Soulcraft™

Soulcraft™ is a cross cultural set of skills and practices developed by Bill Plotkin, founder of the non-profit Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org) in collaboration with other Animas guides. These practices are designed to facilitate the life-shifting encounters with soul — our deepest and most genuine and authentic selves.

Soul is that vital principle or mysterious animating force within all things — it expresses who we are and what is uniquely ours to bring into the world. It is that sacred realm of our most heartfelt knowing and the ultimate significance of our own lives. Soul beckons to us though dreams, symbol, metaphor, art, nature, emotion, mysterious images and curious allurements. It is the source of our deepest longing and like an underground river it often remains hidden even from ourselves. Soul is the life force that arises in us ... and it takes us on a wild journey from the uniquely personal to the transpersonal and back again to birth gifts that are uniquely ours into the world. Soul is the deep imagination of the cosmos emerging thru each of us.

Our habits and cultural influences often keep us from hearing the emanations of soul. And soul can seem risky to our egos and our everyday way of being. This is because soul might ask us to do something that fundamentally changes our routine and predictable lives. For those who say yes to soul it is possible that a door will open that will be impossible to close again. Yet, despite how scary this might be, we sense that what often lies ahead is what David Whyte refers to, “the one life that waits beyond all the others. ...”

In this work I guide/coach others to not only heal and whole themselves, but to also gather up all the images, patterns, stories and numinous threads that make up their unique larger soul story. What we are going for here is what can be called our mytho-poetic identity. In other words, the larger myth that guides our life and gives us meaning.