Bill Plotkin

you know, we might get stuck in mad, sad, bad, glad.

I think that I remember reading that in Bill Plotkin, like there's, you know, people when they describe how they're feeling, there's like a range of seven emotions.

And then Brene Brown came in and was like, look, there's a whole giant dictionary of emotions, but we don't firstly have the emotional literacy.

I think it's the same thing with kind of the archetypal energy is that It's not about being one thing.

If you don't spend those times in the salt mines getting that left hemisphere up to snuff, you end up in spiritual bypassing territory where most of the communities I joined were like, they don't send emails, they don't understand how finance works, they don't understand how industry works, and therefore they're in no position to change it when they do get into a better niche.

The people I'm much more interested in and the members that you've met at Leading Edge are people who have hit For Bill Plotkin, who I was talking to earlier, he's like, no, no, this is a human stage that only comes about once you've hit a state of sufficiency.

And then your life blows up.

And that for me is interesting because that's closer to what I've seen anecdotally.

You know, a lot of work that I do, I've been doing work personally with the Animus Valley Institute out of Colorado and, you know, there's echo depth psychology work.

through Bill Plotkin and others, and they place humans in the right context as just a part of everything else, not separate from everything else.

And what you're talking to is that sense of the eco-awakened human where humans we can go for a wander or spend time in the bush and to the best way we can hopefully is recognise we're connected to everything else.

And that, you know, that tree over there or that animal over there is of no less value than me.

And so we have that sense in ourselves already.

Like when we go for a wander in nature, we just kind of feel better.

And so in terms of grief, letting nature work you over is one thing Bill Plotkin would say.

Let that place do its work on you.

Um, the first is, is that you're talking about the Potawatomi tribe was telling these stories, but what you just described is a microcosm for our entire species r-reaching a rite of passage moment with those two paths.

And the seven fires and the things we have to pick up, that's, to use Bill Plotkin's term, s-striving towards ecological adulthood, along with the grief and the responsibility and the restraint and the wisdom and, and the sacrifice and the courage and all the things.

The second reaction I had, um, if, if I'm honest, is I feel a little bit of shame, um, because four years ago when I started this podcast, I was dead set on describing the energetic benefits that we're getting from the carbon pulse, and those are going away, and climate change, can't you see, and the geopolitical arrangements, and debt is fake claims that we're gonna ha-- And Indigenous wisdom seemed like a just irrelevant distraction to me.

And I now get it.

And it's really hard, you know, again, like going back to like, you know, are there evil forces out there and things like that? Like I, in a way, like I understand the psychology behind like doing the shadow work, like if you encounter a shadow version of yourself, there is a different way you need to handle that.

And that's a lot of like the work that I like to do with Bill Plotkin's Myth of Poetic Journey, Joseph Campbell's work, even like Carl Jung is like you're encountering these different versions of yourself and you're communing with them.

And ultimately, usually the goal is to love it and to bring it into yourself or reassign it a task within yourself.

That's something I have to do.

Yeah, we're over an hour now, but there's another interesting conversation here.

And maybe we'll kind of put a pin in it for next time.

But that one, the Bill Plotkin guy I really like, he broke down life into the eight stages.

And like stage three is what he argues most people are at.

not trying to change or better them.

As the depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin told me, the core question is not so much looking at what's wrong, but where is the person's wholeness not fully realized or lived out.

While self-transformation can enhance the healing capacities of the body, the fact remains that we are never in complete control of an illness nor of matters of life and death.

We can take all the steps necessary to heal and yet remain sick.

And maybe that... is the very kind of thing I am needing like that's like I said that season of contraction of coming back I feel right now that I don't have a plan and maybe that's the very plan that is needed right now um You know, I think about Carl Jung, who I love and talk about all the time.

And he has a kind of quote and he talks about what he says, what looks outside... dreams and what looks inside awakes and so I think that is what I'm being called to do is to no longer look externally onto what's next to feel this discomfort but to allow some space and time and come in without a plan and without needing a timing to fix it and to heal it and to go into that, I definitely feel like that is here.

I also feel like there's an amazing depth psychologist, one of my favorite called Bill Plotkins, has a book called Soulcraft, I highly recommend.

And he talks about like this journey of our soul and evolution in this life is to, you know, come out of the comfortable state we create, all the cushion, the nice things, And to go into the underworld to really, he calls it the, to descend, to retrieve parts of ourselves.

And then there's also the ascension, which is connecting to the spiritual.

So, so the way I found it was when I was at a workshop, and it was quite some years ago now.

But I was in a workshop where I wanted to explore my poetry, my connection to nature, and to meet a particular teacher called Bill Plotkin, who I-

Oh, yes.

Uh, know of Bill

...

I'm not a great reader And I was feeling a bit rude, and I said, "I'm really sorry, but that looks like a fascinating book.

Do you mind if I know what it is?" And he, yeah, he showed me the book, and it was by Bill Plotkin, and it's all about the earth and soul.

And I thought, "I've gotta get that book.