Ep. 41 Why It's Hard to Create with Soul (And How We Can Learn)

Western culture is rich in ways to keep us chasing the outer dream and pitiful in ways to facilitate the actualization of an inner soul vision. Our ability to dream with soul and bring forth what lies deep within us has been hijacked by the cultural delusion that tells us we can have whatever we want, when we want it, how we want it--an affront to nature.

How to create, heal, and live with soul in a culture that's done its best to cut soul out of the picture is the work and obsession of my life. 

In this episode I share what I've learned over the past 15 years from my own Falling Into Soul journey:

• Three main reasons it's hard to create with soul and three tools to make the hard of it easer
• The difference between dreaming with soul and chasing the dreams you've been conditioned to dream
• Self-inquiries to help you align with your own soul way

With love,

McCall

Related episode: How To Recognize the Will of the Soul 

Transcript

Ep. 41 Why It’s Hard to Create with Soul (And How We Can Learn)

Western culture is rich in ways to keep us chasing the outer dream and pitiful in ways to facilitate the actualization of an inner soul vision. Our ability to dream with soul and bring forth what lies deep within us has been hijacked by cultural delusion that tells us we can have whatever we want, when we want it, how we want it–an affront to nature.

That’s a direct quote from my new book Down from the Mountain: On Being Human after Spiritual and Alchemical Initiation. Which is now available on Audible for all the book listeners out there. You can find the link  in the show notes.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Falling Into Soul. I’m McCall Erickson and in this episode I’m diving deep into the workings of soul and why it can be hard to create, navigate, and heal with soul. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the midst of a creative process or some sort of process of healing, where, at some point, I’ve lamented: WHY IS THIS SO HARD!? Or, my favorite: THIS WOULD BE SO MUCH EASIER IF I WASN’T ME. 

When it comes to doing anything with soul, whether it’s creating, healing, navigating the unknown and uncertainty of life, relationshipping with others, we add layers of depth and nuance that complicate things for our logical minds, that complicates our plans for things. 

Why is this so? Why does the soul seemingly complicate and sometimes sabotage our best laid plans? Mmmm this is one of those big questions that underpins the work and writing of my life.

When I finished the manuscript for Down from the Mountain last fall, before it went to publication, I sat down with my dear friend and long-time spiritual partner and did a read-through outloud of the entire book. When I finished reading chapter six which is entitled "Creating and Manifesting with Soul,” I took off my old woman reading glasses, looked at her and declared: “If I could only publish one chapter of the book, this would be it. I’m more proud of this chapter than anything I’ve ever written.”

She looked at me and said, Really? Why?

I said, because it answers what I was so confused about when I first started falling into soul that led me to studying and writing about alchemy in the first place. 

When I first experienced a creative awakening in my early 20s and stumbled upon spiritual margaritaville (see my first book The Second half of the Mountain if you want to know more about Spiritual Margaritaville), the book and movie The Secret had just come out and was huge in the spiritual mainstream. I watched the movie and while I felt there was some truth in it, a bigger part of me felt like something was hugely missing from it. I was actually pretty annoyed by it. The whole Law of Attraction culture just did not sit right with me. I went on a deep dive over the next decade to figure out why. What was missing from the idea that we can create everything we want with our thoughts alone? Well, for one thing, we aren’t just comprised of our thoughts alone. Why couldn’t I attract what I wanted through my positive affirmations? Why was my life steadily coming apart at each carefully stitched seam the more I turned inward and awakened? Why was my life getting worse? Wasn’t following your heart and doing the inner work supposed to make it better? Why did following my dreams only lead me to defeat? What was this strange, wild pull within me that seemingly sabotaged all my best chances for success in this life? What was I missing? 

Fast forward and spoiler alert: I wasn’t missing anything. I was merely wading through a shit pile of cultural delusion that was doing its best to keep me disconnected from the mysterious workings of soul. My soul, and the soul of the world. I was on a path of dismantling and deconstructing my conditioning so I could align with and live from the truth of my soul, not the truth of culture, even the most enlightened aspects of that culture.

This was a process that lasted almost two decades and for that whole time I became obsessed with understanding the mysterious pull within that I call the soul. And that whole time I carried seeds of dreams and creativity within me along with innate gifts and talents that I didn’t know what to do with other than try to bring them to life in the ways I was conditioned to, which of course didn’t work. Even if it did work from the vantage point of outer success from time to time, it never felt quite right inside, which left me feeling even more lost and confused. Nothing I tried to create was sustainable or nourishing enough to have any sort of endurance or rootedness about it.

