Bill Plotkin & Animas Valley Institute

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Bill Plotkin & Animas Valley Institute

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Guiding the Journey to Soul, Vision Fast, and Evolutionary Leadership in the Great Turning.

Our focus is nature-based initiation that elicits each person’s most creative, soul-rooted response to our precious, critical moment in history. Animas programs differ significantly from those offered by most other wilderness organizations, vision-fast guides, and experiential educators. Our work is not primarily rites of passage, wilderness-based psychotherapy, or emotional healing. Instead, our intent is a foundational shift that elicits each person’s most creative, soul-rooted response to our precious, critical moment in history. Our mission, in its widest scope, is to contribute to cultural transformation by fostering nature-based personal development and thus the maturation of individuals and the human species. We support each participant to access and embody the world-changing and vital creativity at his or her core.

10/10/2026

Friday, October 9, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XXIV

The Second of Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World, Growing Soulcentric Cultures: The Imaginal Exchange of Mythopoetic Dream Viruses

The second phase of the journey to the Next World is the progression from ecocentric life-sustaining communities to life-enhancing or soulcentric cultures. This is a radically different goal than the first phase and will take much longer. Several generations or more. The first phase — building ecocentric communities — is a relatively small step on the way to soulcentric cultures. The latter require full complements of initiated adults and genuine elders. They will be the ones to generate mature cultures — not primarily through their strategic minds, as with ecocentric societies, but through their deep imagination in communion with each other, the dream of the Earth, [91] and the dream of the Cosmos. [92]

Mature, soulcentric cultures are not designed; they are grown. Healthy human cultures are like healthy, wild ecologies, the latter being, as Flo Shepherd says, “inviolate, self-willed, self-regulating, self-generating, numinous, and wild.” [93] We can support and assist the flourishing or restoration of wild cultures as well as wild ecologies, but we cannot create either through strategic design.

Life-enhancing human cultures emerge through the lives of true adults and elders conducting their soulwork in harmony with each other and with the greater Earth community — through, in other words, the imaginal exchange of mythopoetic dream viruses, “infections” that generate particular social systems and structures unique to those humans and to the place in which they live. The sacred stories of such cultures — their songs and myths — are not made-up or borrowed but emerge from the depths of the land and the depths of the human psyche.

Read the full musing here: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

10/06/2026

Check out Bill's latest Substack post here: https://billplotkin738835.substack.com/p/a-map-to-the-next-world-part-xxiii

10/02/2026

Friday, October 2, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XXIII

The First of Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World: Ecocentric Communities, Part IV: Eco-Awakening

Last week, I introduced the experience of eco-awakening and my proposal that its widespread facilitation is necessary to bring about the shift, on the level of whole societies, from egocentric and life-destroying to ecocentric and life-sustaining, which is the first of the two phases of the journey to the Next World. This week I want to explore more deeply the nature of eco-awakening and how to bring it about.

Eco-awakening is the shift from egocentrism to ecocentrism, a major life passage. Eco-awakening occurs when we have our first conscious and embodied experience of our innate membership in the Earth community. All other affiliations then become secondary and, in fact, derivative of our inherent and foundational participation in the larger, more-than-human world (which is to say, the not merely human world — the world, in other words, that includes the human realm as one element). A romantic partnership and memberships in family, social or ethnic groups, and perhaps a religious community will continue to provide bountiful riches and lend abundant color to our life but, after eco-awakening, these will no longer be primary. The vitality of the Earth community, of which we have always been part, is now our first concern and first gladness and commands our greatest loyalty.

What would our world become (again) if all or most humans (once again) experienced Earth as sacred?

Read the full musing here: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

09/29/2026

Check out Bill's latest Substack post here: https://billplotkin738835.substack.com/p/a-map-to-the-next-world-part-xxii

09/25/2026

Friday, September 25, 2026

A Map to the Next World – Part XXII

The First of Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World: Ecocentric Communities, Part III

This first half of our journey to the Next World — the design and building of life-sustaining societies — can be accomplished largely through the efforts of our strategic minds (our heart-centered thinking in partnership with our other three windows of knowing: full-presence sensing, full-bodied feeling, and deep imagination). And this phase doesn’t have to take so very long. But it won’t be easy, as is evident from humanity’s track record so far in the twenty-first century. It will require the widespread adoption of transitional social systems and structures that are considerably more ecocentric and life-sustaining than what we have now in modernity’s mainstream. Last week, I introduced a dozen varieties of such structures and systems, all of which are ecocentric and local, and I noted that healthier, ecocentric societies of the past did not need any of these systems because ecocentrism and localism are already built into everything a healthy, nature-based society does. The same will be true of future Next World societies.

