Allow, allow, allow. Everything, every being, every process has its own wisdom and magic. I am learning to not interfere, to let it be, let it work its magic. I honestly think this is love: space to be. Love is when you let it be. Let it be, allow, receive.
Thank you for tuning into the Falling Into Soul Podcast. I’m your host McCall Erickson. It’s an honor to be in this space with you exploring the deeper, more confusing alchemical processes that awaken and keep the soul well in this ever-changing and challenging world. To me, nothing has ever been more important than knowing what my soul alignment and my soul call is in any situation, with anyone, at any time. And that is precisely what the work of inner alchemy has given me--the tools and ability to cut through the noise, the conditioning and programming, the cultural and familial pressure and expectations so I can know the sheer call of my soul no matter how intense or chaotic things are around or inside of me. And my hope is that there’s something in my sharing and perspective that guides and supports you in knowing and living the call of your soul.
If you’d like to show your appreciation for me and my work, please visit mccallerickson.com and visit the give back tab for ways to do so. Thank you to all who’ve supported and continue to support. It makes this work more sustainable for me and boosts my spirits tremendously. You can find links to my website and to donate in the show notes.
This is episode 24, Space To Be
Looking back on the path of alchemy that brought me into soul, I can see clearly a main ingredient we are missing in this world that is vital for the unveiling of the soul, and that is space. Space to be. Space to be who we are without anyone, including ourselves telling us who we are. Western and colonized cultures do not just automatically give you space to be and discover who you are, to know the unique call and response of your own soul and body. It’s the opposite. Who you are and what you should value and what you should be doing with your body and how hard you should work for it is already decided for you and you better fall in line or else. Make no mistake that this programming and pressure has carried over to the spiritual culture too. Ugh. It’s not a given. Space to hear and heed the call of your soul has to be carved out and made.
But it’s not easy to make or give space, to ourselves, to others. Why is that? Let’s explore What keeps us from making space to be who we are. Why it’s so hard to actually be who we are. And what can come from the space and energy of being, not seeking, not trying, not doing one more thing to work on ourselves, but really just BEING.
In the song I want to share today, I wrote a line that altered my path. It’s interesting how this happens with me. Many times I’ve written a line that has haunted me, like a prophecy that I spend many years afterward living into. I don’t always know the full weight of the words until years after my soul has held me to living them.
One of the most important lines I’ve written that changed my alchemical path was this: I just need some space to be who I am.
I wrote this song during a pivotal time. It came on the heels of some years of heightened activity when I had my first big creative, kundalini awakening and expansion, which I associate with the lesser stone of alchemy and the alchemical phase of conjunction (you can read more about that in my book The Second Half of the Mountain). During this stage, I had been going through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I’d tapped into a deep creative well and songs and music just started coming through me. It lit a fire of purpose in me that I had never felt before. I was sure that music was my gift to the world, it was what helped me climb out of my own shit to live a better life and I was gonna share it with the world! it was my purpose, my ticket out of having to work a meaningless 9-5 job, my ticket out of slaving away for capitalism and corporate America, my ticket out of having to live a boring mundane existence. My ticket to freedom.
So I used that ticket and took the ride. I went all in. I opened a music studio, taught music lessons, and started working as a performing songwriter. My ego loved being a performer. But it wasn’t just about my ego, it was the best heartfelt, soulful living I knew how to do at the time. I created a stage persona that I felt good about, bringing forth the sexy, cool, funny, wise, attractive parts of me. I brought them all out on stage. And I got a lot of attention for it. It felt good. I was being me and getting paid for it. Or at least I thought I was being me. And I was to some extent. I was being the parts of me that I was comfortable with. The me that got me the love and attention and approval that I wanted and needed at the time. The me that was less trouble, less annoying, and less out there and weird than I was ready to be. It was me, it was genuine, but it just wasn’t all of me.
