“What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?” —Paulo Freire
Doug Van Houten is a Soulcraft™ guide with the Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org). He also guides programs & mentors individuals on the land at the farm that he lives on in Goshen, Kentucky (20 minutes outside Louisville) and at a distance using Skype or phone.
To view the Harrods Creek Farm click here.
THERE IS A PROFOUND AND UNMET LONGING in contemporary culture for a life of deeper meaning, purpose, and fulfillment especially at this critical juncture in human history. Contemporary society has lost connection to soul and the path to psychological and spiritual maturity. The life-denying norms of our culture encourage us to remain passive, distracted and numb. Daily we experience a sense of unraveling, loss, and uncertainty. Yet, we long to show up in the world in full flowering, in matured wholeness, as an embodied vision. We long to become fully human, courageous and wildly alive. Pollinating the world with our unique gifts.
Nature-based BODY, ART & SOUL offers loving, wise, and timely medicine for ourselves and our world. This work weaves together a wide range of practices both ancestral and contemporary to facilitate self-healing and the cultivation of innate human wholeness. The goal of this work, ultimately, is not only to heal, but to mature psychologically and spiritually, and live a life more centered in soul. Eventually reshaping ourselves into visionaries with the artistry to transform our individual and collective planetary wasteland.
LEARN to give of your natural grace and unique gifts as a soulful response to the world at this time. Discover:
How to summon, recognize and consciously cultivate your embodied innate human wholeness,
Ways to identify, befriend and integrate the fragmented selves to find the initiatory gifts hidden within each,
Practices that invite a deeper communion with the living world,
An enhanced awareness of your ecological identity and find your place in the world from a more soul-oriented perspective,
Practices to shift consciousness in order to access deep imagination, dreams, reflections, memories & vision — the language of soul,
Recognize your true place of belonging within the greater web of life,
How to participate in what Thomas Berry calls, The Dream of the Earth.
Are you willing to risk a radical re-imagining of your life's purpose?
Podcast Interviews with Doug:
Podcast Audio with Caravan of the Heart
https://open.spotify.com/episode/58LgwzUwXZZLYn0XHZoZLr?si=cb8dd097e508490e&nd=1
Podcast Audio with Liz Wiltzen of Tracking Yes!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/980419/9295300
Podcast Audio with Juniper Owens with Academy of Integrative Mental Health
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1082051/6912536
Podcast Audio with A Healing Bridge — Ancestors in the Making
https://www.ahealingbridge.com/doug-van-houten-interview
Practices of Body, Mind & Soul
SOULCRAFT™*
Wild Mind — maP of the Psyche*
Dreamwork
shadow work
Wandering In Nature
Deep Imagery
The Way of COuncil
Symbolic Artwork
Vision Fast (Quest)
Ritual & Emergent Ceremony
Personal Mythos
Sacred Wound Work
Body Inquiry
Refined Hakomi
Yoga
*Created by Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.
A Taste of What’s to Come
VIEW FULL CALENDAR OF OFFERINGS HERE
Soulcraft Intensive
w/Doug Van Houten and Kent Dobson
May 24 – 28, 2025
in Vermont
The Soulcraft Intensive is our popular five-day experiential plunge into the wild depths of Soulcraft; a synergistic set of nature-based practices designed to evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter. Your soul is your true self, those qualities that most deeply define and express who you are and the unique gift that you were born to bring to the world, a world so much in need of the socially transforming contributions of initiated, actively engaged adults. To encounter the soul is to discover the mystical image you were born with, which reveals the path to your greatest personal fulfillment as well as the essence of your true service to society (the cross-cultural wisdom traditions say these are one and the same). Soulcraft practices spring from nature-based cultures, modern depth psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage—to comprise a truly contemporary Western path to soul discovery and soul initiation. For a full discussion, see Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche.
Art & Soul
w/Doug Van Houten & Palika WIlding | ONLINE
June 7 – July 26, 2025
Image is the mother tongue of the soul. As humans, we carry images, symbols, mysteries within us that arise unbidden through the dreamtime, dance at the edges of consciousness, and arrive via encounters within human culture and nature. They are with us from the beginning. Images that are core to who we are carry energy, story, meaning, memory, emotion, and/or vision. They might, if we are willing to engage them, connect us to our hearts — to the places we most fear but nevertheless must go — and also to the heart of the world. Such images point beyond themselves toward the mysteries and destiny inherent in a human life.
sonoran Desert Quest
w/Doug Van Houten & Rebecca Wildbear, M.S.
ocotober 27 – november 7, 2025
in Arizona
This contemporary Western embodiment of the ancient, pan-cultural vision fast is a dynamic wilderness rite for all who are seeking greater depth and clarity about life purpose and meaning. As a rite of initiation, the quest is a ceremonial descent to the underworld, in which you die to your familiar way of belonging to the world, uncover the passion and wisdom of your soul, and retrieve the gift that is yours alone to bring to the world, enhancing personal fulfillment and genuine service.
We do not go into the desert to escape
people but to learn how to find them:
we do not leave them in order to have
nothing more to do with them,
but to find out the way
to do them the most good.
Thomas Merton-
I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
—Dawna Markova
Are you longing for more adventure, wholeness, wildness, mystery and meaning in your life?
