Date & Time Details: Start Time 7pm End Time 5pm

Location: Offered through Pacifica Graduate Institute

To Register: Please click the link below and you will be redirected to another website to register. Please direct all questions to our partners there!

Introduction to Soulcraft, Online – October 2022

October 28 - 30, 2022

With Doug Van Houten and Brian Stafford, MD, MPH

This program is produced by Pacifica Graduate Institute. Please click the Register Now button for more information about this program, and address all questions to [email protected].

Soulcraft™ is for people seeking greater connection, depth, and clarity regarding life purpose and meaning. 

THE SOULCRAFT INTENSIVE is an experiential plunge into the wild depths of the Psyche. Soulcraft™ is a synergistic set of nature-based skills and practices designed to evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter – the revelation of our unique mythopoetic identity. An identity expressed through symbol and metaphor, image and dream, archetype and myth; an identity embodied in a mysterious story that whispers to us in moments of expanded awareness and exquisite aliveness.

Your soul is your true self: those qualities that most deeply define and express who you are and the unique gift you were born to bring to the world, a world so much in need of the socially transforming contributions of initiated, actively engaged adults. To encounter the soul is to discover the mystical image you were born with, which reveals the path to your greatest personal fulfillment as well as the essence of your true service to society (wisdom traditions say these are one and the same). Soulcraft™ practices spring from modern depth psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage to comprise a genuinely contemporary Western path to soul discovery and soul initiation.

This Introduction to Soulcraft is highly experiential even though offered online. We will weave practices offered in the online group space as well as explored in solitude in nature near where you reside. We share and deepen these experiences in our online small group clans and breakout groups. The result will be an online transformational and “in the wild” personal experience. By the end of this introduction, you will likely understand yourself and your place in the world from a more soul-oriented perspective, be further along on your journey to discover the gifts you were born to bring to the world, and have new skills to enrich your life and to more fully inhabit your greater place of belonging in the larger Earth community.

Soulcraft practices include:

  • Soulcentric Dreamwork
  • Deep Imagery Work
  • Talking Across the Species Boundaries
  • The Way of Council
  • Soul Tasks in Nature
  • The Nature-based Map of the Human Psyche
  • Self-Designed Ceremony
  • Shadow Work
  • Soul Poetry
  • Sacred Wound Work
  • Synchronicities: Working with Nature’s Signs and Omens
  • Befriending the Dark
  • Body Movement

This weekend is structured so that our group sessions occur via Zoom. When not in a group session, the guides will invite you to wander on the land near your home or participate in journaling or other practices. Those wishing to participate fully should expect to reserve most if not all of the weekend for the other practices offered by the guides.

Recommended Reading: By Bill Plotkin: Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche and The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries and Revolutionaries.

This program is produced by Pacifica Graduate Institute. Please click the Register Now button for more information about this program, and address all questions to [email protected].

Guides

Doug Van Houten
Doug (he/him) draws on the wisdom of the natural world, depth-psychology, eco-psychology, dreams, somatic knowing, poetry, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering practices that includes: The Way of Council, vision fasting, shadow work, symbolic artwork, trance dancing and conversations with the more than human world. Doug’s true calling in life is to support others as they uncover their own unique gifts and in so doing, transform their lives in service to what Thomas Berry called ”The Great Work” of our times. Doug is also an ardent beekeeper, a visual artist, a wily wanderer, a dream tracker, an emergent ceremonialist, a heart-centered activist, and…
Learn more about Doug Van Houten
Brian Stafford, MD, MPH
Brian Stafford is a guide to the wilderness of nature, wildness, and soul. Called out of academic medicine to serve as a guide to the depths and to serve as an agent of cultural awakening and transformation, he guides with humor, playfulness, fierceness, compassion, discernment, and a deep remembering of the fullness of what each human life can, should, and was meant to be. A native of Colorado and the former holder of an endowed chair and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, he is currently a guide, Board Member, and Training Director of the Wild Mind Training Program at Animas. He…
Learn more about Brian Stafford, MD, MPH