Hello friends and listeners of the Falling into Soul Podcast. This is McCall, your host and creator of this space. It has been a minute since I’ve been in here hasn’t it?
I’ve spent the last seven months reeling in my energies and focus in order to finish my second book titled Down from the Mountain: On Being Human after Spiritual and Alchemical Initiation and I am thrilled to tell you it is completed and ready for preorder.
For those of you who can't wait until the end, you can go now to the link in the show notes to learn about the book and preorder. Or visit my website www.mccallerickson.com
Just a heads up...Preorders are for US addresses only right now, but rest assured, the book will be available internationally through various platforms once it is released in February, mid February.
So let’s talk about this new book so you can know if it's a thing for you or not.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interesting in two main journeys in life:
1) finding out who you are and
2) being it
Both of these journeys have been far more complicated and soul-baring than I ever could have imagined.
First of all, finding out who you are–the essence of you underneath all the cultural and familial conditioning and programming and learned behaviors and trauma can be a journey that’s layers deep. I once thought that awakening itself meant I was there! But awakenings are usually merely the beginning, a glimpse into the light and depth and truth of who we are. It usually takes a lot more sloughing off of the excess to be able to hold a steady alignment with who we are, at our core, our core essence, which is what I've always been most interested in. How can I hold that steady alignment, as a touchstone, as a way of being?
For those of us on the path of psychospiritual development, getting down to that place where we can hold alignment with our core self usually requires the alchemical procedures of the dark nights of the soul, the dark nights of the spirit and then distillation….which can take time.
THIS is the journey that I talk about in The Second Half of the Mountain–all the alchemy required after first awakening to our true nature in order to live permanently aligned with our true nature. And it’s rather disillusioning to be stripped that bare of ideals, beliefs, paradigms of operation, paradigms of relating, and conditionings to live from the core self, especially when it includes being stripped of our most loving, enlightened, and evolved notions of ourselves and our spiritual purpose. So that is the first part: finding out who you are beyond all ideas of who you ever thought you were. No big deal. haha
But then what happens? What happens after you go through the Second Half of the Mountain alchemy to align with your core self? I’ve been pointing toward this a bit in recent episodes, particularly Ep 35 the Journey after the Journey
What happens after we go through the alchemy required to get to the core self is actually rather delicate. When I found myself in this place, which is to say summiting the second half of my mountain, I was incredibly raw, sore, burned out, and disillusioned to the extent that I had no idea what the purpose of the journey even was. I didn’t want to hear the word JOURNEY or SOUL or PURPOSE ever again. I had truly surrendered to becoming nothing and nobody going nowhere in order to know my truest essence within, which was not marketable, not flashy, or able to be labeled. I had nothing to show for it and life was still happening around me, pressing in on me, asking me to live it, asking me to be more human and vulnerable than I wanted to be.
In short: my spiritual awakening and alchemical initiation did absolutely nothing to save me from my physical human life. It did nothing to save me from this world. It did nothing to save me from myself. It removed every excess thing so I could finally see life for what it was and live it, so I could see myself for who I was and be it.
Coming back to life and becoming even more human after these intense spiritual and alchemical journeys is what Down from the Mountain is all about. Once we know who we are (the essence that can’t be changed through everything that changes), we’re faced with the task of BEING it.
Down from the Mountain begins with setting down the spiritual seeking and trying and proving and just BEING. What do we find when we are just BEING? What happens then? Well, I can tell you what happened for me and what I’ve found so far and that's what I share in the book.
Down from the Mountain Outline/Table of Contents
I'd love to outline it for you now, cover the table of contents and just give you and idea of what's in this book.
