Soulcraft Musings

Friday, January 9, 2026

The Story of Animas

How We Learned to Guide the Descent to Soul

Part II

This is the second part of a three-part Musing (one per week).

In Part I, we reviewed the archetypal and evolutionary mission of Animas, our mythopoetic beginnings, the early years of our institute, and our gradually grown clarity about the essence of our work: guiding the descent to soul.

The Eco-Soulcentric Wheel of Life

A first pivotal discovery in the early years of our work was that some of our participants were psychologically and spiritually ready for the descent to soul and others were not. Most, actually, were not. This was a disappointing and disturbing realization for us guides — that the journey of soul initiation might not be available for everyone, even when passionately longed for and regardless how sophisticated or extreme the initiatory methods employed. What became clear was that substantial preparation work was needed — the kind of personal development that perhaps unfolds as a matter of course in a healthy culture but that most contemporary societies aggressively obstruct and that can take years of effort to achieve by those individuals who recognize the need and opportunity. Part of what we began to sense as different about our participants who experienced soul encounter was that they had previously achieved in their lives the sort of personal authenticity that enabled them to look you directly in the eye and not flinch when social pressure might tempt them to deny or hide what was true for them.

Even though only about 25% of our participants had soul encounters, virtually all the rest underwent, in their time with us, a variety of other remarkable metamorphoses. One of the most frequent was a first visceral experience of being as wild and natural as anything else on the planet, in ancient kinship with all Earthly life. This experience, which fundamentally changes a person’s life, is what we call “eco-awakening.” Although such a profound communion with nature is foundational to the everyday adventures of children in all healthy cultures, it has become rare, at any age, in the contemporary world. It is, nonetheless, one of the vital experiences preceding a first descent to soul. Gradually we came to understand that eco-awakening was one of the essential developmental milestones that prepare us for the journey of soul initiation.

A pattern eventually became evident: Participants ready for the descent to soul, in addition to feeling more at home in wilderness, appeared to be in a later stage of human development than those who were not yet ready. First, they held personal authenticity as more important than social acceptance. Second, they experienced the world not so much as a human-made place of commerce and social engagement but, first and foremost, as an animate, self-organizing mystery into which they had been born (or, better, out of which they had emerged). And, third, they recognized, on some level, that their destiny would not be revealed to them in terms of one social role or another or of this or that vocation but rather in terms of a particular mythos, image, archetype, or dream that they might learn to embody in a manner unique to them, an embodiment that would deliver a visionary gift of real practical value to their people and to the greater Earth community.

This core insight led me to ask: How did these participants become the sorts of people prepared for visionary states? Was there something about their childhood and psychological adolescence that might distinguish them from those who were not yet ready for the descent to soul? Living this question over many years resulted in my becoming a mostly self-taught developmental psychologist, but with a couple of unusual and essential twists. First, I wanted to know how nature meant for us to develop — the ideal stages that evolution enabled us to traverse (not the sequence of relatively bland stages imposed by mainstream educational, religious, and social systems). Second, I wanted to learn about the sequence of stages the very healthiest, most self-realized humans went through (not the stages experienced by the average undergraduate “subject” in university research studies). I became, in other words, a nature-based and soul-oriented psychologist of human potential.

These explorations, during my first twenty-five years of guiding contemporary, Western underworld journeys, culminated in the eight-stage model of human development I call the Eco-soulcentric Developmental Wheel of Life. The Wheel became for us, at Animas, an indispensable template for understanding what we do as guides and how to prepare people for an eventual descent to soul. It enabled my guide-partners and me to see which developmental tasks from a person’s current or earlier life-stages were most incomplete, tasks that needed to be addressed before a person would be prepared for the descent, the initiatory journey to true adulthood. (The Wheel is the topic of my second book, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World.)

This first discovery — that the journey of soul initiation is not available or possible for everyone but only for those who have achieved a certain developmental stage — has been heartbreaking but one of the most important insights in our work. It highlights not only that significant preparatory work is required but that most contemporary cultures obstruct the dimensions of human development that prepare us, and that the journey of soul initiation is likely not possible for most humans alive in these times. With hindsight, this should not have been surprising. We’ve known, after all, that maturation or individuation is a type of achievement. Humans do not mature — psychologically or spiritually — simply by getting older. We’ve also known that human development proceeds best when people, especially children, live in healthy families in healthy cultures, both of which have become rare. Developmental progress is an achievement assisted by others and enabled most easily and effectively within the context of healthy, intact community. Contemporary Western culture, although technologically, medically, and scientifically advanced, has been, as a whole, psychosocially and spiritually unhealthy for many hundreds if not thousands of years and is now in what appears to be a terminal state of decay and collapse. Most Westerners never mature beyond early adolescence or even reach a healthy early adolescence. The journey of soul initiation begins in the next stage, the stage of late adolescence, which I call the Cocoon. (Analogy: Only a healthy, fully-grown caterpillar is eligible to enter their cocoon and begin the transformation to butterfly.)

The primary conclusion from this first discovery was this: To be prepared for the descent to soul, developmental stage makes all the difference. It’s not sufficient, for example, to be a person interested in and able to benefit from psychotherapy. After all, the goal of the journey of soul initiation is not the healing of wounds but rather a radical transformation in consciousness, identity, and life orientation. This journey is not therapeutic; it is indeed counter-therapeutic in the sense that it destabilizes our current identity and life — with associated risks such as insanity, homelessness, and physical injury. Consequently it is advised only for those who have already attended to their foundational healing work. In conformist-consumer cultures, relatively few people are prepared in this way.

Photo: Dream of the Underworld – Two [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.