Event Details

Join Bill Plotkin, in dialogue with host James O'Dea.

Addressing the pervasive longing for meaning and fulfillment in this time of global crisis, this teleseminar introduces a visionary ecopsychology of human development that reveals how fully and creatively we can mature when we allow soul and nature to guide us. In his new book, Nature and the Human Soul, depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.

If it is true, as Bill and others have observed, that we live in a culture dominated by adolescent habits and desires, then the enduring societal changes we so desperately need won’t happen until we individually and collectively evolve into an engaged, authentic adulthood. In this teleseminar, Bill will discuss an eight-stage, nature-based path to becoming fully human and what authentic (and inauthentic) functioning at each stage looks like. Included are principles for raising children; how schools and communities can support teenagers to become vibrantly authentic and deeply imaginative; and what it’s like to embark upon — in your twenties, thirties, or later — a contemporary underworld journey of soul initiation, employing cross-cultural practices for discovering the largest conversation you were born to have with the world. That conversation is the soul’s deepest desire and the sure sign of a fully human being. We’ll look, too, at what it means to enter a genuine and conscious elderhood, in which you learn to tend the soul of the more-than-human world.

For 27 years, Bill and his colleagues at Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute have been leading women and men on retreats into the inner (and often outer) wilderness to recover their unique, mystical affiliation with our more-than-human world. This affiliation is revealed in a dream, vision, or revelation that inspires, guides, and drives our choices and ventures through the rest of life, igniting our greatest personal fulfillment and our visionary contributions to the urgent and necessary cultural transformation of this century.

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