I did that for a few years. I rode it to its bitter end. One day, I was standing on stage performing in a venue I’d worked really hard to get booked at, a venue that was revered by me and my peers. If you performed there, you’d all but made it in the local music scene. But I remember standing there singing my heart out, being my cool musician self and thinking “I might as well be invisible to all of these people.” And it was the worst feeling in the world. I’d created a whole identity around being transparent and real on stage and yet, I wasn’t being true to some bigger part of myself. Something deeper and unknown and other in me was screaming out still! It was one of the most painful moments of my life. I realized that in an attempt to be my most successfully creative, soulful self, I had actually failed some deeper, more expansive and wild parts of myself. After the show that night, I went backstage, hugged my partner at the time and said “I think this is my last show. I’m not going to do this anymore. I can’t.” Something had shifted inside me and I knew there was no going back. The pain was too great.
This was a falling into soul moment. Falling from the smaller version of my performing songwriter dreams of myself into my deep soul self and what it was pulling me into.
Not long after that, I wrote this song. As I was putting this episode together, I didn’t feel pulled to re-record this song in my now energy and voice. So here’s the version I recorded in a friend’s studio in 2010 not long after I wrote the song.
A BETTER ME
My heart has no words
My eyes have no tears left
My mind it done gone crazy
Went off and married my fears
Now I’m standing here with nothing let to tell ya
I’m standing here with nothing to prove
I got nothing to prove
I tried so hard
To make you believe in me
I didn’t know it then
But the believin’s up to me
I’m standing here with a fire in my belly
I’m standing here with a smile down to my toes
I’m brave when I have nothing to lose
I’m so beautiful when I make no excuse
So I’ll move to the edge and I’ll take that great leap
It’s doesn’t matter if I fall
It’s time to be a better me
Letting go
Has not be easy
But I don’t need you loving me
For who you think I should be
I’m standin here at the end of who I once was
Not sure yet of who I will become
I’m brave when I have nothing to lose
I’m so beautiful when I make no excuse
So I’ll move to the edge and I’ll take that great leap
It’s doesn’t matter if I fall
It’s time to be a better me
I’m not looking for easy answers
And I don’t need you to hold my hand
I just need some space
To be who I am
I’m brave when I have nothing to lose
I’m so beautiful when I make no excuse
So I’ll move to the edge and I’ll take that great leap
It’s doesn’t matter if I fall
Leaps and falls make me
A better me
I often call this The Song That Started It All because it ended my stint as a performing songwriter and set me into the final climb of the The Second Half of the Mountain where I had to go through the excruciating dark nights of the spirit (even though I’d already been through the dark nights of the soul, which is important to note) and the lift drop crash of distillation to distill myself down to essence and to then be that essence. This took years. It was a brutal, isolating, and maddening climb.
I pretty much disappeared overnight from the music scene that I was an integral part of. And I had no idea how to explain it to anyone. Since I’d lost my performing income, I had to go back to waiting tables to pay my bills. Waiting tables at a popular local restaurant is not the place you want to be if you’re trying to hide out when your life is falling apart. I was constantly running into people who recognized me from the music scene, from my performing days and asking me why I wasn’t performing anymore, what my deal was, why would I quit something I was so good at, something that was my calling in life? Why was I waiting tables when I had so many other talents? I loathed these questions and often made up absurd and evasive answers to them because the real answer was unsayable and unknowable even to me.
Thank god for this terrible time. It was the beginning of my deeper soul initiation. It was humbling. It was my gateway through utter hell to utter freedom.
Through this time, I kept writing songs, but I didn’t share them with the world. They weren’t meant to be shared at the time. They were meant to teach me how to do something sacred just for me. When they served enough of that purpose, I was guided to start this podcast and share those songs here with you.
What I’ve realized in revisiting these songs is that I wrote them for myself to live into. They didn’t come to stroke my ego, to give me a job or income or recognition that validated my existence or anything like that, but for soul healing and clues, tiny huge prophecies for me to discover.
“I just need some space, to be who I am” is one of those prophecies. It sounds so simple and obvious. Lyrically speaking, those words are nothing special, but it’s the energy and the weight and the meaning they carry. Looking back I realize how long it took me to actualize those words. To apply them to myself.
