Intro
"There is a secret medicine given only to those who heard so hard. They can't hope the hoppers would feel slighted. If they knew. "
That's from the essential Rumi by Coleman Barks.
And you're listening to falling into soul. I'm your host, McCall Erickson. Hey, thank you for pushing play and spending your time here with me today. It's an honor to be exploring alchemy and sharing soul space with you. If you value keeping it real on the spiritual path, you are in the right place. Before I begin, I just want to remind everybody that full transcripts for the episodes can be found through the link in the show notes.
This is episode 28--Distillation and the Secret Medicine.
When I first started teaching alchemy online in 2013, I named our class space the secret medicine. After the Rumi quote I just shared, "there is a secret medicine given only to those who heard so hard, they can't hope the hoppers would feel slighted if they knew." I named our class The Secret Medicine because nothing has ever been quite so intriguing to me as this point of paradox, that the most hopeful position is when we give up false and superficial hopes. As alchemists, we so often find ourselves at this crucial precipice where, where we are asked to give it up to find it, stop trying to fix it, in order to heal it, relinquish practices, techniques, and the nonstop doing to feel the feeling, to sit in the not knowing so the deeper knowing can arise. I've lived at this point of paradox so much that I know now it's where I get what I really need. It's where I'm most poised to receive the medicine that can't be sold, or bought, or said or named.
When I first read that Rumi verse, I was deep in my second half of the mountain journey, so focused on trying to get to the core of my soul and live from that place. And those words really hit me because nothing I was trying was really working. All of the protocol about how to live a soulful life, and find your purpose and Live Your Passion and all that. I was trying to do that. But kept being led into more heartache, more loss, more dark nights and more nothingness. I was burning through everything that came my way. So much so that I thought there truly was nothing for me. There was nothing to save me. Which, if you've listened to this podcast, you know, that's a huge theme of falling into Soul.
But when I read those Rumi words, I felt the most amount of hope and relief I felt in a long time. It rang with the kind of truth that pings your entire being from the soul side out, you know, the kind. I was so sick of answers and methods, and however many steps to this or that. I was really sick of people throwing all sorts of great advice my way, another workshop, another book of truth that contradicts the last. If only I could get my shit together and be more enlightened. What I didn't realize is that in order to get to the core of your soul and live from it, you actually have to lose your shit. Let it fall so terribly apart. You must also become endarkened. I think that's a Jeff Brown coinage by the way, endarkenment.
But those Romi words, let me know that the medicine I needed was a medicine that didn't require my adherence to any protocol or belief system. It was medicine that could not be said sold, bought, or transferred to me via mentor or coach, or another training or class. I actually had so little hope in those kinds of things anymore. I was vying for the sacred medicine that comes from being so sore you cannot hope for anything in particular anymore. Something felt so comforting about knowing it was actually okay not to have hope, that something beyond hope could find me in the weird, far out place I was in, that maybe the medicine actually still could find its way to me, even if I did everything wrong. It was the medicine beyond ideas of right and wrong that I was after.
I was in the alchemical phase of distillation, which is what I want to talk about today because I think distillation is so important. And so under-talked about in the spiritual mainstream.
So just to re-frame, the second half of the mountain journey is what I call the alchemical processes that happen after initial spiritual awakening. It is a journey that encompasses the dark nights of the soul, and the dark nights of the Spirit. And if those things weren't bad enough already, it also includes the dreadful distillation. In recent years, I've been noticing there's been a lot more discourse and acceptance of the dark nights, the dark nights of the soul, the darkness being talked about in spiritual culture, which I'm truly so delighted to see. But once you become acquainted with the darkness, the descent into the underworld, there is still more alchemy that happens in order to be fully initiated into your own soul and form the Philosopher's Stone within. Namely, the dark nights of the Spirit and distillation.
Okay, I know I'm using a lot of alchemy words here, if you have a copy of the second half of the mountain, in the back, there's a glossary, where you can always quick reference the words I'm using. If not, you can go to my website mccallerickson.com/glossary and read those words there.
