

ReWild
A Foundation Course
for Being Human
SoulCraft Retreat
29th April - 4th May 2025
Cultivating the West Facet of Wholeness
ReWild is an experiential journey through the four facets of the Eco-centric Map to wholeness.
This residential programme will take place at Treesong
a community event space in the Motueka Valley
near Nelson Aotearoa NZ
About the West Direction

The place where Soul muse lives (messenger/guide between underworld and day world).
It a place for Deep Imagination, an apprenticeship to feeling the deep longing of the earth.
It a place to begin learning about Shadow work
The place where one can apprentice to the emergence of an mytho-poetic identity.
In the West we apprentice ourselves to the cocoon/death, both personal & archetypal.
The place of soulcentric dream work
A place where we learn to amplify the longing for Soul Encounter.
If these words do not mean much to you, yet you intuit there is something here, then read Wild Mind or Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin, or watch Bill video below.
Shadow Work
Arguably the most helpful awareness tool for modern humans. This is an introduction to how we can begin to claim back the power we project onto others, usually without knowing it. Golden shadows are when we give away our potential to others. Sinister shadows can be noticed when we experience an uncomfortable feeling about another, sometimes someone we hardly know. They are demonstrating an unacknowledged and therefore unintegrated quality that is actually a part of ourselves.
Wholeness is the apprenticeship to a integrating with awareness the potent aspects of ourselves that were exiled for good reasons when we were young and life appeared unsafe.
Courting the Muse
In the west lives the possibility of a conversation with our soul muse beloved. He/she/they are the fountain of creativity. They speak to us in images, intuitions, in poetry and dream. The strategic mind is clever, capable, a powerful tool for getting things done. But who does it serve? The muse is where our happiness and pure creativity lives. There is a sense that if we are to fall in love with the world, this is the primary relationship to foster. Like any relationship the more we give the more we receive.
Imagination
Our capacity for imagination has been suppressed, yet it is the essential capacity for re-imagining the world and our place in it. Imagination is pure genius, it is the capacity to open the doors that animate the world, to move from the isolation of feeling like the world is filled with objects to the juice of realising we are in relationship with all things, and all things are speaking. Imagination is our greatest, most powerful tool for creativity, empowerment and being an artist of and for life.
Mytho-Poetic Identity
Bill Plotkin is very clear that Soul Encounter is a rare event. Most people overestimate where they are at in the developmental wheel. Your mytho-poetic identity is about gathering the threads of an identity you were born to occupy in the world. It is not something that can be given, it is not something that can be obtained through will. It is something you can track, gather, glimpse and hold lightly. It is the source of your greatest happiness, your fullest capacity. It is not a path for everyone, yet for some it is the only path.
Laying foundations for Vision Quest
Vision quest is a process of stripping back. Typically it involves preparation, intention setting, community, elders. It involves being alone with it all in a natural setting for three or four days without food and limited shelter with the possibility of opening a larger conversation with your soul and the living world. The skills and capacities we learn in the West are essential for this work. We offer this programme as a way to build these skills.
What is this work about
What is the Great Turning
THE TEAM



Guide Jaime Howell
Jaime is a trained Wilderness Rites of Passage guide, Work That Reconnects facilitator and experienced teacher of Open Floor movement practice. He is the founder of the Centre for the Great Turning a movement inspired by Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, Tarchin Hearn and many more.
Jaime is passionate to develop maps and inquiries that support the flowering of human creativity, wisdom and care for the generations of all life to come. He supports humans to awaken their ecological self, the innate sense of belonging to the natural world. Jaime has a Masters Degree in Education, he is a wild poet, a student of mythology and holds a mean blues guitar. He lives in the knowing of what it takes to live in a community aspiring to wake up. A friend to shadow, bruised and bumped with a heart still open. A recent new father and peaceful warrior to bring the right kind of trouble to a world waking up.
THE ELDERS
Bill McEwan
I’m a 80 year old retired counsellor with an academic background in Agricultural Science and Theology. I live in Blenheim with Lois. In 2015 I felt overwhelmed by an ignorance of climate awareness in Marlborough and sat in the centre of Blenheim for a week with my son Robbie and fasted. That led to the formation of Climate Karanga Marlborough. I’m giving a lot of attention to ways of being an older person in an adolescent society. I am a work in progress and treasure close listening, silence, patience, emotional warmth, tenderness where there is shame and support for the broken hearted.
Lois Mead-McEwan
I’m a 73 year old grandmother with a professional background in education and mental health. I’m passionate about the well-being of the ecosystem - in the widest sense of the word - and all that interconnects within it.
Running alongside this is a love for making collages, writing poetry and performing at open mic, creating functional household items using fibre arts, music and dance.
Family, friends, community, adventure, nature and humour also play an important role in my personal well-being.