Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche | 
|  | | | Title: | Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche | | Author: | Bill Plotkin
Thomas Berry | | Publisher: | New World Library | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 29 August, 2003 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1577314220 / 9781577314226 | | List Price: | $16.95 | | You Save: | $5.42 | | Amazon Price: | $11.53 | |
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Product Description
Since 1980, Jungian psychologist Bill Plotkin has been guiding men and women into the wilderness — the redrock canyons and snow-crested mountains of the American Southwest — but also into the wilds of the soul. He calls this work soulcraft.
There’s a great longing in all people — a longing 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. 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.
A modern handbook for the journey, Soulcraft is not an imitation of indigenous ways, but a contemporary nature-based approach born from the landscape of the Southwest, the traditions of Western culture, and the cross-cultural heritage of all humanity. 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, storytelling, and soul-infused poetry.
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Customer Reviews:
• Insightful And Honest 20 June, 2008
Last year I met, quite out of the blue, a gifted shamanic practitioner in my own locale who has taken me under her wing (and has not requested a single penny from me for doing so). This was a catalyst event which has prompted my own "second cocooning," a concept explained in "Soulcraft" that I now understand. So much about this book has provided me vital context for understanding my current stage of life and showed me the next couple of steps that I need to take from here.
Some might be tempted to dismiss Soulcraft as "fluffy New Age tripe," but I hope you won't make that mistake. Plotkin doesn't blow sweetness and light up anyone's butt. The journey to soul is not an easy one, and no one--no teacher, no seer, no guru--can make the journey for you. This book encourages you to do the *necessary and difficult* work of finding your own soul, your own vision, your own task--it's important not only for you, but for the way we all live on this earth. Not only that, this book gives you some real-world strategies and activities for how to actually do that.
I am reminded of Jesus saying in the gospels, "what does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul?" This book provides some context for understanding what's happening as you lose the world in order to gain your soul. While we ultimately make this inward and downward journey alone, on another level we're not really alone--others have gone before us (and some examples are given in the book), and the presence of Spirit is in all and around all.
My thanks are given gratefully to Bill Plotkin for birthing this book into the world.
One thing, though: I appreciated Plotkin's brief statement in the book that we should not be appropriating culturally from native peoples--but then he quoted Harley Swift Deer in the book, someone who is reputedly/reportedly a "plastic shaman." That was a disappointment, but overall the book is still worth five stars.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1WGB7ZSNBPG3G
• Great Book! 18 April, 2007
If you've never been on a wilderness rite-of-passage before this book offers insight into the practice. Plotkin blends psychospiritual insight on every page. This book is a primer for the ancient practice of the Vision Quest and within this rubric offers a detailed account of the process.
Like Plotkin notes, a wilderness journey into the mysteries of the soul is not a place for the weak of heart. You need to be put together pretty well before answering this call. But the rewards are life-changing.
As metaphor, in the middle ages, gold merchents used a touchstone to determine the value of any gold brought to them by rubbing the gold onto the stone which then produced a certain color to validate the worth of the gold.
A wilderness quest for the purpose of seeking a vision is a touchstone experience. It takes one deep into the raw and untamed soul before its conditioning, conformity, and domestication by culture. In western society, we have forgotten and lost meaningful rites of passage and this loss has created a social fabric of fear based individuals.
Plotkin is well versed in the process of depth psychology and the underworld passage such an undertaking opens in the psyche of those who embrak off from familar shores. Seeking depth, change, and transformation in one's life is difficult and filled with danager. The passage of the threshold expereince is an invitation to risk all for the sake of authenticity and peronal transformation that can lead to a new way of being-in-the-wolrd.
If you think you can sit in a wild place, alone, without food and little water for four days and nights, for the sake of spirit bringing a vision into your life, this book is a necessary guide. Be warned that you may come back (re-incorporation) a different person then the one you left behind at your quest circle. But, for those who pass this threshold, life may also take on a new and profound awareness...
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2K6ZNVJ380K53
• The Transcendent "self-help" Book-and A Sequel Available Now Too! 22 December, 2007
The inhabitants of our alienated modern society--and those suffering globally from its negative influences--are desperate for meaning. Self-Help books abound beyond belief. People of all ages, especially in the workplace and corporate world, live lives of such "quiet desperation," as Thoreau wrote, that they can barely discern even the surface they're skating on, much less the depths that lay beneath. Young people worldwide fall into depression, crime, or the false promise of fundamentalism and fanaticism, sacrificing themselves for--what? Surely not our shared humanity.
Bill Plotkin's SOULCRAFT is, I believe, at last, the "definitive" self-help guide, one so profound that it has the capacity, for those open to it, to help reshape our entire vision of the world--and restore to ourselves a fulfilling home within it.
I write this as a cultural anthropologist, author and lecturer who has himself sorted his way through any number of methods to a more balanced, centered life. Plotkin draws from traditional and Jungian psychology, the deep wisdom of the natural world (one of the richest sources of meaning which we have almost succeeded in destroying), and from a wealth of knowledge about traditional cultural practices the world over that provide ancient keys to holistic living. Plotkin draws out the essence of all this and spins it into a welcoming web, each strand another guiding rope hung with tools to empower one on a perilous and promising journey to center.
Make no mistake--this book is not psycho-babble and or self-help pablum. It is not an instant solution; it is a challenging way to open yourself up to an ever-widening world through which, with courage and commitment, you will continue to journey the rest of your life.
There may be some who think the notion of "soul-crafting" is uncomfortably "New Age" (I feared so at first). If so then this is a work that synthesizes everything good and wise that emerged from the wild and ecstatic upheavals of the late `60s, filtered over decades through Plotkin's formal social-psychological training, shaped by his rigorous, wide-ranging scholarship, and brought finally to fruition through the power of his personal experience and heartfelt vision.
And now his newest book has appeared: "Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World." I just ordered mine from Amazon and got it immediately. After what Plotkin has just given me in the earlier book, I can only imagine what this book, described as a culminating life's work, can offer me. I can't wait to read it. --Jud Newborn, Ph.D., author, "Sophie Scholl and the White Rose."
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1MTQ9IHN5VRFI
• Amazing Psychological Vision Quest 07 January, 2008
I read this book as part of a course in personality. This book gives you the definitions and differences between spirit and soul, and how a journey to know the soul can be a road less travelled. It is an amazing insight into the state of coming to know one's soul and the difficult road that must be taken to get there. The author also gives many examples of his participants vision quests and how they can relate to psychological issues in one's life. This book should be read by all humans. We have all lost our connection with nature and through this book we might be able to regain that relationship
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1KI5R0BXOYVKA
• Even Better Second Time Around 15 October, 2007
I recently picked up this book for the second time - the first was about 3 years ago. It resonates deeply at a core level and, I believe, will do the same for anyone who is standing at the edge. Need a push? Read this book.
Lou
- Reviewed by customer ID: A384N41CBNFKHU
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