So even though we are hearing more about the Dark Knights that are goddess, the dark, feminine and the underworld and all that, I still don't hear a lot about distillation. But I do see many people in it. If I look at the edges, I can always find the people in distillation. And distillation is when we merge the dark and the light and every opposite in our hearts, through subjecting ourselves to very intense and rapid Lift, drop, crash cycles.
I mean, on one hand, you get the spiritual people who tell you the work is all about ascension, bringing the light into your being, becoming more and more light. And on the other hand, you get the people who are hot and heavy with the darkness. It's all about the underworld, it's all about descending into the depths. Well, in alchemical distillation, it's about both. You get to be and do both. You are taken beyond being a representative of the dark or the light, and eventually become a representative for all of it. Life in all of its manifestations. Part of the reason we don't have any context for distillation yet could be that we are only beginning to move there collectively. Or part of that could be because once you hit distillation, you are way off the map. And even if you tried to talk about it, there might not be anyone there to hear you. I don't know. We'll see in the coming years if the spiritual mainstream starts talking about it more, I hope so. Time will tell.
But for now, let me do my best to give you an understanding of how horrible and how wonderful the phase of distillation is. I've talked about it in other episodes too. And most of the songs I've shared in this podcast came from my distillation time. But I felt distillation deserved its own spotlight episode. And of course, if you don't resonate with this right now, move on. You may or may not find yourself here. But most of us on the spiritual path, if we're called to go all the way to the core of our being, we will find ourselves going through distillation at some point. This is a massive alchemical undertaking, which can sometimes go on for years. I don't want to put any time frame on it. But I also don't want to pretend that it's quick and easy. And although I've observed that we go through this in a big way, in the overarching transformation of our lives, and we usually only do it once in that big way to form the Philosopher's Stone within, you know, you can also go through distillation in many other areas and facets of your life to relationships, creative projects, anything that needs to be distilled down to essence. Distilling ourselves prepares us for knowing how to distill many other things in life after that. Once we've distilled ourselves, we do have the ability to quickly distill so many other things down to essence, to see quickly and clearly to the true nature of things. But in my personal opinion, distilling ourselves down to essence and living from that essential place is the hardest.
So just the same way that alcoholic spirits are distilled by heating an evaporating liquid and then collecting the condensation from that liquid, our insides go through a similar process through alchemical distillation. Distillation is all about purification. It's a process that heats you up so you can evaporate and then condense, taking those condensed parts, mixing them back in with the whole of you, with your own condensed parts, and heating them up again, repeat, repeat, repeat until you become pure essence. It's very rough on the ego, a very excruciating process for a human to endure. Because our ego makes up so much of our humaneness. And it's basically just getting bashed out of the way over and over while we distill down to barely recognizable essence.
So yeah, it's a rough, but important process if you want to live your true essence, or free your essence from any form. So I'm going to talk about the signs of distillation, and also the outcomes of it. You may be distilling if you relate to some of this. And the signs of distillation are also why it's so hard.
Signs of Alchemical Distillation
- One big sign is you are in a holding pattern, unable to get any traction or footing. You keep having false starts, the rug keeps getting pulled out from under you.
- Another sign is intense death and rebirth cycles in quick succession. You might feel like you're constantly starting and stopping, creating and destroying, continually creating and destroying, but not really getting anywhere. But also kind of maybe you are getting somewhere.
- You keep experiencing your highest highs and lowest lows, and you find yourself surrendering deeper each time. These highs and lows indicate travel on the internal vertical axis, which I also have a whole chapter about in the second half of the mountain. The lows, you go to have you feeling like there is absolutely no point to anything. Like you go so low each time you feel like you are less relevant, like everything matters so little, like there is absolutely no point. I mean, it's more and more despairing each time but then you rise up to see clearly and you keep experiencing higher highs and clear clarity. So you keep going up and down, repeating that cycle up and down highest highs, lower lows, higher highs, lower lows. Oh my goodness, when does that stop? The whole time you're being stripped of purposes that used to define you, especially spiritual and creative purposes.
