My work is shaped by the values, beliefs and tools described below.

Soulcraft™**

Soulcraft is a set of nature-based practices developed by Bill Plotkin, founder of the Animas Valley Institute, in collaboration with other Animas guides. These practices are designed to facilitate our own unique experience of soul encounter. Our soul is our true and authentic self, those qualities that most deeply define and express who we are and the unique gift that we were born to bring to the world. It is often hidden beneath the layers of our personality, and the roles and functions of our daily life. It is the longing behind the questions about what we are really meant to be and do in our life.

Because hidden, the soul can be elusive. Though it frequently attempts to get our attention, the patterns of our life often prevent us from hearing soul’s whisperings and even its shouting. The soul can feel dangerous to our accustomed way of being because it might ask us to make significant life changes. Soulcraft is not for the faint of heart or those wishing to maintain the status quo.

For those who decide to take the risk, the practices of soulcraft can create the conditions for an increased openness to encounters with soul, and what it is trying to communicate. Through the experiences of soul encounter we gather images, symbols, and stories that have numinous and mysterious qualities that cannot be fully understood but which are felt as “true” at a level below rational thinking. Over time (it can be a brief time, but more often a longer time) the images, symbols, and stories gathered from soul encounters weave together like threads into a pattern or fabric that begins to reveal our larger soul story — the story we are meant to live and through which we are called to give of our gifts to the world.

Soul Initiation is the point at which we recognize the larger story that our soul is longing for us to live, and we make a commitment to that life. In our current culture, which is largely egocentric as opposed to soulcentric, Soul Initiation often does not occur until sometime in mid-life. The maturity of a soul-initiated adult is marked by recognition of where the world’s need meets his or her unique and authentic gifts, and a commitment to learn ways to deliver those gifts, and to then engage in that gifting or “give-away”.

Some of the soulcraft practices that I use in my work are:

	Soulcentric Dreamwork
	Deep imagery or active imagination
	Self-designed ceremony
	Journal work
	Vision questing
	Council Work
	Trance Drumming and rhythms
	Talking across the species boundaries
	Apprehending and responding to signs and omens in nature
	Wandering on the land with various soulcentric tasks
	Story telling

**“Soulcraft” is a registered trademark of William B. Plotkin

There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

—DAVID WHYTE

FROM ALL THE TRUE VOWELS