All of my failures to create in an enduring sustainable way led me to a severe burnout which led me to living in surrender. I had to give up all my trying and all my efforts because I had nothing left in me to give. It was a matter of life and death. And only when I fully surrendered my notions of how to bring my soul dreams into form and do what I was sent here to do, did I begin to trust the organic unfolding of  soul in a culture that has done its best to cut soul processes out of the picture.  

So. After decades of confusion, dismantling, and reorientating myself in order to begin understanding how that even works, yes, you can say I’m really fucking proud of chapter six in Down from the Mountain where I succinctly portray what I’ve learned about how to bring our soul-seeded dreams into form when all the ways we’ve tried before haven’t worked.

Okay, so what I want to give you now is a few of the reasons I think creating with soul is hard and how we can soften that. This is not an exhaustive list. None of my lists are. None of my podcasts are. I’m picking three main reasons to highlight and three tools for making the hard of it easier. 

So reason number one, why it’s hard to create with soul, which I’ve already been alluding to in this podcast so far

1. Soul doesn’t move in accordance with culture. And culture presses in on us in all sorts of tricky ways. For those of us in western and colonized cultures in particular, soul processes have been squashed out of the picture and there’s little cultural understanding or support for how the soul actually works. The way the soul works is more in line with nature. Remember, in the context of alchemy, the soul is an inseparable part of the matter of the universe, which includes nature and our physical bodies which are a part of that nature. The soul is loyal to the body, to the earth, to the collective body of bodies fruiting from the earth, and to the mystery running through all of life. If we are overriding or disconnecting from our bodies, the earth, the people around us in order to create or fulfill a calling or produce something, what god are we actually serving? The soul within us works in cycles and seasons just like nature itself. So there is no forward movement without rest. There is no nonstop production. There is no production period without the need to replenish and rebuild the soil if we expect the fields to keep maturing to harvest. A recent example of this for me is when I finished recording the audiobook for Down from the Mountain a couple months ago, I immediately wanted to make this podcast episode you’re listening to now, but my body and soul energy said absolutely not, we need to recover some of our expended creative energy before we expend again. I used to override this, or not even necessarily be tuned into it at all because I’ve always been rather ambitious. But having the mental drive and ambition to do something isn’t the same thing as having the will and strength of the soul on board. Those are two different things. So instead of just pressing forward in full on create mode after my last project, I leaned into the part of the process that calls for replenishment instead of expenditure. I spent a whole month doing menial tasks around the house, taking walks on the beach, staring at trees, writing in my journal, napping, tending to my close-in relationships. Nourishing, replenishing, supporting my being, and the beings around me.Slowing down for soul takes going against the grain of culture. It takes patience, deep listening, and honoring what our bodies and energies tell us it is actually time for not what we wish it were time for or what culture tells us it’s time for. I mean, if I went at the pace of culture, well..the pace of culture tells me I need to release a podcast episode every week to keep people’s attention. Ha. AS IF. My soul says otherwise. My soul rejects the pace of culture. This creates a unique and special tension within me. Do I keep up with the speed of culture or honor the soul? The best tool for navigating this tension, I’ve found, is to foster an ongoing and open conversation between the ego and the soul. It helps to have an ongoing conversation between the part of us that is interfacing with culture and has to live everyday life in that culture and the part of us that is interfacing with nature and the mystery, bringing us intel from the depths, from the beyond, from what we can’t immediately see. Both parts matter. This is probably the most important inner conversation for the modern alchemist to foster and maintain. Otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or the other, the world of soul or the world of culture. The aim is to foster an ongoing dialogue and negotiation between the two so we can bring our creations from the depths of soul into the culture, which inevitably alters culture. 
2. Second reason why it’s hard to create with soul: The soul holds shadow pieces that need to be healed and integrated, pieces that we don’t know are there until they’re there. The jurisdiction of the soul is the subconscious, the depths beneath the surface, which entails unpredictability and mystery. This is why you can’t always just make a plan and stick with it. Culture tells us it's about our mindset: just set a plan and make it happen. Well, guess what? The soul does not give a shit about your plan. The soul will interrupt your plans, which may feel like sabotage, but it’s more like enrichment. The soul interrupts the plan to bring more pieces to it, to texture it with more layers and meaning than we initially bring to it with our limited understanding of things. If you are going to create, heal or navigate with soul, you probably won’t be able to plan the whole thing out from point A to B. That’s just not how it works. The soul can’t be planned out. You have no idea what pieces the soul will bring up from the depths to work out on the surface