Books: Preparing for Your Inner and Outer Journeys
How you will make your journeys through your inner and outer landscape is as unique as your personal history and the topography you travel. On this page, we’ll suggest psychological and naturalist resources we have found helpful in developing this Institute, resources that you can tap to go deeper in your knowledge of nature and yourself.
PSYCHOLOGY- MYTHOLOGY- SPIRITUALITY-NATURALIST STUDIES-HAZARDS
Parents, teachers, counselors, guides, and mentors, this book is written for you. It provides a blueprint for you to easily design an amazing learning experience that fits your people and your place. Coyote Mentoring is the ancient, worldwide legacy of hunter-gatherer cultures who surrounded their children with “Invisible Schooling.” This way of teaching will hone students’ senses and connect their imagination to the natural world. A set of 54 sparkling, field-tested Activities…Each Activity is primed with a story and goes well beyond “How-to,” taking you “Inside the Mind of the Mentor” and out to “Alternatives and Extensions.” The Essential Manual for the No Child Left Inside movement…The principles in this book are already at the heart of a vibrant educational movement that is spreading worldwide. Click on the book jacket photo to take you to Wilderness Awareness School to purchase this book and help IWI earn a commission that helps support our programming!
Soulcraft, by Bill Plotkin. Jungian psychologist Bill Plotkin has been guiding men and women into the wilderness, into the wilds of the soul. He calls this work soulcraft. There’s a great longing in all people — a longing 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. 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, storytelling, and soul-infused poetry.
Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert Johnson. In this book Johnson introduces a simple four-step method aimed at helping us explore the unconscious. He encourages us to pinpoint the symbols that appear in our dreams and active imaginings. By providing clear instructions, he gives us a feeling for inner work, making it feasible without reliance on formal analysis. Johnson’s well-written book should appeal both to general readers and to specialists in the field.
Animal-Speak, by Ted Andrews. Although I think it is best to avoid animal totem dictionaries when exploring inner animals, especially at the beginning, this book I like this book alot for the facts of animal lives and qualities it presents. Ted Andrews makes a point of approaching this work well-grounded in the reality of the animal world, before leaping into the inner world. Plus, the book covers insects and birds as well as mammals and has a lot of thought deepening writings beyond the dictionary.
Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv. This book will give you some motivation for understanding the urgency to make sure we are keeping deep, intimate nature experiences alive in our lives and in our children’s lives. Louv has done his research, and is being taken quite seriously by educators and planners for the need to build in unstructured access to nature for children. This book will create an additional context beyond your own personal growth as to why individual participation in nature is a gift to our culture to help humanity avoid the extinction of experience Louv warns us about.
Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert Johnson. This is an accessible, short, primer on the Jungian concept of the personal Shadow. Johnson offers practical ways to learn and deal with your own shadow as well as more theoretical and spiritual views on how shadow gets integrated or not in our culture.
Nature and the Human Soul, by Bill Plotkin. This is a dense, rich text that is both accessible and takes time to digest. Plotkin outlines here a complete, well-thought out, cradle-to-grave, map of how a human life develops over time and what the function of nature is in that development. As he descibes the psychological developmental stages, he also talks about nature-guided ways to work through incomplete stages. You will leave this book with a read on where you are in your life, and a preview of possibilities to come, as well as understanding better how others are taking their journeys.
Trail Safe, by Michael Bane, is a short book available at Massanutten Regional Library that gives great advice for making sure we stay aware of the potential risks we take from other human predators when we venture out in the woods. Concrete advice for avoiding trouble and also how to handle situations should they escalate. A must read.
Venomous Animals and Poisonous Plants, Foster and Caras, a Peterson Field Guide. There are a countable few true hazards in our area that could get you in deep trouble, but there are a few that deserve our respect. You’ll enjoy the wilderness so much more when you feel comfortable and like you can avoid hazards. Anyone spending time outdoors should go ahead and invest in this book. One warning though, once you start buying the Peterson field guides, you can’t stop!
The Complete Tracker by Len McDougall. If I were to recommend just one mammal book, this is it. This book give tracking and identification info and most of the normal stuff found in field guides. But, in addition, has tons of lifestyle narratives about the mammals that really bring the animal’s life into focus. I go back to this book time and again.
Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide by Lawrence Newcomb. You really can’t have just one wildflower identification guide and keep your sanity so you might as well give in to the idea of owning this one and also owning Peterson’s Wildflowers. Used together, you have a fighting chance of finding your flower. Newcomb’s guide is famous for having a 5-question +method of looking up a flower rather than flipping back and forth just looking at pictures. That way, if you answer the 5 questions about a plant you see out in the woods, you can look it up once you get home just by remembering the answers to the 5 questions. In theory. But it’s probably the best bet I have found for success.
Botany in a Day by Thomas J. Elpel. This book is a straightforward, practical botany intro to get you started on learning about the patterns of plants. Teaches you how to learn plants by families ,so is a good intro to taxonomy. plus a section on medicinal plants. Not a identification field guide.
Common Native Trees of Virginia by the Virginia Department of Forestry. I really like this book because it is local Virginia trees only, no wading through lots of stuff that doesn’t pertain. It’s also cheap, less than $3 at Shenandoah National Park shop. Has range maps for Virginia, detailed twig, leaf and fruit/nut drawings plus an identification key.
