If 'no man is an island', as John Donne said, then why do so many men and women live as if we were? Kelda Barnes reviews Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.

It sometimes seems as if it has become the norm in Western society for the individual to concern herself almost entirely with her own life, so closed down to the mass of others that her relations with them become as transactional as an encounter with the cash machine.

This is of course an extreme interpretation, yet many of us would immediately recognise the experience of listening numbly to the evening news, as images flash past our eyes that no longer shock us because they have become so familiar. Most of the time they barely touch us, and any feelings of unease are numbed again once Coronation Street comes on.

Regardless, the unease remains. It has been variously described as 'malaise', 'alienation' or 'dissatisfaction'. Perhaps our dedicated attempts to avoid such awareness speak not of how little we care, but of how much. The growing spiritual consumerism, now so immersed in commercialism it has become a challenge to sift the authentic from the opportunistic, says much about a pervading sense that something is wrong. Is it possible that somewhere along the line of material progress we have lost something important that we need? In a society that promises to fulfil our whims, it seems we are nevertheless left with a void we struggle to fill.

Both Joanna Macy's Coming Back to Life, and Bill Plotkin's Soulcraft, declare themselves 'guidebooks' in the process of understanding the root of that pain and then taking steps to address it. The approaches they take are different but related. Essential to both is the supposition that the modern Western individual is somehow alienated from her context, and it is this alienation that feeds our personal, social and ecological crises. Plotkin, a depth psychologist, attributes many of his clients "discontents" as "rooted in an unmet longing for wildness, mystery, and a meaningful engagement with the world". He views our alienation as a response to "soul loss", and sees phenomena such as addiction, overwork, environmental degradation and armed conflict as attempts to "bury" our resultant suffering. Macy discusses at length the processes of psychological and social repression which she, like Plotkin, views as avoidance of our despair, of our "pain for the world".

The answer given by both authors is reconnection, but the their emphases are different. Plotkin argues the necessity of an "underworld" journey into the centre: the soul. This journey of initiation into adulthood, he argues, still present in traditional cultures, is missing from the modern Western world. Its story has been told down the ages through mythology. Perhaps one such modern example would be the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, that, considering its overwhelming popularity, must resonate with many people. In fact, Plotkin's own work is immersed in the language of mythos, and draws heavily on archetypes - we encounter characters such as 'The Wanderer' and the 'Loyal Soldier' in its pages.

The purpose of the journey is to recover our own uniqueness, our "soul gifts". Yet for Plotkin this inner journey is accompanied by, and reflected in, an equally important outer journey into natural wilderness. Plotkin sees this reconnection to our natural context - the "larger organism that births and sustains us" -as  supportive of the soul journey. The reader is guided through this inner and outer journey through a series of creative, symbolic exercises and forays into nature. The soul-initiated, mature adults who emerge from this process will help "engender a mature human species" and guide us through "perilous times".

Macy also offers a range of exercises for reconnection. These are group exercises gathered together through the decades of both her own, and others', experience. Macy's ideas are grounded in engaged Buddhist philosophy and living systems theory, and she sees our denial of interconnection with our contexts as preventing us from comprehending the ecological danger we are in. It is only by engaging with our "pain for the world", and transforming it, through the type of group work she proposes, into concern and action for our "common fate", that we can hope to bring about social and ecological change. Echoing Fritjof Capra, Macy claims that future generations will look back on our time as being characterised by a "Great Turning".

Both authors, in the end, see confronting our pain and darkness as the necessary catalyst for transforming it, and ultimately bringing about change. Despite differences in their background and approach, both Macy and Plotkin also view existence as relational and the functional self as the ecological self. To many, this holistic, interconnected view may appear threatening to individuality. Recognising this, Macy is careful to point to the vital ongoing role for the individual. A holistic shift in consciousness, she argues, would require "the uniqueness of each part and its point of view". While systems theory may focus on the emergent properties of interactions between different parts it does not, in so doing, negate the properties of the individual parts, or indeed persons. Plotkin also sees the uniqueness inside us as being "carried as a gift to others", and sees this offering of the true self as "all the world needs".

Are both these books at risk of merely preaching to the converted? The fact is that readers not already sympathetic to the new  (and yet ancient) thinking they are based in may well be unreceptive to them. And they demand a lot: neither Coming Back to Life nor Soulcraft offers an easy path to change, and neither claims to. Both require us to relinquish much of what we know, and the human mind is notoriously resistant to that. Even so, if they are mainly preaching to the converted, they are at least also teaching the converted how to practise what they preach. And perhaps therefore to become the soul-initiated leaders Plotkin envisions, helping to "engender a mature human race" by guiding others.

Bill Plotkin and Thomas Berry
Soulcraft: Crossing into the mysteries of nature and psyche
New World Library 2003