until they’re there. If there’s a plan at all, it has to be loose. The plan has to be interruptible if you want to incorporate soul every step of the way. And you have to be willing to slow down to address the shadow bits as they arise. Connecting with the soul is about bringing what’s been discarded back into the whole. Well, we don’t know what that is sometimes until we’ve taken a step forward and can then look into the shadow that step has created to see what it contains. So, if we’re in the creative process and things start to feel murky or yucky or the flow jams up, that’s a good sign that something is arising that needs to be addressed. That’s a sign that the soul is speaking up, saying, hey I have something else to bring into the picture here. We have to be willing to slow down, go into the fog, descend into the lower vertical that I talk about a lot in my books and work, lose our perspective momentarily to give the soul pieces time to work their way to the surface so we can address and incorporate them into the picture. For example: when I was recording my audiobook, there were moments I felt my overwhelm start to build. Or the flow would get muddy or things would simply stop working, and I’d start to feel like what I was trying to do was impossible. During these times, I would stop. I would lie down on the floor, stare and the ceiling, let my emotions and tears flow and transmute whatever needed to be transmuted, transmute whatever old stories I needed to transmute instead of bullying myself into finishing the chapter that I wanted to get finished that day in order to stay on schedule. Yes, doing so made the project take longer, but it kept me aligned. It kept me connected to the soul pieces that wanted to be healed and integrated every step of the way. Isn’t that the whole point? All that inner alchemy I did along the way is woven into the final recording of the audiobook. It’s not just about the book. It’s hardly ever about the thing itself that we are creating. It’s about how we are creating it and what we are transmuting within ourselves as we go. That’s the gold that gets woven into our sacred creative offerings. So, this answers the question that I’ve asked myself so many times over the years when it comes to my work and creative projects: WHY IS THIS SO HARD FOR ME? It’s hard because I didn’t just sign up to make things. I signed up to align with soul. To stay connected to soul means things WILL arise from the depths that I don’t have control over. Things to look at, feel, sort through, transmute. At the onset of a project I have no idea what’s in there ready to be healed and integrated, but it will tell me in time. And that’s hard because I don’t get to control the timing of that. I don’t get to control any of that. I can only allow and receive it. I GET to allow and receive. I’ve learned to leave a lot of space in the schedule for soul and its detours. Because it will happen. There’s so much less “take charge and make it happen” energy when it comes to creating with soul and a lot more “make space and let it happen” energy. So the tool here is to MAKE SPACE for soul. The word space and soul go together. The words space and soul and slow. Those words go together for me. Soul will demand detours, interrupt the process in annoying and perfect ways asking for your attention. Expect it. Plan for it. And listen deeply for the soul’s direction. Be willing to go into the fog for it. Be willing to lose perspective and surrender the timeline for it. That’s how we know the mystery of the soul. Do you know how to recognize the brilliant interruptions of the soul in your processes? Do you make space for them or override them? Or a little bit of both sometimes?
3. Number three why it’s hard to create with soul, because, ah this is the biggest one. The way of YOUR soul is unique and can’t be taught to you, sold to you, or transmitted to you by anyone else's protocol, method, or formula because the way of your soul doesn’t exist until you make it. This is super super tricky because we have an abundance of healers and teachers and coaches out there who have figured out tried-and-true methods that work to bring certain results and outcomes, which may be true, but honestly, how boring is that? The soul doesn’t care about following someone else’s proven way, it doesn’t care about following a formula to get outer results. The soul cares about you doing it your unique way and bringing your unique voice, your slice of genius and creativity into the world. There’s always a formula if you want a quick fix. And there’s always a wild process if you want something real, something rare, something soul.If you want to create and heal on a soul level, you can listen to and learn from the wisdom of others, but when it comes down to it, you have to make your own way. You have to find your way by trusting your own subjective experience, making your own mistakes, feeling around for your own light in your own darkness. I could give you a bajillion examples of this, up and down the avenues of my life. But again I’ll stick with the recent of recording my audiobook. When I was recording the audiobook, something I don’t really know anything about, I was doing research and watching videos of creators who were giving me all sorts of tips and tricks on how to do it. I started out doing exactly what one creator told me to do and it did not at all work for my voice. It was the exact wrong thing for my voice, actually. When I realized what was happening, I caught myself and said, McCall, you know how this works…you have to figure out your own way. No matter how many tutorials you watch, you have to figure out how it's gonna work for you, which no one can bundle and sell to you because no one is you. Everyone’s selling what worked for them, but no one can sell you what works for you. Everyone’s selling what works for them, but no one can sell you what works for you.

