stalled, we seek help from psychotherapy and related disciplines such as social work, personal coaching, art and movement therapies, and bodywork.

Soul embodiment is facilitated by practices that I refer to collectively as soulcraft and that include underworld dreamwork and deep imagery journeys, self-designed ceremonies and traditional rituals, wandering in nature, and conversing with birds and trees, the winds, and the land itself.

The descent — and the darkness into which it leads — have their own value; the journey to soul is not a misfortune or a necessary evil.

Then the descent can be harrowing indeed as we enter a blackness we fear we won’t escape.

When the descent is chosen, it is likely to offer exhilaration and ecstasy as well as frights and ordeals. Initiation has its hardships; yet the descent can be joyous even when it begins with calamity.