- The whole time you're getting weirder and rarer. And feeling like you fit in nowhere, like there truly is not a place for you.
- You're suspended between the worlds. You don't feel like you wholly belong to the world of spirit, or the world of matter. Like which world is going to eventually claim you? You can feel like an edge walking ghost through this time. No matter what you do. No matter how high you go or how low you go, nothing seems to save you after subjecting yourself to this process over and over.
And just remember, hey, it happens if it happens. It doesn't if it doesn't. You're either gonna distill or you're not. I mean, we don't necessarily make this happen. It is an alchemical process that naturally happens as a result of our evolution. But once you're in that process for a while, the outcomes are extraordinary. They are extraordinary.
Outcomes of Distillation
- Birthing, a new incarnation that encompasses all of you. I mean, you are birthing a new incarnation that can live in both worlds at once, an incarnation that encompasses duality and non duality, an incarnation that encompasses the seen and the unseen essence and form.
- Everything opposite unites within you--soul and spirit, dark and light, the masculine and feminine energies, all opposing energies unite within you permanently, permanently. That changes everything.
- This permanent congealing, coagulation is what it's called alchemically the formation of the Philosopher's Stone within, it means you get to live and create from that unbreakable core that is uniquely yours, the philosopher's stone.
- It gives you the ability to face and transmute things you couldn't previously face. I don't know that could be a good or a bad thing, maybe both. Because we find ourselves not being able to escape things maybe we were able to set aside before.
- Another amazing outcome of distillation is peace and well being bonding to the personality, and it remains so even when you experience great disturbance or loss or chaos. I mean, it's life, we're going to experience those things. This formation of the philosopher's stone and coagulation is not to keep us safe from life. It's not to keep us immune from life. It's to give us a greater ability to face it. But when we do form that Philosopher's Stone, there is a really strange and abiding sense of peace that continues no matter how unpeaceful or how unwell you feel, you live that strange paradox.
- One of my favorite outcomes of distillation is that your worth depends on nothing but your existence. To me, as someone who always felt like my worth depended on what I produced, or what I could do for others, or how I served the world, finding out that my worth depended on nothing but my existence, and life owed me nothing, and I was just receiving the gift of breath and aliveness gave me the greatest sense of freedom
- Another outcome of distillation is inability to abandon yourself, in ability to abandon yourself, all the ways we abandon ourselves before, yikes, it kind of doesn't work anymore. You're stuck with yourself, you're your number one advocate, you find ways that you did abandon yourself before and you find that you can't do it anymore. This alters the dynamics in so many relationships in an irrevocable way.
- Another great outcome of distillation is crystallized focus, alignment, and intent. As I'm conveying all these outcomes, I'm struck with the reality of how all of these are a double edged sword. They're so good, and so hard, so good, and so challenging. Crystallized focus intent. And alignment is kind of like the inability to abandon yourself. Like there's something so focused about your purpose and your, your alignment, and where you should be focusing, that you can't get out of alignment anymore. If you take a step to the left, your purpose and your alignment is gonna follow you, like nothing is separate anymore. You can't get away from yourself, you can't get away from that permanent unification of soul and spirit within. It's very strange and very relieving. This is living essentially, you get to live essentially. So many things go by the wayside. So many things are left undone, because not everything is yours to do. You find this very crystallized intent and purpose and alignment. And you do that you live from that place. And you realize that you can't do everything in this lifetime, that it's not your call to do everything in this lifetime. And you don't have to. When you answer the call that is yours to do, living essentially living stripped down in that bare core, intimate with life place.