I admit, this is realllllyy hard sometimes, I know. It’s soooo tempting to pay someone else to teach us how to do it. But how often do we buy the course or take the class or pay for the session and realize at the end of it that we still have to have our own direct experience. We still have to figure out our own damn way with it. 

I’m not saying we don’t need each other. I’m not saying I don’t gather pieces from others along the way. I absolutely do. But I listen with a discerning ear and a fine filter because I’m no longer under any impression that someone out there holds the special formula that will work for me. No one knows how to do it my way, no matter how much I pay them. Before I became initiated to my own soul, I did still have threads of belief that there were people out there who had figured out some kind of secret that I needed to know that I couldn’t figure out for myself. But initiation brought me to the threshold of my own soul experience. There’s no one out there who has information about my own path and life that I can’t and must access for myself.   

So here’s the thing, the paradox really. Yes we need each other. Yes we learn from each other, but we all still have to do it ourselves.

If I hadn’t watched tutorials and read blogs from other people I wouldn’t have been able to record my audiobook. So thank you other people. But if I hadn't stopped listening at some point, I wouldn’t have a finished audiobook because I had to find my own weird, special way with it. 

This is why sometimes I exclaim… this would be so much easier if I wasn’t me. As if I could just follow someone's protocol, or follow the already-discovered paths in place, it’d be so much easier. But no. I have to complicate it by being ME.

And honestly, this is the basis for my whole life’s work. I care about ONE THING more than anything and that’s living in direct experience with my own soul and supporting others who wish to do the same. Which isn’t always easy in a world that sells you a method or formula for success around every corner.

This hearkens back to the premise of my first book, The Second Half of the Mountain– the premise is that any path can get you halfway up the mountain, but the rest of the way, you have to do yourself. 

So, the tool here, ah, biggest tool of all, is discernment through self inquiry. Some questions to ask yourself:Do I keep listening to others, trying all the things, taking all the classes at the expense of having a direct experience with my own soul and life, or am I listening to the experience of others as reflection, only to get the pieces I need as I navigate my own path?

I actually have a mantra when it comes to stuff like this. It goes like this: get in; get out. Get in, get what you need and get out. By which I mean, if I’m going into someone else’s experience or perspective to get some information or a tool I need to continue my work (like figuring out how to work EQ my audiobook in garageband), get in, get what you need, and get out. Don’t stay longer than is necessary. Don’t mingle. Get what you came for, thank them for it, and then go do what yours to do. Get in, get out.

So here’s the twist. Here’s the twist. It’s actually not hard to create and live with soul. It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s only hard because we’ve been conditioned away from what soul actually is. It’s hard to dismantle that conditioning. It’s hard to reorient to the nature within us. It’s hard to rewild ourselves to that. But when we do, it’s more like a remembering what we already know–our true nature. Our true flow is there, which requires no forcing, only allowing. And when we can do that, the most amazing thing of all happens:

we get to bring something unique and unrepeatable into the world that wouldn’t exist without our very being in it. 

Biggest question of all: how do we know we’re actually doing that? How do we know we’re dreaming with the soul and not just chasing the outer dreams we’ve been conditioned to dream? 

If you want to explore that deeper with me, see chapter six of Down from the Mountain–Creating and Manifesting with Soul– it’s my best attempts to date to articulate the difference between dreaming with the culturalized ego and dreaming with the soul, including what it actually looks like to bring a soul dream into form. This is my sacred offering to you. You can find multiple ways to read or listen to Down from the Mountain in the show notes. Thank you so much for being in this space with me. With love until next time.