Bill Plotkin & Animas Valley Institute

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Bill Plotkin & Animas Valley Institute

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.

08/25/2026

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

08/21/2026

Friday, August 21, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XVII

Wholing and Self-Healing

Earlier in this multi-part essay, I proposed that nature-based full-spectrum human development is core to any functional Map to the Next World. In particular, I introduced a model of eight eco-soulcentric stages of life that differ radically from the egocentric stages that most contemporary people traverse in Dominator World. I noted that there are both a nature-oriented task and a culture-oriented task of each of the eco-soulcentric stages. Dominator cultures actively inhibit their people from fully addressing any of these tasks, especially the nature-oriented ones and especially for the first three stages (early childhood, middle childhood, and early adolescence), which results in most contemporary people becoming permanently stuck in an egocentric version of early adolescence that I call Conforming and Rebelling. (See Parts V, VI, and VII of this series and also here. For a full exposition, see my book, Nature and the Human Soul.)

However, in addition to addressing developmental tasks, full-spectrum maturation summons us to a second complementary lifelong project: cultivating the innate wholeness of our human psyches, what we at Animas call the four facets of the Self. “The Self” (with that capital “S”) is our shorthand for the domain of the human psyche that includes and integrates all four of our facets of wholeness. Each of these four facets is a bundle of psychological, social, and spiritual resources, the cultivation of which enables us to do well with whatever we are called to in this life.

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

08/18/2026

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

08/14/2026

Friday, August 14, 2026

A Map to the Next World, Part XVI

The Familiar Experience of Shifting Between Worlds

The Next World, as I’m conjuring it in this series of posts, may seem like a radical leap beyond where we are now (it surely is) but the generic notion of different worlds, of moving between one world and another, is not a new or unfamiliar experience. For any of us. Even you.

Consider, for example, the difference between the worlds of dreaming and waking, the nightworld and the dayworld. With very rare exceptions, each one of us experiences both worlds as entirely and unquestionably real when we’re in them. But they are astonishingly different kinds of worlds. [39] Indeed, it’s often challenging and sometimes impossible to translate one world with the language and consciousness of the other. Nightworlds commonly include creatures and features that not only do not or could not exist in our waking world — like unicorns or our capacity to “ski” in our bare feet down the smooth precipitous waves of cascading rivers (I’ve done this often in the nightworld) — but also phenomena that cannot even be accurately described with dayworld language. We find ourselves resorting to metaphor, to “as if,” or throwing up our hands, admitting defeat, and saying there’s really no way to describe it, you just had to be there. Shuttling from one world to a very different one is a common human experience. Most of us do this every morning when waking.

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

08/11/2026

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

08/08/2026

REMINDER: Information Call for the Yearlong Soulcraft Intensive TOMORROW

Meet this year's guides, Laura and Kent, and learn more about what the Yearlong Soulcraft Intensive holds.

This program is rigorous — it will ask real things of you, and it isn't for everyone. Join us on this call to feel into whether now is your time to answer the call toward Mystery. Bring your questions; there will be space for them.

Info Call
Sunday, Aug 9 · 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87220902920

08/07/2026

Friday, August 7, 2026

A Map to the Next World – Part XV

A Wildly Imaginative Partnership with Earth

Last week, I suggested that soul-initiated adults and elders could be thought of as the imaginal cells of human societies during their transformation from life-destroying to life-enhancing communities. But unlike the week-or-two-long metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly, cultural metamorphosis of this sort could be expected to take several generations. We might think of such a cultural renaissance or zeitgeist change as a soul revolution.

What does this possibility of a soul revolution suggest about the specific ways the human Ego might transform on our way to the Next World? How would such an evolutionary unfolding differ from what humanity has experienced in the past? And what might this suggest about how the contemporary journey of soul initiation, including the Descent to Soul, is different from its precursors?

Here’s another way to ask this: What would have to be true about a human Ego capable of imagining futures that are utterly unlike any previous human experience — futures that are so wildly divergent that the word future itself would have to be re-visioned?

I believe the answer has to do, at least in part, with how we experience time.

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

08/05/2026

Announcing an Informational Call for the Yearlong Soulcraft Intensive.

Meet this year's guides, Laura and Kent, and learn more about what the Yearlong Soulcraft Intensive holds.

This program is rigorous — it will ask real things of you, and it isn't for everyone. Join us on this call to feel into whether now is your time to answer the call toward Mystery. Bring your questions; there will be space for them.

Accepting applications for the program now.

Info Zoom Call
Sunday, Aug 9 · 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87220902920

08/04/2026

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

07/31/2026

Friday, July 31, 2026

A Map to the Next World – Part XIV

True Adults and Elders as Imaginal Cells

Last week, we explored our forward-seeing deep imagination as our species’ core but as-yet unrealized gift to the world, one that enables us to cultivate a conscious partnership with evolution. We considered some attributes of a potentially emerging species that Geneen Marie Haugen refers to as homo imaginans.

As a reminder, throughout this multi-part essay I’m taking a deep-time perspective regarding both the causes of our current polycrisis (many millennia in the making) and what might be our best long-term responses (over the next several hundred years or more). But this doesn’t mean I believe there’s nothing essential to do anytime soon. Quite to the contrary: We must prepare now for our multi-generational future by creating the foundations for post-modern healthy human societies — and this requires, foremost, a renewed and deepened tending to human development — nature-based, full-spectrum human development. Additionally, in the interim, we must design and build transitional life-sustaining societies and solutions, something I’ll explain and explore later in this series.

A healthy soulcentric human culture is grown from wild seeds, not strategically designed or built. This is why it will take several generations to bring such cultures to fruition. Our goal is an old-growth forest standing again in a place that has been clear-cut. A thriving, life-enhancing culture is much more like a self-organizing ecosystem than like a machine or a hierarchically structured corporation; it’s more like an organic mycelial network than an assembled apparatus or a software program. There’s nothing artificial about the many kinds of intelligences needed to grow a healthy culture. (AI, which is backward seeing, derivative, and unimaginative, offers little of value for humanity’s post-Dominator, forward-seeing, deep-imagination project.)

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

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