Active Hope is about finding, and offering, our best response to the crisis of sustainability unfolding in our world. It starts by accepting that the challenges we face can be difficult even to look at: climate change, the depletion of oil, economic reversals and the die-back of our natural world act together to create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. The book offers an approach that strengthens our capacity to face disturbing information and respond with unexpected resilience and creative power.

Drawing on decades of experience running workshops in an empowerment approach widely known as The Work That Reconnects, the authors guide the reader through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, holistic science and spiritual perspectives. This process equips readers with tools to help them face the mess we re in and find and play their role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society. At the heart of this book is the idea that Active Hope is a gift that is not only given but also received. The journey of finding, and offering, our gift of contribution helps us to discover new strengths, open to a wider network of allies and experience a deepening of our aliveness. When our responses are guided by the intention to act for healing of our world, the mess we re in not only becomes easier to face, our lives also become more meaningful and satisfying

Since 1980, depth psychologist Bill Plotkin has been guiding women and men into the wilderness--the redrock canyons and snow-crested mountains of the American West--but also into the wilds of the soul. He calls this work soulcraft.
There's a great longing in all people to uncover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find the unique gift we were born to bring to our communities, and to experience our full membership in the more-than-human world. This journey to soul is a descent into layers of the self much deeper than personality, a journey meant for each one of us, not just for the heroes and heroines of mythology.

A modern handbook for the journey, Soulcraft is not an imitation of indigenous ways, but a contemporary nature-based approach born from wilderness experience, the traditions of Western culture, and the cross-cultural heritage of all humanity. Filled with stories, poems, and guidelines, Soulcraft introduces over 40 practices that facilitate the descent to soul, including dreamwork, wilderness vision fasts, talking across the species boundaries, council, self-designed ceremony, nature-based shadow work, and the arts of romance, being lost, and storytelling.

Addressing the pervasive longing for meaning and fulfillment in this time of crisis, Nature and the Human Soul introduces a visionary ecopsychology of human development that reveals how fully and creatively we can mature when soul and wild nature guide us. Depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.
With evocative language and personal stories, including those of elders Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, this book defines eight stages of human life - Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master, and Sage - and describes the challenges and benefits of each. Plotkin offers a way of progressing from our current egocentric, aggressively competitive, consumer society to an ecocentric, soul-based one that is sustainable, cooperative, and compassionate. At once a primer on human development and a manifesto for change, Nature and the Human Soul fashions a template for a more mature, fulfilling, and purposeful life - and a better world.

Soul initiation is an essential spiritual adventure that most of the world has forgotten - or not yet discovered. Here, visionary ecopsychologist Bill Plotkin maps this journey, one that has not been previously illuminated in the contemporary Western world and yet is vital for the future of our species and our planet. Based on the experiences of thousands of people, this book provides phase-by-phase guidance for the descent to soul - the dissolution of current identity; the encounter with the mythopoetic mysteries of soul; and the metamorphosis of the ego into a cocreator of life-enhancing culture. Plotkin illustrates each phase of this riveting and sometimes hazardous odyssey with fascinating stories from many people, including those he has guided. Throughout he weaves an in-depth exploration of Carl Jung's Red Book - and an innovative framework for understanding it.