The same things keep happening. And we had to figure out a way to do them differently. doing the same things differently. That's how we grow in the spirals, sacred geometry of the soul.
Intro
Thank you for tuning in to the falling into soul podcast. I'm McCall Erickson, bringing you unpopular and hard truths that strangely soothe the soul. This is Episode 21. doing the same things differently. This is one of my favorite topics because it really helps me to remember and understand the dynamic nature of soul growth, the non-linear reality of soul growth, that we grow more like nature, in ever-deepening, and ever-renewing cycles and seasons and spirals than we do in straight and clear cut lines. We are on the soul spiral continuum. This is why there is no once and for all way to heal our wounds, and wrap things up in a pretty package. Although there truly are milestones and phases we clear and pieces, we click into place on levels that we never have to return to. It's paradoxical, as is true with the heart of almost everything right?
When I was younger, and really beginning to dig into my own inner work in trying to recover from growing up in a typical dysfunctional American family, I had an amazing counselor and mentor. In one of our first times together, I was really frustrated and overwhelmed with the amount of mess and issues we were unearthing in me. I said is this, all we're going to be doing is identifying how fucked up I am? And what she said next, stuck with me. She said, we have to identify what your issues are first. You have to get cozy with your issues and wounds and know them well. Because that's how you know what you'll be working on and with the rest of your life.
Okay, wait, what? The rest of my life? What's the point of doing the inner work if I'll be doing and the rest of my life? That sounded so ridiculous to me at the time. And I was still too young and too hopeful to understand the depths of that truth. I mean, I wondered, What does healing even mean? If the issues and wounds never go away completely? Isn't there such thing as transcendence? What even is transcendence? Is there really no escape from this human drama, and trauma.
I've been grasping with these questions for decades. I wanted to believe promises of spiritual transcendence, of total and miraculous healing, curing even. I wanted to believe there was some sort of control in all of this, I wanted to believe that, as I've mentioned before in this podcast, that I can crack the code to suffering and end it once and for all. This was also the Buddha's quest that sent him on the path of enlightenment, right? He wanted to know, if there was an end to human suffering.
Early on in my journey, I truly felt there was something, something to acquire, someplace to get to. And I wasn't wrong in this. Although I knew and understood on one level that the journey never ends. I truly wanted some things about it to come to an end. Alchemy helped me understand this better. It helped me understand that some phases of the work do come to an end, some facets of soul work and soul missions wrap themselves up at certain levels, and roll into deeper levels for another time. That the fermentation of the Dark Nights happen again, at deeper levels, but different each time, that the spiral nature of growth is like doing the same things again, but differently, that each time around the spiral of growth, I got to bring my new awareness and new tools with me that things themselves might not change outer circumstances might not always change in the way I waned. But if I changed, if something in me changed, then I could do the same things differently. Rather than total transcendence and graduating from suffering once and for all, the real hope, the real transcendence comes in expanding our awareness and growing our alchemical ability and our metabolism enough to be able to suffer better each time, to be able to walk through the dark nights, the valley of the shadow, when we are called with more tools, more awareness, more presence each time to be able to enter life and relationship and face things we couldn't face before, to stay present, where before, our habits of protection that we develop from trauma just made us want to skip out.
The idea of transcendence can mean many different things. But in my experience with alchemy, transcendence is when we grow and expand our awareness beyond a thing, clear the karma we are creating around it, clear the trauma out of the body enough to have an altered relationship with that thing, or that situation, or that person. We know ourselves apart from and beyond it enough that we can have a new relationship with it. Sometimes certain issues never go away, but we relate to them in new ways. That's the hope. That's the work of alchemy. Transcendence means expanding and growing our awareness, beyond the thing, just enough to have an altered relationship with it, which I feel is so perfectly reflected in the lines from TS Eliot, "we shall never cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time." The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
Recently, a listener asked me a really good question. He said, "is the step into the abyss one spectacular no turning back leap? Or can it be incremental?" In my experience, it is both. Incremental no turning back steps into the abyss. Incremental, no turning back steps toward healing and renewal.
It's like the board game monopoly. When you pass go, you collect your $200. But you go in for another round around the board, another round around life. There is finality to some things. There are always some things you pass go on and never have to do again. There is breaking cycles. But when we break a cycle, we step out of the circle, and enter the spiral. That's what it means to break a cycle, it means to get off the merry go round, that keeps going in circles, and step deeper into the spiral, we step out of the circle, break this cycle, and enter the spiral.
So what's the difference between a cycle and a spiral? To me, it's the thread of awareness that you carry through, you are different, you have more awareness and more tools. So you can break the cycle, enter the spiral, even though it can feel very similar sometimes, to me a cycle feels like a soul prison. It feels like bullshit on repeat without a way out, like banging your head against the same old wall and getting nowhere. But the spiral feels like nature and seasons like life and breath, and light, not a way out, but a way into a way into the process a way into the hard thing you are being asked to grow through, a way into where you can be with it and transmuteand experience a different story with it. Like, instead of banging your head against the same wall, over and over again and getting nowhere, you bang your head against the same wall and touch the magic spot that opens the secret door in the wall. Something new arises it's a it's a different story. It's a different engagement.
