Alchemizing Difficult Situations
An alchemist is one who takes everything as it comes, transforming the harmful into helpful, the ordinary into extraordinary, and the painful into beautiful. Not by way of bypass, but by way of engaging in deep and, at times, disruptive processes. Alchemists turn their back on nothing, knowing that every life circumstance, desired or not, is the critical base matter needed for making gold.
Intro
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.
This is Episode 25 Alchemizing Difficult Situations or How To Do Alchemy Without Knowing Much About Alchemy
I mean, alchemy is a huge esoteric topic with weird words, cryptic symbols and images, and various interpretations. It could suck your whole life trying to understand it all. To be honest, I don’t really know that much about alchemy. I am by no means a scholar of alchemy. I only know what I need to know for making magic in my own life, which is to say...transforming difficult and sometimes devastating situations into something more meaningful.
Lately I’ve been feeling it might be helpful to create an episode here giving you a few quick tools to work alchemy without having to get bogged down with all the details about alchemy. Sometimes knowing what alchemical stage you are in can be helpful to provide relief and context, but sometimes trying to figure it out can just be a distraction from doing the actual alchemy itself. You don’t have to know anything about alchemy to make magic in your life.
But what does it mean to DO the alchemy? And what do I mean by making magic?
First of all, when I say “do alchemy” or “work alchemy” what I mean in the simplest terms is to transform something from one state to another. Or transmute something from one state to another. For example, how do we transform grief? Sudden loss? Pain. Disappointment? Anger. Personality traits or behavioral habits that seem to keep getting us into trouble? Relational dynamics that create painful cycles? You get the picture.
Transforming is not the same thing as fixing. Instead of fixing, it’s more like shifting. This is hard to do in a world hyperfocused on quick and sweeping fixes. But alchemy helps us truly transform. Shift. Move something from one state or one form to another. Not necessarily fixing it or putting a bandaid on it or curing it even, but moving breathing walking, walking with it differently, making more room for flow and light.
So, I’ve pared alchemy down to three keys that I think are the most helpful to remember if you want to do this in your life. My aim here is to help you apply alchemy in any situation without needing to know all the technicalities about alchemy.
The three keys:
- Start Where You are + Let It Happen
- Know the essence from the form
- Unite the Opposites
Start Where You Are and Let It Happen
If you never knew anything else about alchemy, this one thing alone is all you’d really need to transform anything.
And yet, it is probably the hardest thing to do and the easiest one to bypass.
In order to make magic, transform something from blah to beautiful or base metal to gold, you have to start where you are.
This does not mean you have to like where you are. It doesn’t mean you have to be happy about where you are. This does not mean you have to accept things as they are. It merely means you have to acknowledge that this is the way things are, and you have to be where you are with it first. Not as an end point, but as a starting point. As the portal in to transformation.
I’m reminded here of what the civil rights activist and writer James Baldwin wrote: “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
If we want any chance at all of transforming something, we have to start with the thing as it is. We have to turn toward it and face it. Not in an attempt to fix it, but first be with it.
And once we do we have to let it happen. Let what’s happening happen. This is hard for most of us. The urge to resist what you don’t want and fight for what you do want and feel you deserve is so deeply ingrained in the western psyche, it feels counterintuitive to allow something to happen, especially when you don’t immediately agree with it, you think it’s evil or you don’t see any good or any point or purpose to it whatsoever.
We are conditioned to think we have more control than we do and that the best thing to do with something we don’t like, something we don’t agree with, something we feel morally, spiritually, or emotionally superior to is to absolutely fight and resist at all costs. If you don’t like it, change it goddammit!
But the principle of alchemy tells us that before we can change it, we have to first allow it. What we resist persists, as the saying goes. This is very true in alchemy. We learn. Oh, humbly humbly we learn that we have power over nothing. We have power over nothing. But by allowing things, taking the time to know them, get curious about them, and relate in a conversational way, we have begun to have power with them. In alchemy there is no power over, only power with. So we meet things as they are. We come to the middle space, the space between.
You cannot transform anything that you do not welcome in. You cannot transform anything that you don’t have a relationship with. Because transformation happens in the relational space.
