Doug Van Houten
Body, Art & Soul
Guide to Soul
Artist
Somatic & Movement
Ancestral ~ Soulwork
Soulcentric Dreamwork
Where soulwork, creativity, wholeness, embodiment, ancestral tending, and mentorship constellate in the dark—opening portals into the unseen depths of your life. Cross the threshold and surrender to the mystery that dreamed you into being.
Awaken to your Soul-Centered Life
A quiet, powerful stirring is awakening in our time — calling us to live with soul, purpose, and presence. People are longing to align with their true nature: to feel fully alive, deeply connected, and in service to something larger than themselves.
Beneath the surface of our busy, distracted culture is a hidden hunger — not just to survive, but to grow. To awaken courage, creativity, and wholeness. To show up in the world as a singular expression of our gifts and to leave traces of beauty, meaning, and soul in everything we touch.
Contemporary society often encourages the opposite: numbness over feeling, distraction over depth, conformity over authenticity. And yet, despite all this, the inner call remains — insistent, clear, and numinous. We are meant for more than mere survival. We are meant to bloom, to contribute, to transform ourselves and the world around us.
Nature-based Body, Art & Soul
Nature-Based Body, Art & Soul offers a direct response to that call. Here, your journey is not about fixing what’s broken — it’s about stepping into your wholeness, awakening capacities that have been dormant, and cultivating a life that flows from soul.
Our focus is nature-based initiation: a descent to soul designed to mature the ego so it can carry your deepest, world-transforming gifts. This is not therapy, self-help, or cultural adjustment. It is a fundamental shift — a transformation that reconnects you with your own aliveness and the rhythms of the natural world.
In our programs, encounters with wild nature, ancestral wisdom, and expressive arts serve as mirrors, revealing your hidden gifts and forgotten stories. You learn to navigate the terrain of body, heart, mind, and spirit, cultivating maturity, courage, and creativity. Over time, you become a visionary: a fully embodied human capable of bringing your unique soul gifts into the world.
This path is for those ready to step beyond old patterns, awaken their inner fire, and participate consciously in the flourishing of life.
Through this work, you will learn to:
Awaken and embody your innate human wholeness — summoning the deeper Self that already lives within you.
Identify, befriend, and integrate fragmented parts of yourself — revealing the gifts hidden within your wounds and shadows.
Enter into deeper communion with the living world — restoring relationship with nature as a mirror and guide.
Expand your ecological identity — understanding your unique place in the greater story of life.
Engage practices that open the gates to soul — through imagination, dreams, reflection, memory, and vision.
Remember where you truly belong — not just socially or geographically, but cosmologically.
Participate in what Thomas Berry calls The Dream of the Earth — becoming an agent of renewal in a time of great turning.
Doug Van Houten
THE SINGULAR DREAM that has been a perennial guide for Doug’s own guiding practice is one where humans thrive in a mutually enhancing relationship with Earth, know our cosmic origins, and see ourselves as integral and yet necessarily unique participants in the ongoingness of the universe. His lineage of teachers and inspirators includes: Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute, Joanna Macy, Matthew Fox, David Whyte, Mary Oliver and Brian Swimme to name a few. In co-creating wild, ceremonial and soulcentric spaces for human development, Doug draws upon the wisdom of deep imagery and dreams, somatic and embodied knowing, poetry and art-making, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering, nature-responsive practices. Doug’s true calling manifests in a devotion to supporting others to transform themselves toward wholeness and maturation as they descend into the mystic wellspring of their imaginations, drink deeply from soul’s source, drench in their own unique grief and gifts and return to outpour their particular powers in service to what Thomas Berry called, ”The Great Work” of our time. In addition to guiding and mentoring Doug expresses his own soul’s longing as a visual artist, a wily wanderer, an intuitive dream tracker, an occasional beekeeper, a heart-centered activist, an emerging yogi and cosmic dancer.
Doug is a senior Soulcraft™ guide with the Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org). He also guides programs & mentors individuals on the land at the farm that he lives on in Goshen, Kentucky (20 minutes outside Louisville) and at a distance using Skype or phone.
Are you willing to risk a radical re-imagining of your life's purpose?
What must a caterpillar do that it may one day fly?
Podcast Interviews with Doug:
Podcast Audio with Caravan of the Heart
https://open.spotify.com/episode/58LgwzUwXZZLYn0XHZoZLr?si=cb8dd097e508490e&nd=1
Podcast Audio with Liz Wiltzen of Tracking Yes!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/980419/9295300
Podcast Audio with Juniper Owens with Academy of Integrative Mental Health
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1082051/6912536
Podcast Audio with A Healing Bridge — Ancestors in the Making
https://www.ahealingbridge.com/doug-van-houten-interview
Practices of Body, Mind & Soul
SOULCRAFT™*
Wild Mind — Map of the Psyche*
Dreamwork
Shadow Work
Wandering In Nature
Deep Imagery
The Way of Council
Symbolic Artwork
Vision Fast (Quest)
Ritual & Emergent Ceremony
Personal Mythos
Sacred Wound Work
Body Inquiry
Refined Hakomi
Yoga
*Created by Bill Plotkin, Ph.D.
I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
—Dawna Markova
Are you longing for more adventure, wholeness, wildness, mystery and meaning in your life?
