Purpose Guides Institute Presents:
Invite your friends and family to explore Bill’s powerful teachings with you.
Bill Plotkin
There is a great longing in each one of us — 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 quite distinct from the transcendence aspired to in many eastern spiritual disciplines. Since 1980, depth psychologist Bill Plotkin has been guiding women and men into the wilderness — not just the outer wilderness of desert canyons and snow-crested mountain ranges — but, more to the point, into their inner wilderness, the wilds and depths of the soul. He calls this work soulcraft. This event is about gaining the skills, tools and perspectives for this journey of descent.
“The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift—your true self—is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.”
— Bill Plotkin
In this special 60-minute event you’ll:
- Discover why the journey of descent is necessary, particularly at life transitions and crossroads - and how to recognize the call to descend.
- Explore the necessary prelude and preparations to descent, and what the process of descending looks and feels like.
- Hear episodes from Bill’s own life and others, where he’ll show us how restoring ritual to its rightful place is a crucial part of personal growth and discovery of one's unique gift, or "soul purpose.”
- Hear about the upcoming two-session Book Club with Bill Plotkin, which he will personally host on Thursday, June 27 & July 11 at 5:30pm PST. We’ll be discussing Bill’s book, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche.
Praise for Bill Plotkin
"Here is an abundantly wise and carefully crafted survival guide for the wild soul currently dozing (or dying) at the heart of your civilized life. Plotkin has wandered again and again into the nourishing darkness, and has returned with this earthly bundle of insights and images — talismanic tools for awakening to the outrageous depths both within us and all around us. He has bound them into a book that is immensely practical, alive with ritual intelligence, thick with useful tools from a host of courageous comrades."
— David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous
"As we enter a future where humans and the natural world are more intimate with each other, we will surely be powerfully influenced by this new guide into the mysteries of nature and psyche. In Soulcraft, Bill Plotkin gives us an authentic masterwork. In the substance of what he has written, in the clarity of his presentation, and in the historical urgency of the subject, he has guided us far into the new world that is opening up before us. We will not soon again receive a work of this significance."
— Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work
"The fundamental worldview of industrial society is that Earth is like a gravel pit or a lumberyard — just a resource for human use. We live disconnected from the evolving earth community, but our deepest allurement is a rich, intimate participation in nature and the ongoing adventure of the Universe. In this stunningly original and inspiring guide book, Bill Plotkin shows us how to reconnect with the sacred powers of life, of nature, of soul, and the ways that each one of us can reinvent ourselves and discover our unique way to flower forth."
— Brian Swimme, cosmologist and author of The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, The Universe is a Green Dragon, and coauthor with Thomas Berry of The Universe Story
About Bill Plotkin
Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., is a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution (and self-described “psychologist gone wild”). As founder of western Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute in 1981, he has guided thousands of women and men through nature-based initiatory passages, including a contemporary, Western adaptation of the pan-cultural vision quest. Previously, he has been a research psychologist (studying non-ordinary states of consciousness), professor of psychology, psychotherapist, rock musician, and whitewater river guide.
In 1979, on a solo winter ascent of an Adirondack peak, Bill experienced a call to adventure, leading him to abandon academia in search of his true calling. Bill is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (an experiential guidebook), Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World (a nature-based stage model of human development through the entire lifespan), and Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (an ecocentric map of the psyche — for healing, growing whole, and cultural transformation). He has a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
