You can follow the protocol and do all the right steps, and it can still not work for you. Because you can’t predetermine or outline the wild, unpredictable factor of the soul. You feel, discover, and live the truth of it every step you go.
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Intro:
You're listening to Falling Into Soul. I'm your host McCall Erickson. As a lifelong student, writer, and guide of inner healing and transformation, I bring forth context for the deeper, more nuanced and confusing processes of soul awakening that aren't always reflected for us in mainstream culture.
Having the right context for the processes you're going through that the world gives you no context for can help you feel less crazy, less alone, and more able to work with them as they're happening.
It's an honor to be in this space with you, sharing my experience, my strength, my perspective, as well as songs I've written along the way.
All music in this podcast is written and recorded by me.
Thank you for tuning in. This is Episode 15
I want to talk about what I think is one of THE BIGGEST missing piece to most modalities of healing. The biggest missing piece in the whole culture of inner healing, of bringing your dreams to life and creating a life that works for you.
There’s never been a lack of methods, a lack of way-showing, seven steps to this or that in the self-help industry. We are flooded with that, with ways to do this, heal this or that. But what we don’t hear is what to do when the proven method doesn’t work for you.
And that is precisely what I’ve always been obsessed with my whole life.
- Why do certain healing protocols and methods work for some people and not others? Why do you set goals sometimes with the best of intentions and then have no motivation to follow through with them? Or have unforeseen, uncontrollable circumstances get in the way of them?
- Why does one person’s life work and life purpose lead them to having a million followers on social media while another person puts their whole heart into it and gets no response at all? Why do the steps to so-called success work for some people and not others?
- How can certain people who eat vegetables and run marathons die of heart attacks in their 40s when other people who eat meat, smoke cigarettes, have so-called "unhealthy" habits but live into their 90s? What is it that keeps some people alive no matter how much they brush the brink of death and what takes others away so soon?
- What is this unpredictable mysterious factor that we can’t control? Is it the soul? Is it the will of the soul?
If the soul is the part of us that merges with the mystery, that is in direct conversation with the mystery, then it seems the will of the soul would have just as much to do with the way things do or don’t go for us in life as our conscious intent and will does. If not more so.
Unfortunately, most of us have little to no understanding of how the will of the soul works in a culture that teaches us to be mini controllers of everything, that teaches us we can do anything as long as we put our minds to it, our will to it.
Soul is not about what you can take charge of and control. It’s about what you can surrender to, allow, and receive in flow.
Willpower Is Not Enough
I have a strong memory of being 14 and finding a book on tape in my stepdad’s office called Willpower Is Not Enough. I don’t remember all the details of the book, but I do remember sneaking into his office when we was gone and listening to the tapes and feeling so validated that in a society that tells us all we have to do is decide what we want and go be it, go do it, go achieve it, there’s actually more to it than that.
I felt validated that there were other energies at play in me. That I couldn’t stop certain behaviors or make certain things happen in my life just based on conscious intent and willpower. Listening to those tapes validated this energy in me that I now call the soul but at the time, I didn’t have words or context for this deeper driving force of will that seemed to take over my life. It pulled me from within. No matter what I consciously wanted, how badly I wanted it, or how much I was willing to work for it, it seemed like there was something other driving me.
Listening to that book gave me enough to hang on to, to know I was on to something, that there was more to making change than conscious intent and willpower
Trendy Spirituality Letting Me Down
Further down the road in college, when my consciousness expanded and took me out of religion as the answer for everything, I entered the spiritual arena like many of us do. "spiritual not religious" right? But spirituality to me wasn’t much different from religion in that it offered so many answers, so many steps to this or that way of healing, but cut out the mystery.
The Missing Piece from the Law of Attraction
I remember watching The Secret which is about LOA and all that and thinking, something is missing here. I see what they are saying, and things CAN manifest in miraculous ways, but not always. Why not always? Why can’t we just make up our conscious minds to do something and have it be done every time?
It just didn’t sit right with me. Something was hugely missing from the picture. I found myself saying "YES BUT," a lot to trendy spirituality and the make-your-dreams-come-true culture. "Yes BUT..." Like life was more of a complex puzzle and I was being sold one piece of the puzzle as the answer to the whole puzzle. But my soul was screaming I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR EASY ANSWERS. It seems to be about so much more than easy answers.
I was drawn in by the inexplicable, the element of the unpredictable. Things religion, science, and trendy spirituality weren’t readily explaining to me about my journey and processes that were happening.
I searched and searched for some kind of context for living with this factor of the unpredictable, the uncontrollable. Anyone who would talk about it, I would eat it right up. I searched and followed the pull of my own soul, which is to say I followed my own life mess, my own crazy, my own madness until I found Alchemy.
Alchemy gave me so much context for the processes of the soul. This helped fill in a lot of gaps for me. It gave me context for what I’d always felt--that I am not just my conscious mind, my conscious will, my willpower, but some unconscious deeper unknown will and force of nature and magic. It gave me context to understand why my life wasn’t working in ways I thought it should, in ways I was taught it should, in ways that other people’s lives were working.
Understanding that there was this inexplicable unpredictable force in me, which I call the soul, changed everything for me. I began to understand that it would always be there. The factor that I can’t control will always be there.