- So far, I've found that it's very difficult to start piling the things on, again, that we used to pile ourselves under that made it so hard to get to the our essence in the first place. Once you undo all the conditioning through distillation, once you shed all that old skin, I mean, sometimes it is just scraped off of you until you are raw. It's very difficult to start taking on stuff that isn't you anymore to start taking on programming. I mean, after you go through distillation, why wouldn't you want to go back? There is something so irrevocable about this that's why it's so hard to achieve it. And it's only achieved through utter surrender, the surrender that we learn through the lift, drop, crash, wash, rinse, repeat cycles of distillation, we come into a place of surrender as a state of being. And we have a clean slate in that surrender space, true ground to build upon, because you are out of your own way. Distillation gets you out of your own way. What comes next is coagulation and mediation, which keeps you out of your own way. When you're out of your own way, when all the conditioning is out of your way, it's a new place of living.
Listen, I know this is a bit out there. It is not alchemy lite. It's not spirituality lite. This is not a beginner's stage. Distillation is a very advanced alchemical stage. You have to have a certain amount of psychological, spiritual, emotional development to go through this stage.
Distilled people are one of a kind, the rarest of the rare. They have no carbon copies or duplicates. They have a certain quality about them that you can't quite put your finger on. When you meet a distilled person, someone who lives from essence in sheer relationship with life, you kind of wonder what's their secret? And if they're truly distilled, they would never dream of being able to tell you.
"The Secret That Protects Itself"
In alchemy, this is called the secret that protects itself. The secret medicine that takes you through distillation to coagulation is so unique and individual, it's impossible to bottle and sell it. It's magic that can't be said or named. Alchemist's have a saying, "Those who know don't say and those who say don't know. Those who know don't say, and those who say don't know."
When you taste the secret medicine, the more magical that medicine is, the less you are going to be able to trace it to anything specific to specific steps or anything you did. It comes in sideways when you're not looking or watching. When you're done trying and hoping. Something sneaks in and shifts and soothes the soul in ways you least expect. It's not something you can control or will into place. It's sheer grace. It takes utter surrender to achieve, including surrendering all desires of trying to achieve it. Once again, that dang paradox.
To be honest with you, distillation is one of the reasons I worked myself out of a job as a mentor. For many years, I mentored people through alchemical journeys, but most of the people who were coming to me toward the end, were in distillation. And aside from saying, "Oh, hey, sorry, you're in distillation. And this is what it's like. And I know it sucks, and there's nothing I can do. But something will one day shift for you." I had nothing to offer, I knew I had no control in the fall of the soul, or the medicine itself.
Distillation is the utter destruction and devastation that leads to utter freedom. It strips you of all spiritual purpose and ego, it squeezes you through the eye of the needle and strips you bare along the way. So much does not get to come with you through the distillation needle. But what's real will be there to meet you on the other side. And there is there is there is there is there is life on the other side.
Hey, I know everyone is not called to this journey by any means. But if you are, I'm rooting for your distillation because when you distill, all of life is yours. Laughter is yours. feeling horrible is yours. Feeling wonderful. Absurdity, beauty, being real, what you are and what you're not. What you feel, what you don't, there's so much freedom in being whatever you are and knowing that whatever you are, is IT. It's nothing and everything. There's nowhere to go but everywhere. It's here and gone. The paradox. The letting go and holding on. All of it is yours to experience and be. Ah, just be. There is nothing to prove. Unless you want to. But you might crack yourself up if you find yourself trying to. You just get to live now. Not the life you tried so hard to make for yourself, but the life that wants to be lived through you. Oh how disappointing and lovely is that? You have become the vessel for the sacred magic and it looks like nothing in particular. It hides in plain sight reveals itself everywhere and nowhere, it can't be sold or bought or packaged or named. Sorry, capitalism. It's free to all and owned by no one. All you have to do...ahem..."all" you have to do is hurt so hard you can't hope anymore. Fall until the fall becomes the fly. Become so dark you turn the light and so light you fade to dark. You are both, you are both in the heart. You've become both sides. You are both sides, both and something more. You are something rare. Something other something more.
Once again, thanks for listening and being in this space with me. Before you go if you're someone who listens on Spotify, please consider taking advantage of the new feature to rate and review this podcast. It helps new listeners find small shows like mine, and I appreciate it so much. Until next time, be well in soul.