with Bill Plotkin (author of Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche) & Geneen Marie Haugen

… To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others. …

David Whyte

The human soul - our mysterious, unique essence - longs to express itself in the world, and the world simultaneously longs for the soul-infused offerings of human beings. The soul calls, sings, howls to us in the wild language of nature, image, symbol, myth, poetry, and of dreams. Attending our dreams is one way of deepening the conversation with soul.Soulcentric Dreamwork is a central component of Soulcraft - a contemporary set of nature-based, cross-cultural practices designed to facilitate the encounter with soul, our most innate expression and the source of our unique contribution to the world.There are many methods of working with dreams. Soulcentric Dreamwork holds the view that the soul wants to initiate us into our soul path by familiarizing the ego with the nightworld or underworld. Other forms of dreamwork might attempt to import some images from the nightworld of soul into the dayworld of personality - to support the ego's healing, therapy, self-understanding, or entertainment. But in Soulcentric Dreamwork, we commit ourselves to an extended stay in the soul's mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on us rather than the more common approach of doing our work on the dream.

We will apprentice ourselves to the mystery held within our dreams. With a variety of modalities - including direct dialogue with the dream itself, expressive arts and movement, deep imagery, and wandering on the land with (and in) our dreams - we will submit ourselves to the "underdream" that lies beneath our everyday conscious self. We will offer ourselves to what the nightworld has to reveal and will allow ourselves to be changed as a result. We will explore how our dreams want to shift us, what doors they want to open for us, what thresholds they want to usher us over.We will deepen our dreamwork through additional soulcraft practices, including council work, drumming, trance dancing, poetry, shadow work, and individualized soul tasks in nature. We will spend much of our time outside in the heart of the Scottish National Park with its ancient oak forests, mountains, lochs and streams, learning from greater nature as well as our human nature accessed through our dreams. Please join us!

GUIDES/FACILITATORS

Geneen Marie Haugen is a wilderness explorer, writer, teacher, and guide for contemporary vision quests and other programs designed to facilitate a more engaged relationship between the individual soul story and the story of the world. Her work appears in many anthologies, including American Nature Writing and Going Alone: Women's A dventures in the Wild. She has been exploring the intertwined mysteries of nature, imagination, beyond-human intelligence, and non-ordinary perception for over 20 years, and is committed to the world-shifting potential of the generative human imagination.

Bill Plotkin, Ph.D., founder and president of Animas Valley Institute, holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since 1980, he has guided thousands of people through initiatory passages in nature. An ecotherapist, depth psychologist, and wilderness guide, he combines his love of nature with his love of people into the crafting of a variety of unique soulcraft programs. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (2003) and the forthcoming A Natural History of the Soul: Imagining the Future Human (2007). Bill likes to think of himself as a psychologist gone wild.

… Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

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