It has been over ten years since I walked off the stage and said I wasn’t going to perform anymore. Over a decade of taking and making space to BE, to allow, discover, and receive who I am. I can tell you this: it’s not who I would have guessed myself to be, and yet somehow in every moment of allowing myself to be, what arises makes perfect sense, what arises finds flow, transmutes my lead into gold and makes more love and beauty in the world. I don’t exactly know how that magic works, but it does.
In preparing this episode, I’ve been contemplating and inquiring: What does it mean to be? To really just be authentically who you are at any given moment and allow those we love to do the same? And how can we possibly be the real parts of who we are when most of us carry trauma around being who we are? For many reasons, we’ve built habitual protections around being who we are. Mostly for the sake of survival.
Having worked with many people on the path of alchemy and soul, I have noticed that what many of us are most scared of is...ourselves. Being who we are gets us in trouble. Being who we are causes problems, hurts and disappoints people we love, takes us away from who and what we love. You name it, being who we are complicates things and brings pain, in some life times, it has gotten us killed. I mean, we aren’t just self-avoidant for no reason at all. It’s because of this underlying trauma surrounding our deep sense of self. And that trauma has to be faced, addressed, and cleared to a certain extent in order to start Being ourselves, to live the unlabel-able energy of aliveness that pulses through the root of our being in real time.
In The Second Half of the Mountain, I outline the alchemical journey of coming face to face with ourselves. And I say there’s nothing you can’t face once you face yourself. Coming into alignment with who we are is the hardest thing. Like I’ve said many times before, it requires confronting, healing, releasing trauma and learned behaviors in order to do so. And we continue to do that at deeper levels many times in our lives.
Healing Trauma is a hot topic these days. There’s no lack of resources out there if you start looking around. It seems like every other awakened person is a trauma-informed therapist or coach. I take this as a sign that the collective consciousness is rising enough to know that resolving the trauma locked in our bodies is the way forward. The way forward to freedom. To intimacy. To the soul’s creative ability to thrive through any challenge, to weave light through chaos and demise. A clear connection to the soul’s essential and innate wisdom is critical to making it through dire times.
But we must remember that clearing the trauma response from the body, clearing the programming and conditioning and learned behaviors in order to access the soul’s innate wisdom, first brings us to the gates of surrender, the gates of the unknown--an invitation to first just be.
This step cannot be skipped. But most of us will try to. The sacred magic, creative abilities, connections, intimacies we yearn for come from first simply being, from simply living, from being nobody and nothing so we can be anything we are at any given time in that state of surrender. When we have all the trying and reaching and guessing and the urge to control the narrative of our lives knocked out of us and we can just be, live each moment, not have to prove anything, truly just BE in the breath, then we release the innate wisdom of the soul as it is, in direct relationship with life. Then we are who we came here to be. It’s unsayable. But not unfeelable. And the more difficult task is not to say it, but to feel and live it.
I have come to know that this is one of the greatest acts of love… space to be. To allow ourselves to be. And through that surrender, discover the wordless things and energies we are.
In the being space we don’t impose ideas of ourselves on ourselves. We don’t get to choose who we are, we get to be it, receive it, and then work with it. Create with it. Dance with it. LOVE with it.
The feminine state of surrender and allowing and being doesn’t mean doing nothing for the rest of our lives. It’s the state from which our truest direction and action can arise and unfold. It’s the truest starting place.
It’s hard work getting there sometimes, and then taking another turn on the spiral and getting there again, but I wish everyone this profound experience of love and freedom. It is the soul’s birthright.
To simply be in any way shape or form that we are is the most profound experience of love. To really just be as we are, to build the strength and ability to do this for ourselves and others heals inner poverty in our world of outer excess.
Love is space to be. Love is space to be.
Thank you for taking the time to listen and feel in this space with me. If you know someone who values keeping it real on the spiritual path, consider sharing this podcast with them. Until next time, be well in soul.