Soulcraft Musings

Friday, January 16, 2026

The Story of Animas

How We Learned to Guide the Descent to Soul

Part III

This is the final part of a three-part Musing.

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.

In Part II, we described the origins of the Eco-Soulcentric Wheel of Life (a nature-based model of full-spectrum human development) and its implications for people living in egocentric societies (most all humans alive now), especially the possibility to embark on the journey of soul initiation.

The Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche

A second major discovery was that developmental stage is not the only precondition for the descent to soul. Among our participants who seemed to be in the stage in which the descent first becomes possible, some still seemed under-resourced for the journey in one way or another. In addition to having attained the necessary life stage, it appeared they needed a relatively high level of cultivation of their core human capacities, the sort neglected or actively suppressed by Western conformist-consumer culture, capacities such as deep imagination, full-bodied feeling, empathy, heart-centered thinking, vibrant and full-presence sensing, emotional aliveness, ecological sensitivity and fluency, mindfulness, humor, intuition, and self-nurturance (the latter especially during high-intensity, uncomfortable, or psychospiritually risky conditions). Without these resources, the descent would not commence or it would be aborted in midstream and little of value would be gained.

This realization led to a question I may never have asked otherwise, namely, “What then are the core capacities that comprise the evolutionary inheritance of all humans?” If we were going to assess participants for both strong and weak capacities, we needed a non-arbitrary and comprehensive understanding of the full set. Despite my years of training and practice as a psychologist, I was not aware of any models that provided such an inventory. So, my colleagues and I began to map the human psyche onto nature’s pan-cultural template for wholeness — the seven-directions sphere of east, south, west, north, upwards, downwards, and center. At first we focused on the horizontal plane — the four cardinal directions — in order to enhance our understanding of what we call the four facets of the Self. This inquiry ultimately yielded what we call the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, a second indispensable tool for helping us prepare people for the journey of soul initiation as well as supporting them to succeed during the journey itself and to effectively embody their soulwork afterwards. (This Map is the subject of my third book, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche.)

In addition to supporting the cultivation of all four facets of our innate human wholeness, the Map also provides guidance for embracing, healing, and dis-identifying from the four sets of our fragmented or wounded parts (including our inner critics, addicts, victims, rebels, and conformists), a process we call Self-healing. It supports us to develop what has become a rare achievement in the contemporary world — a healthy, mature ego rooted in our wholeness, not in our wounds. Often, as guides, we would observe participants getting stuck on the journey of soul initiation when one or more of their wounded parts — their immature protective parts — would get scared and deploy a childhood survival strategy to divert or abort the journey. Self-healing was needed to get back on track. And Self-healing is always a matter of employing the resources (core capacities) of the four facets of the Self for the purpose of embracing and healing the wounded parts.

A New Model for the Descent to Soul

A third core lesson from guiding four decades of Animas immersions is this: The contemporary journey to the underworld of soul and back is best described by five phases (not the more familiar three favored by anthropologists and mythologists), namely: Preparation, Dissolution, Soul Encounter, Metamorphosis, and Enactment. These five phases are described in The Journey of Soul Initiation.

Our primary mission at Animas is to guide the descent to soul and to train soul-initiation guides — for the purposes of cultivating conscious participation in the dream of the Earth and engendering visionary artisans of cultural renaissance. Our intention is to continuously evolve our methods and practices so we might gift future generations with the knowledge and methods for the journey of soul initiation, the multi-year process that bears fruit as true adulthood. Looking around at other related work in the world, it appears that Animas may be the only organization to have developed a contemporary, Western, nature-based approach to soul initiation. It might simply be that we are the only ones to have attempted such a preposterous project. But we also keep in mind that a small proportion of Western people, even without a map or a guide, manage, as I did, to stumble upon their own way to self-initiate. In The Journey of Soul Initiation, I explore a few such examples, including Joanna Macy, Carl Jung, and William Butler Yeats.

Soul-initiated people might be more whole and more fulfilled than others, but more importantly, for themselves and our world, they are the ones who “carry what is hidden as a gift to others.” (David Whyte, again.) Their personal transformations are, in every case, seeds for societal and planetary transformation, the Great Work of our time. (Indeed, I have come to believe that such seeds emerge only from soul-initiated individuals.) They have become full partners with the rest of creation in the evolution of life on Earth. They embody the dream of the Earth through the ways they, as initiated adults, lead, heal, invent and design, teach, and nurture, and in the ways they constructively interrupt dysfunctional worldviews and propagate new ones in synergy with the rest of life.

Animas Valley Institute Today

Each of our Animas offerings — intensives, vision fasts, yearlong immersions, wilderness pilgrimages, and trainings — is entwined with each of the others. All emerge from the same set of foundational principles, models, and maps. All spring, in part, from the insights of nature-based underworld guides discovering how to facilitate the journey of soul initiation through a variety of soulcraft practices and ceremonies, including contemporary vision fasts.

The tapestry of what Animas is today has been woven and shaped by Mystery through the contributions of many weavers in the form of Animas guides, apprentices, participants, staff, board members, and volunteers, and by what we have learned from our many teachers — of the human kind, the Others, and the land, sky, and waters — and from the initiatory practices and sacred stories of life-enhancing traditions of both long ago and recent times.

Animas Valley Institute, founded in 1980 and a Colorado non-profit since 1998, is currently (2026) a community of 24 guides, six staff members, a four-person Board of Directors, 25 SAIP apprentices, over 200 Wild Mind trainees, and thousands of courageous spiritual adventurers, all of us on the journey to becoming fully human and as useful to the world as we can at this time of the Great Turning.

Animas, in its essence, is a generative cauldron of visionary revolution, planetary evolution, human rejuvenation, and cultural renaissance.

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

To read previous musings click here.