“As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode.... The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies - and vice versa.”
Founder of Animus Valley Institute Bill Plotkin will be making his first Australian tour in November this year alongside Geneen Marie Haugen, his fellow guide and partner.
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 women and men through nature-based initiatory passages, including a contemporary, Western adaptation of the pan-cultural vision quest. 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), and Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (an ecocentric map of the psyche — for healing, growing whole, and cultural transformation). He has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Program Overviews
Training in Human Development: The Soulcentric Development Wheel
3 – 7 November, 2018
Guide: Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.
Venue: Karuna Retreat Centre, Katoomba, NSW
Cost: Full $1530.00 Early bird (before 30 August) $1375.00 Scholarship (by application) $1150.00
Full residential program. Limited places. Some part scholarships available by application. Ten percent discount for early bird registrations.
Description:
This training program is designed primarily for professional human development guides in fields such as psychotherapy, psychiatry, ministry, education, and life coaching. The Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (SDW) is a new ecopsychology of human development and cultural transformation, a blueprint showing how richly we can grow and mature when soul and nature are embraced as our wisest and most trustworthy guides. We will explore the SDW and its applications to education, parenting, rites of passage, psychotherapy, spiritual formation, personal growth, the journey of soul initiation, and cultural regeneration.
An application is required for this program.
Writing the Wild Soul
3 – 7 November, 2018
Guide: Geneen Marie Haugen, Ph.D.
Venue: Karuna Retreat Centre, Katoomba, NSW
Cost: Full $1530.00 Early bird (before 30 August) $1375.00 Scholarship (by application) $1150.00
Full residential program. Limited places. Some part scholarships available by application. Ten percent discount for early bird registrations.
Description: In “Writing the Wild Soul” we’ll explore practices that beckon us toward non-ordinary experience and modes of participation with the world. We will press our ears to the ground, listening for mythopoetic language, for sounds and words with mud still clinging to their roots, or hinting of the holy, or gasping with transformation or dismemberment. We’ll track images that can be translated into words, listening for the rhythmic breathing, faint howls, or leaping hooves of our Earthy and numinous companions. We’ll practice bringing a whisper, or a full-bodied roar, from the alluring, soul-filled, animate world to the page.
Deep Imagination, Soulcraft and the Reanimation of the World
11 – 15 November, 2018
Guides: Bill Plotkin Ph.D. and Geneen Marie Haugen, Ph.D.
Venue: Bamarang Bush Retreat, Nowra, NSW
Cost: Full $1640.00 Early bird (before 30 August) $1475.00 Scholarship (by application) $1230.00
Full residential program. Limited places. Some part scholarships available by application. Ten percent discount for early bird registrations.
Description: Deep imagination is a portal to the terra mysterium of soul and to the wrenchingly alive, sentient, ensouled world. Recovering our innate experience of an intelligent Earth (populated with both seen and unseen presences) and reclaiming our relationship with our deep imagination not only re-enliven us as individuals, but also erode the outworn Western worldview of a meaningless, disenchanted universe upon which life-assailing business-as-usual depends. Discovering, or deepening, a relationship with soul can serve as a compass to guide us as we learn to reinhabit a wildly alive, participatory Earth and cosmos.
An application is required for this program.
Coming Home to an Animate World: A Way of Ceremony and Conversation
21 – 25 November, 2018
Guides: Geneen Marie Haugen, Ph.D. and Bill Plotkin Ph.D.
Venue: Perup Natures Guesthouse, Tonebridge, WA
Cost: Full $1350.00. Early bird 10 percent discount (before 21 September)
All enquiries to: jenniyork@southernphone.com.au
Description: This five-day nature-based intensive, in the southwest of WA — guided by Bill Plotkin and Geneen Marie Haugen — can be thought of as a green doorway, an opening to a wilder consciousness shaped by (and in conversation with) Sacred Others known as forest, stone, cockatoo, and river — a cosmos breathing with mystery and invitation, singing and crying in a zillion tongues (See Event for full description).
An application is required for this program.
Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche: An Advanced Soulcraft Intensive
28 November – 2 December, 2018
Guides: Bill Plotkin Ph.D. and Geneen Marie Haugen, Ph.D.
Venue: Karuna Retreat Centre, Katoomba NSW
Cost: Full $1640.00 Early bird (before 30 August) $1475.00 Scholarship (by application) $1230.00
Full residential program. Limited places. Some part scholarships available by application. Ten percent discount for early bird registrations.
Description: This intensive is designed for those who have cultivated the resources of what we call the four facets of wholeness, and those whose primary longing now is for a first or deeper experience of soul encounter — the revelation of one’s unique mythopoetic identity, an identity expressed through symbol and metaphor, image and dream, archetype and myth, an identity embodied in a mysterious story glimpsed in moments of expanded awareness and exquisite aliveness.
An application is required for this program.
For enquiries and registration see soulcraftaustralia.com.au