Soulcraft Musings

Friday, April 10, 2026

An Introduction to the Work of Animas Valley Institute

—Bill Plotkin

Part I

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

IN THESE DEEPLY TROUBLING TIMES, many of us are recognizing that the current diminishment and destruction of life on Earth is, ultimately, caused by unhealthy human societies. Consequently, increasing numbers of us are envisioning and working toward the generation or invention of healthier cultures. Current conversations on cultural change focus on topics such as new forms of democratic governance, regenerative agriculture, rights-of-nature laws, ecological restoration, community-centered economics, racial and social justice, and technologies that enhance life, technologies that empower rather than dominate. These are all, I believe, necessary and essential realms of societal reshaping. And they are all examples of what we might call outer change, alterations in our collective systems and structures.

In comparison, it seems a relatively small number of culture-change activists are focusing on what might be called inner change, on psychological or spiritual transformation — in other words, the development of healthier and more mature human beings. And, of those who do, few approach human development from a nature-based or ecocentric perspective, one that doesn’t separate us from our native entanglement with the rest of the Earth community.

At Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org), our mission is to contribute to the generation of healthier and more mature human societies by supporting what we call nature-based full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD).

At Animas, we believe that, in the long-term big picture, NB-FSHD is the central and single most important dimension of regenerative culture because everything we humans do is, after all, done by us, and everything we do is an expression of who we are, including the fullness and soundness of our individual human development. Healthier human societies require human beings who are healthy psychologically, spiritually, socially, and ecologically. Healthier human societies are generated by healthy humans. And it’s equally true the other way around: Healthier humans are what we get when we are born into, raised in, and come of age in healthier societies. Healthy societies and healthy individuals dependently co-arise together.

Yet, over the past 40 years, I’ve come to believe that what contemporary societies understand as healthy human development is missing a lot — and is misguided in some essential ways. It seems that over a very long period — probably thousands of years — most current human societies have lost touch with what constitutes optimal human development. The vast majority of contemporary human communities are no longer designed to support NB-FSHD.

But we can learn again how to do this. At Animas Valley Institute, this is the work to which we are dedicated. Our aspiration is to be a generative cauldron of visionary revolution, planetary evolution, human rejuvenation, and cultural renaissance.

To introduce you to our work, I want to highlight some of the distinctions we, at Animas, have come to believe are essential for doing a better job with human development and to distinguish our approach from what is more commonly found in most contemporary human societies. I’ve come to believe, reluctantly, that many of the most bedrock assumptions that modernity makes about humans and human development are actually wrong. In this light, please consider the following 18 distinctions. I gathered these just last month in preparation for a presentation to the Centre for Climate Psychology.

1) Healing in contrast to wholing. By “wholing,” I mean the cultivation of our innate human wholeness, which at Animas we identify in terms of what we call the four facets of the Self — that’s “Self” with a capital “S”. Our names for the four facets are the Nurturing Generative Adult, the Innocent/Sage, the Wild Indigenous One, and the Dark Muse-Beloved. (These four facets of wholeness are fully described in Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche.) Sometimes we refer to this healing vs wholing distinction as psychotherapy vs soulcraft. Healing and wholing are very different approaches to human development but are fully complementary. At Animas, we facilitate both healing and wholing but emphasize wholing because it is mostly neglected in modernity. We each need easy and reliable access to all four facets of wholeness in order to mature, to love, to heal ourselves and others, to lead, to participate creatively in the restoration of our world, to undergo the journey of soul initiation, and to competently use all four of our innate windows of human knowing: our full-bodied feeling, deep imagination, full-presence sensing, and heart-centered thinking. We can’t access or help build a new world without the cultivation of all four facets of our wholeness. Healing by itself does not create life-enhancing societal change, although it does enhance our adaptation to current circumstances. Through the cultivation of our wholeness, on the other hand, we can catalyze cultural innovation and renaissance. [This healing versus wholing distinction is related to the distinction between a double-negative approach to human development (reducing or eliminating undesirable conditions like psychological and behavioral symptoms) versus positive or wellness approaches to human development.] Most contemporary societies seem to be designed to suppress our conscious and embodied access to the four facets of our human wholeness. An egocentric, Dominator, patho-adolescent society cannot be sustained if even a large minority of its citizens have access to their innate wholeness. A corollary: Wholing is revolutionary because it is subversive to Dominator society. Psychotherapy by itself is, too often, consistent with and even supportive of modernity’s Business-as-Usual.

2) Being healed by someone else in contrast to healing ourselves. Self-healing, I believe, is deeper and longer lasting than being healed by another. The capacity to Self-heal, however, requires adequate wholeness because the healer in Self-healing is the person’s four-faceted Self, which must be adequately cultivated before Self-healing is possible. (To call it “Self-healing” makes it sound like this is done alone in isolation. But ideally, we Self-heal in the context of our most important relationships, in community. The resources of our fourfold Self are required for Self-healing but, preferably, our closest companions (human and otherwise) are supporting us to Self-heal. We share with one another our successes and challenges with Self-healing, ask for and offer support to one another, and practice and assess our Self-healing capacities by embodying our healed or healing selves during our daily interactions with each other.) We might wonder what percentage of contemporary people are capable of Self-healing. It may be more than I fear, but most people with adequate wholeness would need some coaching to be able to Self-heal because it’s not a possibility found on the map of contemporary societies. For support, see Wild Mind or contact an Animas mentor (email us at [email protected] and ask for our current list of mentors).

This list of 18 distinctions will be continuing next week. Or read the whole essay in full now on our website click here.

Photo: Preparing for the Descent While Living in Industrial Growth Society/Trauma Culture [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.