Soulcraft Musings

Friday, April 17, 2026

An Introduction to the Work of Animas Valley Institute

—Bill Plotkin

Part II

In last week’s Musing, I began a three-part introduction to our Animas mission: the generation of healthier and more mature societies by supporting what we call nature-based, full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD). I began a list of 18 distinctions we’ve come to believe are essential for doing a better job with human development and that illuminate how our work contrasts with what is more commonly found in most contemporary human societies. The first two, described last week, concerned the differences between healing and wholing and the difference between being healed by someone else and being healed by ourselves. Today we’ll continue with six additional distinctions.

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3. Psychological healing as the reduction or elimination of psychological and behavioral symptoms (including the symptoms of trauma) versus psychological healing as the embrace of our Inner Protectors and our cultivation of gratitude for their psychosocial survival strategies. This second kind of healing is what I mean by Self-healing (again, that’s “Self” with capital “S”). And, again, I believe that this second kind of healing goes deeper and lasts longer than healing provided or supported by another. The capacity for Self-healing travels with us because the Self, of course, does, while our therapist usually doesn’t. (The process of Self-healing and the four groups of Inner Protectors are fully described in Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche.)

4. Egocentric and anthropocentric forms of healing and wholing in contrast to ecocentric forms of healing and wholing. Egocentric and anthropocentric healing and wholing treat the individual human as a separate being rather than as a part of a larger, interconnected ecological and relational system. Healthy humans, healthy human communities, and healthy Earth communities — all three are co-generating. Ecocentric forms of healing and wholing include our active participation in the healing and wholing of the natural world, the greater web of life. Ecocentric forms of healing and wholing also incorporate ways for us to be in relationship with the natural world as itself a healer and agent of wholeness (in addition to other humans as our healers, our guides to wholeness, and our Self-healing coaches).

5. Healing and wholing considered together as a single realm in contrast to addressing the developmental tasks of our human life stages. These are not at all the same things. In contemporary approaches to human development or psychotherapy, there’s little explicit focus on supporting people to address the developmental tasks of their current life stage or to address the most unfinished tasks from earlier stages, especially ecocentric and soulcentric versions of human life stages. (At Animas, our experience is that, in modernity, there is, for most all of us, a very significant degree of unfinished developmental tasks from childhood and early adolescence.) This is in part due to the lack of awareness of what such optimal human life stages look like, in the first place, including what the developmental tasks of those stages might be. At Animas, we’ve generated a nature-based, eight-stage model of human development that we call the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (fully described in Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World). Addressing the developmental tasks of these ecocentric and soulcentric stages may very well be even more important than healing or wholing — although it’s true that people often have trouble addressing developmental tasks precisely due to psychological woundings and a lack of personal wholeness. Healing, wholing, and developmental maturation go hand in hand. The problem, again, is that most contemporary human development guides, including parents and educators, neglect or are unaware of eco-soulcentric developmental tasks. There’s an implicit assumption that developmental progress is simply or primarily age-dependent and that everyone proceeds automatically to the next life stage simply by getting older. But … what if the majority of contemporary humans actually get stuck in the psychological stage of early adolescence and never reach even late adolescence, no less true adulthood and elderhood?) [This fifth distinction is also related to the distinction between individual-based approaches to human development versus community-based and relationship-based approaches.]

6. (Implicit in distinction #5) Contemporary understandings of stages of human development versus the stages of human life as understood in the framework of NB-FSHD. Most contemporary models of human development are based on empirical studies of “average” contemporary humans. In contrast, our Animas understanding of FSHD is based on two things: nature’s own templates of wholeness as seen, for example, in the patterns and rhythms observed in the four cardinal directions, the four times of day, and the four seasons and, second, similar in this way to Maslow’s approach, the study of the healthiest humans we can find.

7. Rites of passage, on the one hand, and addressing the developmental tasks of our life stages, on the other: In other words, do we focus on the passages between stages or on the stages themselves? Or both? I believe that what happens during our life stages — or, rather, what ought to happen — is quite a bit more important than the passages. After all, the stages encompass the majority of life; the passages are relatively brief. (Life-stage passages and their associated rites of passage are discussed in depth in Nature and the Human Soul.)

8. Systemic Human Development Oppression (SHDO) versus full-spectrum human development (FSHD): SHDO operates through social, educational, religious, and political systems that suppress our full and natural humanity. From where I’m sitting, SHDO appears to be the fundamental structure of modernity — arrested human development is modernity’s actual intended outcome (because egocentric consumer-conformist society is not possible in communities of mature humans). I believe that SHDO is at the root of all other oppressions: racial, class, ethnic, gender, and religious. These other forms of oppression will not be fully overcome until we have adequately dismantled SHDO and replaced it with FSHD. [Consider the following signs of systemic human development oppression and cultural breakdown now found globally: a widespread questioning of self-worth; the impoverishment of purpose and meaning; existential anxiety and a sense of helplessness; pervasive emotional, moral, and spiritual crises; social fragmentation and an erosion of interpersonal trust; pervasive dynamics of deception, propaganda, and manipulation; the weakening of traditional values such as empathy and community; meaningless, repetitive labor and jobs that are mind-numbing and maturation-suppressing; enslavement and servitude; social and racial injustice and oppression; anthropogenic ecological disasters and climate disruption; the development and use of weapons of mass destructive, including bio-weapons, germ warfare, and engineered pathogens; totalitarianism and the rise of surveillance societies.]

This list of 18 distinctions will conclude next week. To read the whole essay in full now on our website, click here or on Substack.

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

To read previous musings click here.