a
conversation with Bill Plotkin by Grace Welker
Bill Plotkin’s new book, Nature and the Human
Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented
World
, is based on the premise that a more mature human
society requires more mature human individuals. At this time
of ecological and social crisis on planet earth, Plotkin’s
visionary work offers an alternative that is as profound as it
is practical, and will, ultimately, deepen our understanding
of who we are as human beings and how we can actualize our
full potential. This conversation between Plotkin and
Kripalu’s Senior Editor Grace Welker provides an introduction
to Plotkin’s road map for human development.
Kripalu Online (KOL) Your work is guiding
people toward their soul. Can you say a little bit about what
the soul is for you?
Bill Plotkin Well, that’s
an important question because the English word “soul” has been
used in so many different ways. When I speak of the human
soul, I mean a person’s ultimate place—our unique role or
destiny—in the more-than-human world. You might say our soul
is the ecological role we were born for. I love how
contemporary poet David Whyte speaks of the soul: as the
largest conversation we are individually capable of having
with the world.
KOL Your model of the
Soulcentric Development Wheel describes what a human life
looks like when there is an understanding of the soul—what it
needs, what it wants, how we come into relationship with it,
and how we can steer our lives by this relationship. You talk
about eight stages of a full human lifespan—two phases each in
childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elderhood. And you say
that most contemporary Western people only reach the third
stage, which, psychologically speaking, is early adolescence.
This sounds like a problem.
Bill Plotkin It’s
important to understand that it’s possible to be well past
your teens chronologically, but only in early adolescence
psychologically. In the third of the eight soulcentric life
stages, a person’s primary psychological emphasis is the
cultivation of social identity and belonging. This is, of
course, a healthy orientation for teenagers, but it is a sign
of developmental arrest when older people remain predominantly
focused in that way.
I characterize contemporary
Western society as not only adolescent but as
patho-adolescent. A society becomes sick or pathologized when
there are relatively few people in more mature stages to
provide healthy guidance. You end up with a society like
ours—one that is very materialistic, egocentric,
competition-based, and violence-prone.
KOL So
how does a person move out of stage three?
Bill
Plotkin The way to progress developmentally is to fully
embrace the psychospiritual tasks of the stage you’re in. If
you’re in stage three, which I call the Oasis, your
developmental task is to cultivate both personal authenticity
and social acceptance. In the contemporary Western world, we
put all the emphasis on the social-acceptance half of that
task, and neglect the practices that enable us to become more
real, more authentic as social individuals.
KOL
That may be one of the reasons people feel so at home at a
place like Kripalu. They are discovering how to connect with
their authenticity and finding social support for it. What are
the challenges to accepting one’s authentic nature?
Bill Plotkin The most common challenges result
from developmental deficits incurred in childhood (the first
two life stages). For example, one of the tasks of early
childhood—these are the parents’ tasks on behalf of the
child—is the preservation of the child’s innate innocence.
When this task is not successfully addressed in stage one, a
person will, from that point onward, have difficulty being
present to their own experience, because our innocence is
really our capacity for presence. Many, many people in the
world today suffer from this very fundamental deficit, the
inability to be present in the moment. And it is difficult to
become personally authentic if we can’t be present to
ourselves and others. That’s why meditative, contemplative,
and yogic practices are so important for Western people—simply
to help us come back to the now.
KOL One of the
things I appreciate most about your work is the message that
it’s never too late to address developmental tasks we have
missed or that are incomplete. You also clearly define two
tasks in each stage, one culture-oriented and the other
nature-oriented. Can you give an example of a nature-oriented
task that normally would be addressed in childhood, but which
people in their twenties or later might need to revisit?
