Conscious Mental Health

Nature Based Soul Work with Doug Van Houten

December 18, 2020 Academy of Integrative Mental Health
Conscious Mental Health
Nature Based Soul Work with Doug Van Houten
Show Notes

Our guest today is Doug Van Houten whose work in the world is as a body, art and soul guide. Doug draws on the wisdom of the natural world, depth-psychology, eco-psychology, dreams, somatic knowing, poetry, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering practices that includes: The Way of Council, vision fasting, trance dancing and conversations with the more than human world. Doug’s true calling in life is to support others as they uncover their own unique gifts and in so doing, transform their lives in service to what Thomas Berry called ”The Great Work” of our times. Doug is also a student of Refined Hakomi, an ardent beekeeper, a visual artist, a wily wanderer, a dream tracker, a deep ceremonialist, a heart-centered activist, a yoga instructor interested in new forms of yoga and somatic practice, and a guide for Animas Valley Institute (nature based soul initiation).

"To live a more soul rooted life, means to move beyond an out-dated psychological emphasis focused primarily on wounds and symptoms to seek out the more numinous gifts we all bear that lie trapped beneath the torment of old ideals, bounded by beliefs that no longer serve, relegated to shadows cast by fear, humiliation and shame."

See Doug's offerings and work here.

Resources mentioned in the conversation:

SoulCraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin

Check out the Animas Valley Institute to explore all upcoming offerings. 

What to Remember When Waking

by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

David Whyte

The Ninth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke

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