There are already small ecocentric communities in many places around the world that have been divining, designing, and implementing these kinds of life-sustaining transitional systems and structures for decades: ecovillages, co-housing projects, intentional and sustainable communities.[74] Such projects, however, will be considerably more challenging to achieve at the scale of whole societies, states, or nations — and that scale is what is needed if, this century, we are going to save a significant portion of Earth’s miraculous biosphere. And if we’re going to save ourselves.

Read the full musing here: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

09/22/2026

Check out Bill's latest Substack post: https://billplotkin738835.substack.com/p/a-map-to-the-next-world-part-xxi

09/18/2026

Friday, September 18, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XXI

The First of Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World: Ecocentric Communities, Part II

Last week, I wrote about how, over the next several generations — beginning with us now! — we’ll have to create transitional social structures and systems that will enable us to reconnect with and support the health and diversity of the greater web of life. These structures and systems will form the core of life-sustaining communities that will serve as lifeboats or as bridges between our current life-destroying societies and the eventual life-enhancing cultures of the Next World. The two common themes with all these systems and structures are ecocentrism and localism. Here, rather briefly, are a dozen core examples:

First and foremost, because a society is only as healthy and mature as its citizens, we will need a variety of initiatives that support nature-based full-spectrum human development (aka, eco-soulcentric human development) facilitated by those who we, at Animas, call professional human development guides (PHDGs) who work in schools, universities, clinics, health centers, community organizations, and individual practices (within contexts such as education, ministry, life coaching, psychotherapy, psychiatry, counseling, ecotherapy, rites of passage, parenting education, mentoring, outdoor education, and community development). This is the “inner” dimension of future life-sustaining societies most commonly overlooked by contemporary agents of cultural change, and yet I believe it is the most foundational dimension. This is, of course, the central topic of this current multi-part essay.[57] Our capacity to create the other structures and systems in the following list will largely depend on our success with this first set.

Read the full musing here: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

09/15/2026

Check out Bill's latest Substack post here: https://billplotkin738835.substack.com/p/a-map-to-the-next-world-part-xx

09/11/2026

Friday, September 11, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XX

The First of the Two Phases of the Journey to the Next World: Ecocentric Communities, Part I

So far, in this multipart essay, we’ve explored a number of elements of our Animas map to the Next World. Several of these are features of what I call nature-based full-spectrum human development, including a model of eco-soulcentric life stages (the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel), the cultivation of Wholeness (the four facets of the Self), Self-healing, the journey of soul initiation (including the Descent to Soul), and the four windows of knowing (especially deep imagination).[55] Additional elements of our Map to the Next World that have been explored in this essay include resacralizing our relationship to the land (cultivating animate consciousness), an ecological and mythopoetic conception of Soul, the relationship between consciousness shift and world change, humanity’s recent discovery of the one-way arc of time and its effects on human consciousness, the perspective that we will arrive in the Next World not as individuals but only as communities, some ways in which the journey to the Next World might be a process of evolution/ speciation for homo sapiens, and collectively awakening to the dream of the Earth.

Today I want to introduce another major theme of our map: two distinct phases of humanity’s current migration to the Next World. First is the transition from our current egocentric life-destroying societies to a variety of ecocentric life-sustaining societies and then, second, the passage from ecocentric life-sustaining societies to soulcentric life-enhancing cultures. These two phases call for very different kinds of projects and communities. We can’t get directly from here to the Next World. We must build a bridge, and life on that long, multi-generational bridge will be different in essential ways from both Dominator World and the Next World.

Read the full musing here: https://www.animas.org/books/bill-plotkins-soulcraft-musings/

09/08/2026

Check out Bill's latest Substack post here: https://billplotkin738835.substack.com/p/a-map-to-the-next-world-part-xix

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