Bill Plotkin A very important one presents
itself in stage two, middle childhood. The nature-oriented
task in this stage, which I call the Garden, is to learn how
to be fully at home in the more-than-human world, which in the
West we think of as simply “the outdoors.” But we become
enchanted with the natural world in two ways: by exploring our
own human nature—our bodies, imaginations, and our
emotions—and by immersing ourselves in the other-than-human
world, the wild nature of other species and land forms and
water forms and weather forms. Learning the enchantment of the
natural world is best accomplished through lots of free play
time in wild and semi-wild environments. This crucial
developmental activity of childhood has become minimized or
entirely neglected in the contemporary West.
If we
don’t feel at home in the more-than-human world, then at the
very core of our experience is a sense of homelessness, of
rootlessness. And if we live with this kind of core
anxiety—which may or may not be conscious—then cultivating
personal authenticity becomes very difficult. It’s perhaps
impossible to become real when we don’t feel at home in the
world.
KOL I can see why our contemporary way
of life—in which people are very often cut off from the
“external” natural world as well as the natural world of our
own bodies—would thwart people’s development past stage three.
Let’s continue developing, though, at least theoretically. Can
you say a little about stage four?
Bill Plotkin
Once we fit in socially and we’re at home in this world, we
naturally start asking the bigger, existential questions, like
“Okay now, what is my life really about? What’s my potential?
What’s the unique contribution that I can bring to this
world?” The goal of stage four is to uncover our destiny.
In both of my books, I describe my core understanding
of how I was shaped to be in this world, in particular that my
task in life is to weave cocoons. A cocoon is where a
caterpillar dies to its caterpillar life and is reshaped by
the Mystery into its adult version, a butterfly. We humans,
too, are designed to go through this kind of transformation at
a certain point in our life, namely in stage four, which I
call the Cocoon.
Let’s think about the butterfly for a
moment. In the cocoon, we might say that all it really learns
is that it is meant to fly. It grows wings, but it doesn’t
know where it’s supposed to fly to or with whom it’s supposed
to mate or really how it’s going to live its life. It simply
learns, “I am to be a creature that flies.”
In a
similar way, as humans in stage four, we learn something
mystical about our relationship to the world; we uncover our
soul image or story. But we don’t yet know how that will
manifest, how we will choose to embody it. For example, when I
was given the image of weaving cocoons, it didn’t come with
instructions of specifically how to do that. The image didn’t
say that I should become a workshop leader or a writer, a
psychologist or a wilderness guide.
KOL In
other words, what you experience in stage four is more of a
vision that inspires and sustains you. You have said that a
fully psychologically mature adult knows why they were
born—the particular truth, the piece of the mystery they were
born to bring into this world—and they’ve made a commitment to
living that into the world.
Bill Plotkin
Emerging from the Cocoon with a soul image or soul story, the
person moves into stage five, early adulthood, which I call
the Wellspring. There the developmental task is to find ways
of bringing this concentrated vision into form, identifying
what I call delivery systems—as well as further exploring the
soul image or story and the nature of one’s soul powers.
KOL I have to say that the idea of living in a
world of people who have a sense of their purpose and the
courage to bring it into the world gives me a lot of hope. I’m
wondering where you personally access your hope.
Bill Plotkin Well, I feel most like myself and
most at ease in the world when I’m in wild settings. That’s
where I am consciously connected with the very roots of my
being in this lifetime, and it’s those roots that give me
hope.
The soul possesses passions to be in the world
in a certain kind of way. You might say we wouldn’t have been
born if our soul wasn’t deeply enthusiastic about bringing a
certain kind of gift into the world. So when we consciously
discover what that gift is, we find loads of enthusiasm and a
sense of gratitude and good fortune to be alive with the
opportunity to contribute our particular kind of mystery to
this world. Another way to say it is this: the soul itself is
what gives us our greatest hope.
* * * *Bill Plotkin, PhD, is
founder and president of Animas Valley Institute and is a
depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and ecotherapist. He is
the author of
Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating
Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World and
Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and
Psyche.
www.natureandthehumansoul.com
Don’t Miss Bill Plotkin at Kripalu, October
5–10, 2008,
Nature and the Human Soul: A Trail
Map to Our True Place in the World.