I call this force the Soul. It’s also called the daimon. And it can be called many things in different traditions. You can call it the mystery if you want. It’s the unconscious part of us. It's the part of us in direct contact with the mystery, that brings us intel from the mystery. We will never fully know it with our conscious minds. We know it by bringing our consciousness to it with every breath, every step. There is no way to know it all at once. There is no way to outsmart or outgrow the mystery. You can’t outgrow the mystery, you can’t outgrow your soul.
Isn't there just something so comforting in that? Terrifying at times, but also comforting.
So this idea that soul is the part of us that is merged with the mystery, that is in direct contact with the mystery, that brings us intel from the mystery, that we can't know it with our conscious minds all that time...this is why I say soul is the caveat to everything.
This is why I say that Soul is the Caveat to Everything.
Yes, you can manifest amazing things, heal miraculously, do what you love, live your dreams, set goals and achieve certain things, but only in ways the will of the soul is aligned with to carry out.
And sometimes we don’t know what the will of the soul is until everything not it, everything we thought was it falls away.
This is what we come to know on the path of soul awakening: We come to know that we can’t make anything happen that doesn’t also want to happen through us. We can’t make anything happen that doesn’t also want to happen through us.
This doesn’t make us victims of soul. It makes us partners with it, partners with a deeper story line, a deeper mystery, discovering the deeper dance with every step as life unfolds.
This is why the way of soul is not so much about finding and doing what’s considered right and true or finding something that is guaranteed to heal you or help you do a certain thing in a certain way. It's about finding and doing what actually works for you. And I don’t mean doing what works for you to hell with the rest of the world, or at the expense of the rest of the world. I mean doing what works to bring you into alignment with “what is.” Into alignment with life as it's happening. When we are aligned and present with what is, we are aligned with the soul, which brings a fresh genius and aliveness to your relationship with your environment, people around you, and the larger world.
This is what soul awakening is: it’s awakening to a relationship with the mystery, relationship to life as it’s actually happening. Life is a manifestation of the mystery. So when we're in relationship with our soul, we're in with mystery, we're in relationship with a deeper intelligence than we consciously know or understand. A deeper intelligence and design than we can immediately know or understand.
This is why it feels like there is so little control in soul living. It really strips us of that control. And brings us into surrender.
In surrender we are continually giving up what we think should be happening for what is actually happening. In surrender we are continually giving up what we think should be happening for what is actually happening.
This is incredibly hard on the ego. And the alchemical phases and procedures serve to get the ego out of the center of gravity so it isn’t running the show but being in service to the soul.
Blessed is the ego that has been burned, drowned, thwarted, bashed out of the way to be in service to the soul. In service to the mystery.
And this is why I've been fascinated with alchemy so much, is that it outlines these processes, the processes we go through to strip the ego from this magical alignment of soul and spirit and soul within us. Alchemy serves to get us into core alignment with ourselves and life, core alignment with ourselves and the mystery.
Once we're in that core alignment, alchemy serves to keep us aligned. If we reach to make something happen that the will of the soul is not aligned with to carry out, we can trust that we will most likely visit the lower vertical realms for healing and adjusting, recalibrating and adjusting, realigning.
I talk more about the lower vertical in TSHOTM and also episode 2.
So we're constantly going through this alchemy to keep us in alignment with our core, in alignment with our soul and spirit, in alignment with life as it's actually happening. And once again, the spirit and soul represent the opposing energies within us. The spirit brings us inspiration but the soul brings us the will, the drive to carry that out. That's why these two have to be in alignment and agreement for anything to be brought into form. We have to have the inspiration of spirit and the will and the drive of soul, which we can't control only surrender to, in order for inspiration to be brought into matter, into form. And you will know if it doesn’t work because you won’t be able to manifest this magical alignment no matter how hard you try.
The alchemical processes and procedures prepare us to live in this magical alignment.t This type of surrender is another reason I say we don’t always get to be what we want to be. We get to be who we are. We don’t always get to create what we want. We get to create what wants to be created through us. And we do better when we can tune into and bring forth the precious, stalwart part of us wants that too. When we can want what wants us, that is a magical alignment.
I know this is the hard truth, but also the point of freedom. Our freedom comes when we take our deepest dreams, highest desires, truest inspirations and offer them to the mystery. Offer them to what we can’t yet see or know about the bigger picture of things. This is how we honor and live the soul.
The good news about all of this, about going through the alchemy, about enduring the ego bashings that bring us into this alignment is that when we are in this alignment, we can bring amazing things into form, when the inspiration of spirit and the will of the soul are aligned and the ego has been alchemized enough to allow that to happen and bring those two into form in matter, in physical matter, in human life, right there, that is the magic, the magical process, the magical happening.
To all on this path of discovering, uncovering, recovering…the wild mysterious parts of you, deep bows. It takes guts to live in this type of surrender, to go through this ype of alchemy. It’s hard core. It goes against the grain of cultural conditioning for most of us.
Take heart and know that if things are not going the way you think they should or wish they would, this is the soul speaking, this is the mystery inviting you into a deeper conversation. A richer, fuller conversation with your true nature and life itself, the mystery of life moving through you..
When we surrender control, we enter the mystery, we enter the soul.
Outro:
Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. It means so much to know you’re out there, you’re listening, and you care. I’m deeply touched and honored that this is finding a place in so many of your hearts. You can find more ways to support the podcast at mccallerickson.com and also by leaving a rating and review on apple podcasts.
Until next time, be well in mystery and soul.