Part One: Crossing Over and it’s all about coming to the end of the journey of seeking, the end of trying to find out who you are and why you’re here and realizing you have no definitive answer for it but you have no steam left in you for figuring it out. There is a paradoxical action here of surrendering the search, dissolving the search, giving up trying to find what you feel you can't live without in order to have a chance of deeply living it, deeply knowing it, or rather, becoming it. So there is a lot of surrender here and acceptance of defeat, which is the title of chapter one: accepting defeat. Once we accept defeat, relinquish control, realize we have to move forward without getting what we thought we were looking for, then we have to face the life that is right around us. We have to come back to life, which is chapter two: coming back to life. This is what I call reincarnating into your own life. Because there's no shiny new life waiting for you to enter. There’s your same old life, but something in you is renewed, so you bring that new spark within you, that core essence into the same old life and see what happens. And what happens is usually quite difficult, because it asks us to take steps we could take before. It asks us to address things we may have put on hold so we could go on a healing journey, on our spiritual journeys. It requires relational reckoning, having hard conversations with people in our lives we didn’t have the strength to have before because we have to be true to the essence that has been laid bare inside us. This is chapter three: the step you don’t want to take. It’s all about addressing first things first. Doing the hardest and most important and vital close-in work in our relationships and lives first before moving forward into anything else.
Part Two: Strange New Land I love this Jack Kerouac quote from the Dhama Bums that I use to being this part. “You can’t live in this world, but there’s nowhere else to go." “You can’t live in this world, but there’s nowhere else to go." When I first read that I thought, yes, that is exactly how I feel.
It’s quite a disillusioning thing to go on a spiritual quest to find out who you are and why you’re here, to realize that you can't hang out in the spiritual realms forever, that your spiritual purpose or spiritual nature isn't going to save you from the physical world, that the spiritual and the physical realms are actually indelibly intertwined and you can’t turn your back on one without the other, so how do you live both in a world that feels like it has no place for you, in a world you feel like you don't belong in? PHEW! That is the big question! When you go to great lengths to uncover your true essence and you realize there’s no place for your truest self in this world, but you can’t leave this world either? Then what?? You have to make a place for yourself in this world. There’s a lot of reckoning with actuality and reality and humanity that comes in at the phase. If we have to live in this world, we have to be human. Chapter four is called What the Human Needs. This is where we learn to excavate and ask for what we need as a human being, not just as a lovey dovey spirit who can love and light everyone to death. But what do we need as an actual limited, finite, needful human being in a body subject to time and gravity? What does the human actually need in order to live their spiritual purpose in this world!? This was such a hard and important reckoning for me. It’s all about learning to be vulnerable, ask for what we need, and then being willing to take the answers from life and the universe and our fellow humans in return. It might not be the answers we want. That's the vulnerability in it. But we have to ask for what we need. Learning to receive the answers, learning to receive the gift when and how it arrives, which might not always be according to our preference. Which might not always arrive packaged to our liking. This is important work. So how do we recognize the gift? That’s chapter five: Learning to Recognize and Receive the Gift. Because so much is not how we planned, not how we imagined. So then how do we know how to recognize it? After we start getting good at recognizing what we need, learning to ask for it, and then receiving it when and how it arrives, then we can start building something new, I mean actually building, not just tearing down, and dismantling and distilling for infinity, but actually building something real and lasting. We can begin bringing the dreams that won’t stop dreaming us into form. We might not have been able to manifest everything we wanted out of life, but we can begin to live what actually wants to be lived through us, what wants to be born through us. This is where we start being in conversation and relationship and cocreating with the life that is living through us, this is where we really learn to live and navigate and create in deep partnership with soul, with the soul in us. We know the soul cannot be controlled, but we can work with it, create with it. This is the magic. This is the magic dance and it requires a deep understanding of and surrendering to how soul actually works. This is chapter six: Creating and Manifesting with Soul.
Part Three: Into the Village
And I don't mean village in the old paradigm sense of community, in the sense of community that actually overrode our individuality and made us have to leave to go individuate. I'm talking about very small circles. Very close in communal life. It's different now. It's different now than our idea of community before.