I came across this Zen Proverb when I was gathering my thoughts for this episode:
“What we cannot hold we cannot process and what we cannot process we cannot transform. And what we cannot transform haunts us.”
Mmm. So much about alchemy is building the muscle to hold things, difficult things, beautiful things. Both can be hard to hold.
So if all you do is develop your ability to hold something, the feeling, the circumstances, the pain, the trauma, the unfathomable, the unacceptable, the unnamble, the unbearable, the unholdable, then your time as an alchemist is well spent. And yes, starting where you are can even mean holding the truth that you do not yet know how to meet or hold the thing. Be as real as you can possibly be about where you are and start there.
Many times I’ve been astounded by how much allowing something shifts it. Many times all a feeling or mood or state will need is acknowledgement and then it begins to shift and do something else on its own.
Like Rilke said. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
No feeling is final. No alchemical phase is final. Although, alchemical phases can linger a lot longer than a feeling or an emotion. Still, we must let them happen and see what happens.
Let it happen and see what happens. This has become a mantra for me in working alchemy. This doesn’t mean let people walk all over or abuse you. This doesn’t mean have no boundaries. That’s not what this means. This means let whatever bigger process, bigger deeper process is happening happen so you will know from the intuitive place what you need to do and when you need to do it. Meeting everything as it is is the great magic trick. When you allow like the great feminine receiver, you have the best seat in the house for learning about what’s truly happening (vs what you think should be happening) and when to make a move, how to work with it. Which brings us to the next key. Key number two.
Know The Essence From The Form
After we allow a thing to exist, then we can start discerning. The most important thing to discern is what alchemists call separating the subtle from the gross or the essence from the form. Or the energy from the form, the spirit from the form.
This is important because alchemy is all about bringing spirit into matter. How can we do that if we can’t sense the difference between energy and matter, energy and form? To the uninitiated, a physical body is just a physical body. But to the initiated and those with eyes to see, the physical body is alive with spirit. Trees are alive with spirit, rocks are alive with spirit! Everything, everybody in the 3d realm is somewhere along the spectrum of being ruled by the constructs and ideas of ego or surrendered to the flow of spirit and soul. If the ego is in the way, less soul and spirit energy are going to be coming through that form. If the ego is in healthy alignment, in service to the soul, more soul and spirit is going to be coming through.
Every alchemical process, whether it’s the fire that burns, the water that drowns, the air that clears, the darkness that grows, or the light that reveals has one main purpose and that is to free the soul and spirit from the tight and constructs of the ego.
What I mean by ego here are
- Conditionings
- Programmings
- Learned behaviors
- Ideas about how things “should be,” plans, goals
- Identities
None of those are inherently bad, but if they are in the way of the soul’s alignment with spirit, then they have to go. Alchemy is constantly separating us from our beloved forms and ideas and plans and ideals to keep the essence of spirit moving freely through different forms.
So if you are in the middle of an intense emotional storm or alchemical process and you’re leaning in and you’re letting it happen, the next thing you can do is observe what is falling away. What “form” or label or ego construct is the alchemy working upon? What is being separated within you? This may be a story you had about yourself, a truth you’ve been telling that no longer feels true, an identity that is falling, a role or a relationship that is shifting. Allow the form to separate from your true essence. Yeah, I know, this is painful. Alchemy can be painful. As the gross form falls away though, the subtleties of soul and spirit begin to speak. And then we bring the subtleties into new forms in their own way and time. It doesn’t work the other way around, you can’t choose the form first and then force the subtle energies to comply and be there. N. It doesn’t work that way. Energy first, then from. Energy first, then form. Which is why so much of the alchemical journey is about shedding forms that do not properly align with our soul and spirit energy.
So we learn to discern subtle from form. You can practice this with everything and everyone you encounter in the physical realm by seeing the form, the name or label and then dropping it to feel the essence of that person or being. And you will begin to be able to tell when people (including ourselves) are or aren’t congruent with their subtle energies or essence.
It can get so distracting how things look, seem, appear on the outside. But when you learn to feel the energy or the subtle in a person, thing, or situation, you see with the eyes of an alchemist
The caveat to this is you can only really do this if you’ve already gotten to a place in your psycho-spiritual development where you know how to drop the mind chatter to hear the subtleties of soul and energy speak. If not, you do have to learn how to do that first.
