Bill Plotkin - Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche

Once again, Bill Plotkin provides an invaluable field guide to reclaiming and embodying our original wholeness and our inherent kinship with nature, all its species, and all its inhabitants. Wild Mind not only revitalizes but reenchants us in our endangered world!

Angeles Arrien, PhD, cultural anthropologist and author of The Four-Fold Way

Bill Plotkins Wild Mind ushers in a new era of depth psychology. For all the penetrating insights flowing from Sigmund Freud and his associates, the fields origin was imprisoned in the worldview that regarded our universe as dead. It was inevitable that psychological work would be confined to conversations between humans, in offices, inside buildings. Plotkins work shatters that limited conception, for he lives in the creative universe as articulated by quantum physics, indigenous traditions, and evolutionary cosmology. Most helpful of all, Plotkin shares his powerful processes for entering deep conversations with rivers and owls and stone. To study Wild Mind is to pass through a magical gateway into ones unique role within the Great Work that Earth is calling us to.

Brian Thomas Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies, coauthor with Thomas Berry of The Universe Story

Living as we do in both an external environment and an internal environment, Wild Mind is a summons to an evolved eco-consciousness. Both natural settings have been subordinated to narcissistic enlargement by a complex-driven ego, and the price we are paying is personal, cultural, and environmental pathology. Wild Mind provides a compelling agenda for the reintegration of these sundered worlds in service to wholeness.

James Hollis, PhD, author of

What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

Wild Mind offers wise and loving medicine for our selves and our world at a time when reinventing how we live on Earth and with each other is more crucial than ever. This brilliant and lyrical book provides an alternative to the outmoded mindset that had us focused on whats wounded or missing in ourselves rather than appreciating our magnificence and the unique gifts we each carry for the world. With this delightful, encouraging, and inspiring read, Bill Plotkin delivers an engaging and tender adventure of reclaiming, healing, and celebrating.

Nina Simons, co-CEO and cofounder, Bioneers

Thomas Berry calls us to reinvent the human. Bill Plotkin has been doing his part for decades, principally through leading people into their deeper selves via vision quests in the wilderness. In this book he continues his pioneering efforts in a brave attempt to reinvent psychology with useful practices and a new language that honors the psyche-cosmos relationship.

Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing and The Popes War

I have both taught and worked with Bill Plotkin, and I believe that Wild Mind is the most mature synthesis of his excellent and much needed vision. Be guided here by a master of listening to both nature and soul!

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, Center for Action and Contemplation,

Albuquerque, New Mexico, and author of Falling Upward

Plotkin brings forth a new model for the whole of human life and spirituality in our world. An essential, weighty book for our perilous times.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

With Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin once again works miracles. This vital book provides a road map to help us remember how to be human which means how to be a human being in relationship to the natural world, to our home. We owe Bill Plotkin a deep debt of gratitude for this important work.

Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words

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,

from the foreword to Soulcraft

Also by Bill Plotkin

Nature and the Human Soul:
Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

Copyright 2013 by Bill Plotkin

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for educational purposes only. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given nor liability taken. The publisher advises that such activities as fasting or wilderness excursions not be attempted or practiced without appropriate guidance and support.

Soulcraft is a registered trademark of Bill Plotkin.

Permission acknowledgments beginning on page 285 are an extension of the copyright page.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Plotkin, Bill, date.

Wild mind : a field guide to the human psyche / Bill Plotkin.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60868-178-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-60868-179-2 (ebook)

1. NaturePsychological aspects. 2. SoulPsychological aspects. 3. Developmental psychology. I. Title.

BF353.5.N37P56 2013

612.8dc23 2012050312

First printing, April 2013

ISBN 978-1-60868-178-5

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To
the visionary artisans of cultural evolution
and
to the future children of all species.

Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her.
She is like the needle of the compass pointing to the North,
which is most usefulwhen you know how to navigate.

C. G. J UNG

Sometimes

I look out at everything

growing so wild

and faithfully beneath

the sky

and wonder

why we are the one

terrible

part of creation privileged

to refuse our flowering.

D AVID W HYTE, FROM T HE S UN

Contents

Let the day grow on you upward

through your feet,

the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,

until by evening you are a black tree;

feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,