So this starts with Chapter Seven: Going Nowhere Alone. This is where things start getting rich. This is where things start shifting from being so much about the inner alchemy lab, the individual and personal alchemy to also being about alchemy labs with others, creating alchemy with other people, in our relational spaces with people. This is where we learn to relate and create and live with others from our place of alignment with our individuated core self. I did not always know how to do this. For most of my life I felt torn between my need to be alone and my need for companionship because I didn’t know how to stay aligned with myself and work with others at the same time. I couldn't really hang on to my truth, my alignment, my feelings without being overwhelmed by the feelings, story, narrative of others. Thank goodness the journey of alchemy and inner work and individuation helped me know how to do this. Because going nowhere alone, the realization that I was going to go nowhere alone meant I had to start working with others in a new way, since the ways I mostly knew before stemmed from the culturally dominant relational paradigm of codependency, superiority, inequality, and other flavors of intimacy-draining sabotage and fuckery. So what I’m trying to say is I had no idea how much relational disfunction and codependency was hiding in the shadows of my spiritual and mystical light. I had no idea. Until I had nowhere else to hide and I HAD to start needing people again, which showed me how much work I had to do, still had to do in the relational space, and this is what I talk about in Chapter Eight: Working Together. How to create magical alliances with other humans that honors autonomy as well as interconnectedness. How to let go of the need to be right without letting go of my alignment. How to hold the tension of differences in the relational space to discover the magical third. This is big work. Probably the most magical work of the past ten years for me. I do love this part. Which brings me to Chapter Nine: Letting It Be Good. Relationships with other humans are the most magical alchemy labs, full of creative possibilities for growth and healing (and please know I am talking about all forms relationships, not just romantic relationships. Romance hardly enters the picture for me anymore) When we can begin working with others in a new way, doing the same things differently, cleaning up our lingering relational dysfunctions that might have been hidden under the light of our spiritual and mystical gifts, when we can be true to our inner alignment without making ourselves wrong or right, without making the other person wrong our right, when we can hold those paradoxes and bothness, we can begin restoring trust with ourselves and others in ways it has been previously broken. We can begin working together in ways and places where we jumped ship before. We can begin repairing and restoring where there has been rupture. We can engage in this lovely blossoming and fruition which is also a part of the natural processes of the soul. I know I've talked a lot about the darkness and the dismantling and the sloughing off of the excess and the decomposing and the fermentation, but there's also this beautiful life that grows from that, blossoming that comes from that process when we see it through. And when we do see it through, we can return to this natural ease with life, at ease with what life really is, not what we wish it was, at ease with life’s uncertainty and ambiguity and paradox. We can be at ease creating and moving and flowing in the face of the unknown. This is where it can be good, which is the title of chapter 9, the final chapter: Letting It Be Good.
This down from the mountain journey encapsulates a ten year journey for me. I always live a book before I can write it. And no one is ever too happy to hear how long these processes and integrations take, but what else are we alive for? What a gift to be able to ENGAGE in such deep and wild soul healing processes such as this, to have the time and life force to do it. A huge privilege and gift I do not wish to waste.
Also, included in the back of the book is an expanded glossary of alchemical terms and a review of the seven stages of alchemical transformation for reference. I did this so that those who want to read Down from the Mountain without having read The Second Half of the Mountain can do so without feeling lost about the alchemy stuff. While Down from the Mountain undoubtedly is a follow up book to The Second Half of the Mountain, but it also stands alone for those who want to start here and just read this book.
Alright my friends, I’m hoping to be back with some regular episodes here again soon now that the book is finished. I’m really looking forward to going deeper into the alchemy and stories from my Down from the Mountain journey.
Once again, you can preorder the book through the link in the show notes or by visiting McCallErickson.com
When you order paper copies of the book directly from me instead of big stores like Amazon, more of your currency will go directly to me in support of my work. I appreciate it greatly. So just keep that in mind. In understand that it's not always possible, shipping can be cost prohibitive, especially for international readers, I understand, and for that I'm glad Amazon and bigger stores exist. But for those of you who have the means, who want to support me directly, and who can order directly from my website, please consider doing so. Thank you so much.
Until next time….
Preorder Down from the Mountain