Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
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them together in the appendix, rather than dividing them up among eight chapters. I recommend you consult the appendix and use these practices regularly.
North Walks
Go for a walk in a neighborhood, city park, state or national park, or wilderness area. Lead with your Nurturing Generative Adult. Be aware of how you walk, sit, look, listen, think, imagine, and feel from this North perspective. Be in relationship to the things, creatures, and other humans you encounter. What opportunities for service, compassion, or caring arise? What insights emerge about the authentic way you belong in the more-than-human community of life? What emotions or longings surface? Record your discoveries in your journal.
Another walk: Wander in a wild or semiwild place where there are few other humans, asking the world or Mystery for help in finding — or being found by — a nurturing, other-than-human thing or place. Take your time with this; don’t settle for something that doesn’t truly feel nurturing to you. If you find such a thing or place, sit or lie down there and let yourself fully feel, viscerally and emotionally, the nurturing love present in this place. If you can’t feel this everywhere in your body, notice if even one part of your body can receive it. If so, allow the experience of that love to spread throughout your body. Then, in your imagination, let yourself merge with this thing or place, experiencing the world from its nurturing perspective. Allow this to feed your remembering of your Nurturing Generative Adult. Perhaps you’ll write one of the following letters while in this place.
Love Letter from the Nurturing Adult
Write yourself a letter of fiercely loving support from the perspective of a mature and unconditionally accepting parent. Embrace all your current emotions and life challenges and help yourself appreciate what each tells you about your relationships to yourself, to others, and to the world. Offer advice about what you could courageously do to further grow or develop those relationships. While in this consciousness, embrace your strengths and your weaknesses. Remind yourself, as you write your letter, that the goal of individuation is wholeness, not perfection.
Write a series of these letters and notice how they change over time. If you’d like, make a copy of one, place it in a sealed envelope, give it to a trusted friend who knows you well, and ask him to mail it to you when he intuits you could use some support from your North Self.
Love Letter to Another
The love letter from the Nurturing Adult to yourself aims at cultivating the intrapersonal dimension of the North facet of the Self. The interpersonal dimension can be cultivated by writing a love letter from the North Self to another being, usually another human, or possibly a member of another species or a whole species.
This love letter, and the ones that follow, can also take the form of a song or a poem, a dance or performance art, or a painting, sculpture, or weaving.
Love Letter to a Mountain, River, or Watershed or to the Earth, Sun, Milky Way, or Universe
In order to access and cultivate the ecological or cosmic dimension of your Nurturing Generative Adult, write a love letter to an ecological feature of your world — a particular mountain, river, desert, forest, marsh, or glacier. Or write a letter to the Earth. Or to our local star. Or to our galaxy or the entire Universe.
Love Letter to the Mystery
Write a love letter to the vast Mystery that informs and expresses itself as every thing in the Universe. For example, Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet, wrote more than 150 such letters, in verse, when he was in his midtwenties. These letters Rilke bound together in his Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, in which he acknowledges that he has a personal relationship with Mystery, has personal obligations to Mystery, and has opportunities for passionate and wild celebration of this relationship. You, too, may want to acknowledge your relationship with Mystery — from the consciousness and perspective of your Nurturing Generative Adult. Rilke recognized that Mystery appears as universally as “the Limitless Now,” on the one hand, and as uniquely and specifically as mountain, fire, or “a wind howling from the desert’s vastness,”9 on the other. The Self of every person knows this to be true.
A Vow to Your Soul
If you have come to understand your Soul’s desires mythopoetically (namely, in the Soul’s own language of metaphor, symbol, archetype, and image), write a vow of commitment to enacting or deepening your soulwork, your own unique life mission, personal mythology, or sacred story. Express your vow in writing, or sing it or dance it on a hilltop, and be sure to do so from the embodied perspective of your Generative Adult. Don’t hold back! Let Mystery know you say yes boldly, despite your appreciation that being so bold will occasionally lead to humiliations — mortifications (ego deaths) necessary for transmuting you into ever more effective shapes and semblances for embodying Soul.
And this probably goes without saying, but I’m going to say it nonetheless: as helpful and facilitative as vows are, much more important is the follow-through — the actual performance of your Soul-infused vision as a gift to others.
THE NORTH FACET OF THE SELF AND THE DESCENT TO SOUL
So far we’ve mostly been exploring how the Nurturing Generative Adult functions in the middleworld — our everyday reality of family, friends, school, work, and community. But the North facet of the Self is also an essential resource in the transpersonal journey to the underworld of Soul.
The descent to Soul offers some of the most harrowing challenges of a lifetime. There we encounter dangerous opportunities that range from the physical to the psychological to the spiritual. On the way to Soul, we might be compelled by our initiation guide or by our own psyche to wander into wilderness (remote mountain ranges, claustrophobic caves, or searing deserts) or into our own psychospiritual wilds (core emotional wounds, Shadow realms, nightmares, memories of personal or collective trauma, or confrontations with our own mortality) that demand a well-honed capacity for self-care, self-reliance, and creative response if we are to benefit from these experiences — or even survive them.
In Soulcraft I explore the many capacities that must be honed for a fruitful descent, or that are at least invaluably facilitative. The self-nurturing subgroup of these skills includes the abilities to relinquish attachment to our former identity, quit addictions (explored in chapter 8 of this book), welcome home our Loyal Soldiers (chapter 6), explore our core wounds (chapter 7), choose authenticity over social acceptance, and make peace with our past. The complementary set of generative skills for Soul encounter include those of soulcentric dreamwork, deep-imagery journeying, talking across the species boundaries, self-designed ceremony, symbolic artwork, journaling, and the arts of wandering, Shadow work (chapter 9), soulful romance, and mindfulness. Cultivating and deploying these two sets of underworld-relevant skills require a well-developed Nurturing Generative Adult.
And after underworld encounters, the work of embodying Soul likewise necessitates a well-honed North Self. Living our mythopoetic identity for the benefit of the more-than-human community requires determination and perseverance, as well as the skills and knowledge that constitute a delivery system (a Soul-resonant craft, career, profession, art, or discipline). As initiated adults, we also need to hone the strengths of character and the skills required to face active resistance or censure from those threatened by our culture-reshaping contributions, or to respond effectively to the often destabilizing projections of others — the positive ones as well as the negative.
THE NORTH FACET OF THE SELF AND THE ASCENT TO SPIRIT
The North facet of the Self is also an essential resource in the transpersonal ascent to Spirit, in which the Ego aims to merge with Mystery. On the path to cultivating spiritual equanimity, universal compassion, self-transcendence, and nondual awareness, there are a great variety of challenges, distractions, and pitfalls. In order to stay on the path, we need a well-developed capacity to nurture ourselves