And this is what I experienced when I went through the higher operations of alchemy, that are outlined as the Great Work in the Emerald Tablet that I outline in the second half of the mountain. I found that once I acquired the Philosopher's Stone, which is to say that enduring alignment with my unbreakable core. My task after doing that was to take that new alignment, that newfound touchstone within and enter the world in a new way. Everything around me seemed to be the same, but I was different, which inevitably altered the relational dynamic with myself and everyone and everything around me.
The great misconception for many novice alchemists or anyone on the path to so called Enlightenment or doing spiritual growth, is it if we do enough work, we'll eventually be free of the pain, free of this world free of 3D life, free of whatever it is we want to be free of, we'll be able to escape it. But this is not how transformation works, there is no new world or new life to swap out the old. Everything new is created from what was. The New World, the new relational dynamics that we hope for, and dream for, the new versions of ourselves exist, not by escaping into a new world. But by entering the current world as is and doing it a new, we become free by realizing what we cannot escape. There's an illuminating line from William Butler Yeats, he says there is another world, but it is in this one. There is another world but it is in this one. When we can find create, live the new world that is within this world. That to me, is soul freedom.
The song I want to share today came shortly after my first dark nights of the soul that happened after I left religion and my family of origin. I had absolutely no framework for living, it had all crashed down, I was so lost and it still kept crashing down for years. Everything I kept trying to live was being pulled out from under me, which is a huge theme of the second half of the mountain journey. There is no resting place. There is no way to root when the ground keeps shifting out from under you. It seems as if there is no end to things falling apart, no end of the karma and the trauma you are trying to clear. And the kicker was, while I was in the middle of this, I couldn't quit. I couldn't stop and close down completely though I wanted to. Every time I thought I was done or wanted so badly to be done, something new would come around and asked me to open my heart again, to be vulnerable again, to take another step on shaky ground.
And I begin to realize that the important thing was my willingness to keep moving on the spiral of my own unfolding and open again, no matter how many times I loved and lost. Sometimes an understandable response to being hurt or disillusioned is, well, I'm just never going to be illusioned again, I'm never going to open again, engage again in what could hurt me. I'm going to hold back. I'm going to protect myself by not having any expectations of anyone at all ever, of life or anything. But the soul and life demands our participation. Once again, our folly, not our wisdom, as Carl Jung says, demands our folly, not our wisdom, not our protection, our participation. The soul would have is open to life again, no matter how many times we've been hurt. The most important thing is this soft and supple spot within where we can enter life and love again, no matter how disillusioned, we have become along the way.
And I'm not talking about opening to abuse or opening to being used, but opening to the places where we are asked to open. And as Brene Brown is always telling us risk, emotional exposure, risk being in the arena again. And as I practice this soft opening again to soul and love and life, I was beginning to realize that more important than holding on to my beliefs was my ability to allow those beliefs and hopes and dreams to be shattered, and to allow a new presence to arise from those ashes. The paradox of alchemy is we shine when we burn, we rise when we fall, and we gain when we lose. We are strongest when we give it all away we have the most when we give it all away.
The Philosopher's Stone, you know, I've always found it's so interesting that it's called the stone because the only reason we become something solid through these processes at all that we have any kind of solid ground from which to move is when we allow ourselves to become totally fluid. The stone is this stone, because it's fluid, because it's always moving and you can't pin it down.
So doing the same things differently asks us to go out on a limb for ourselves, for love for the soul for what matters most, to set aside our beliefs, the stories that no longer fit and to give it to the unknown, to engage again, to risk being hurt again, to risk living in a new story that will one day grow into an old story. And to let that go and do it again. And again, to risk the loss inherent in love and life to be all in an open as much as we can.
The song's called once upon a time again.
Once upon a time
I was a believer
I had songs to sing
And dreams to dream
And a God who would always love me
As long as I did the right things
Once upon a time
I was a lover
I had stars in my eyes
And a moon in my sky
And kisses hello and goodbye
Until there was only goodbye
So don’t tell me I just need to believe in love
For things to work out right
I’m tired of the same old stories and games
I’m giving up that fight
The hardest thing in the world
Is not that we learn to believe
It’s knowing there’s something more
And opening again
Once upon a time
I was a hero
I slayed a dragon one night
After such a long fight
And saved my village from strife
but I still felt the strife
I woke the next morning, didn’t know who I was
After all my good deeds were done
I’d climbed the mountain I’d played the part
All my songs were sung
The hardest part of it all
Is just when we think we’re done
There’s really so much more
In some ways we’ve only begun
So we learn to love
To find out who we are
To take the journey again
In a new way all over again
Once upon a time again
So this is the greatest hope I have found in alchemy and doing the inner work, that when we do, when we really transform something inside of ourselves, we gain the ability to do the same things differently. To face things we couldn't face before. Work through triggers we ran from before. And when we can stay and be present and face things in a new way. We transform those things. When we transform the pain in our own inner landscapes, we carry new threads of awareness, new threads of light, new threads of presence into the same old human stories, sometimes very worn out stories. We can breathe new life into them from the well of light inside ourselves. This is the hope in the magic. Not that the world will change. But the we can change our ability to relate to ourselves into the world. And what happens when we relate differently? Behold, behold, the wonder.
Thank you once again for listening and being with me in this space. I just want you to know, I appreciate so much all of your support, whether it be by monetary donations, letting me know how these episodes are touching you, or sharing the podcast with friends or whatever. It all helps me know you're out there, you're listening, and you care.
Until next time, wherever you are in your current spiral of unfolding, be well in soul.