So often a process or situation can look like one thing, but feels like something else. You have to be able to withstand the stories that your mind is telling you about what is going on to truly understand what is going on. We do this every stage along the way. When we know the difference between essence and form, when we’ve properly separated them, we can better combine them.
Which brings us to the third key.
Uniting Opposites
It’s hardly ever about one thing or another. It is not about essence or form. It’s not about soul over ego. It’s not about light or shadow, feminine or masculine. It’s not about the spiritual or energetic realms being more important than the physical realms of matter. Newly awakened people hyped up on spirit will tell you this world is all an illusion and it’s the world of energy and spirit that’s most real. But to an alchemist, both spirit and physical worlds are real. It’s about both and how they interplay and work together. It’s always about both/and.
I have been known to say that my favorite word in all of the English language is and. Because it’s a bridge that combines ideas, it makes room for more. It’s so inclusive.
Alchemy is a very inclusive business. No life circumstances are too unelightened to work magic with. Nothing is rejected with alchemy. If something is rejected, it will haunt us like the shadow always does. So there is no one thing or the other. It’s not about spirit over matter or matter over spirit. It’s not about ascending being more important than descending. Or the spirit being more important than the body. It’s about both. Sure, some alchemical phases will acquaint us with one more than the other, but the more advanced alchemical processes we get into will acquaint us with both at the same time. Integration.
Every alchemical process and procedure is about preparing the physical vessel to hold more soul and spirit. It’s not about denying the physical vessel in favor of spirit. Your essence traverses the dimensions, but it also lives in your blood and cells. This is what is meant by “as above so below.” The above in this context is not directionally above, it’s the realms of the unseen, they are everywhere, coexisting within matter or the “below.” Somewhat unfortunate words given their connotations, above below. To alchemists, the unseen dimensions are not better than the physical worlds. Magic is made by uniting both. This is why alchemists are so geeky about matter. We want to bring more spirit energy into matter, not escape physical matter.
When you get really good at seeing the essence from the form or the subtle from the gross, you can see that spirit works through all forms, all walks of life, all corners of the earth. A person who cleans toilets for a living can be just as aligned in spirit and soul (maybe even more so sometimes) than someone who teaches yoga or meditation for a living.
This kind of alignment with spirit and form comes by way of uniting opposites. Because if we are insistent on things having to be one way or the other or look a certain way, we will continually be torn in two, torn between what our ego wants and what the soul and spirit is pulling us to, unable to align spirit with any given form. Spirit can come into any form, any life circumstance if the ego is in proper alignment with soul.
And that really only usually happens when we make room for and welcome conflict within instead of insisting on things being one way or the other, being right or wrong, this or that, we practice being in touch with the parts of ourselves that are both, happy and sad at the same time. Okay with this, not okay with this. Joyful and despairing. Clear and confused. Allow conflicting things to be true at the same time. The more we practice holding the tension of opposites within without picking sides, the more room we create for the magical third thing or the third way to be born. This is what alchemists call the stellar path. It’s also called spirit child, what is born. When you hold the tension of opposites within long enough for something new to be born, this third magical way is created. And it is pure magic because it is done by letting go of one way or the other, right or wrong, this or that, black or what, but instead holding impossible, impossible contradictions side by side, opening the heart wide enough to hold these impossible contradiction, surrendering control of the outcome, and then learning to recognize and receive what is born from holding the tension of those opposites, learning to recognize and receive the magic however and in whatever form it comes. This is the goal and aim of alchemy.
I hope it helps you in some way to remember these three keys: Start where you are and let it happen, know the essence from the form, and unite the opposites. And remember, a magical life does not have to look a certain way. A magical life is not the absence of pain, disappointment, darkness, and heartache. It’s living all of that so fully it becomes your beauty.
Thank you so much for spending your time with me here today. If you know someone who values keeping it real on the spiritual path, please consider sharing this podcast with them. As always, I wish you well as you alchemize your unique life situations into your unique beauty.
www.McCallErickson.com/give-back