Down from the Mountain: On Being Human after Spiritual and Alchemical Initiation

By McCall Erickson

Are you burned out on spiritual seeking, finding your purpose, and trying to create your best life?

McCall Erickson's Down from the Mountain provides a shimmering template for returning to life and being human after undergoing the ruthless and transformative experiences of alchemical initiation.

Dangerously magical benefits of reading this book may include but are not limited to:

- Learning to be who you are in a world that has no place for you.

- Making peace (and magic!) with what can't be changed about you and your life no matter how many alchemical death and rebirth cycles you go through.

- Identifying and receiving the support and resources you need in order to be who you are and do what you came to do in this life.

- Navigating the disappointment that comes with core alignment by integrating the ego and soul selves.

- Understanding the intricate workings of the soul in order to bring The Dreams That Are Dreaming You into form.

- Breaking free from the spiritual codependency (martyrdom, sneaky self-righteousness, hyper-individualism, superiority, inequality) that infiltrates how we serve, share our gifts, and integrate our spiritual awakenings into our physical lives.

- Fostering collaboration and connection in partnerships and communities in ways that honor and nurture both the individuated and interconnected self.

Also included in the book:

- Personal behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the author's own journey of integration.
- An appendix detailing the seven stages of alchemical transformation.
- An expanded glossary illuminating key terms and the lost words of alchemy.

If your human and spirit parts are aching to live more authentically and harmoniously with yourself and the world click BUY NOW at the top of this page to begin making this strange and priceless magic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350943528

McCall Erickson

McCall Erickson is a writer of books and songs exploring deep process, the relational space, and living in the unknown. She is the creator of the podcast Falling Into Soul: An Exploration of Inner Alchemy. Her work inspires humans across the globe to follow the pull of their own souls. You can find her at www.mccallerickson.com.

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Copyright © 2024 McCall Erickson. All rights reserved.

Copyright protects, celebrates, and honors the work of authors and creatives. Thank you for honoring the author of this publication by not reproducing,

distributing, or sharing any part of this book by any means whatsoever

without permission, except in the case of brief and properly cited

quotations as permitted by fair use copyright law.

For permission requests and book ordering information,

contact the author through www.mccallerickson.com.

Special gratitude and acknowledgement to David Whyte and Kat Lehmann

for permission to reprint their copyrighted poetry in this book:

David Whyte, Start Close In, from David Whyte: Essentials. © 2020 David Whyte. Excerpt used with permission from Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA

www.davidwhyte.com.

Kat Lehmann, Small Stones from the River, 29 Trees Press © 2017.

In the writing of this book, the author does not provide advice, diagnosis,

or treatment related to health, medical, or psychiatric issues. The intent

of the author is to share information of a general nature. Neither the author nor

the publisher assumes any responsibility or will be held liable for any loss

or damage as a result of anyone’s interpretation or application

of the ideas shared in this book.

Cover Design: Diren Yardimli

Print ISBN: 979-8-35094-351-1

ebook ISBN: 979-8-35094-352-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024900218

First Edition

Tandem River Press

Sunset Beach, North Carolina

Printed in the USA

To HWM,

for walking up and down the mountain with me.

And for every lifetime.

Sometimes there is no point

Only moments

Some painful, some beautiful, some both

Strung together by breath and soul

–M

Contents

Prologue: Dissolving the Search

Part One: Crossing Over

1. Accepting Defeat

2. Coming Back to Life

3. The Step You Don’t Want to Take

Part Two: Strange New Land

4. What the Human Needs

5. Learning to Recognize and Receive the Gift

6. Creating and Manifesting with Soul

Part Three: Into the Village

7. Going Nowhere Alone

8. Working Together

9. Letting It Be Good

Epilogue: By Way of Peace

Appendix: The Seven Stages of Alchemical Transformation

Glossary: The Lost Words of Alchemy (And Some Made-up Words Too)

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Note from the Author

Notes

Prologue

Dissolving the Search

The end is often the beginning. During my final days of writing the manuscript for this book, I watched a documentary on the life and work of legendary songwriter, Leonard Cohen, that helped me know how to begin this book journey with you.

In the documentary, a reporter asks a later-in-life Cohen about the depressions he suffered earlier in life. Cohen replies, They’ve lifted. They’ve lifted completely. It’s not so much that I got what I was looking for, but the search itself dissolved. ¹

When I heard him say those words in his deep, gravelly Leonard voice, I bolted upright to the edge of my couch, grabbed the remote, and kept rewinding the film over and over just to hear him say that part again. It’s not so much that I got what I was looking for, but the search itself dissolved. Did he seriously just sum up the most pivotal point of my life in a sentence better than I could have said it myself? Not to mention, the entire premise of the book I just spent five years writing? Of course he did; he’s Leonard Fucking Cohen. Inspired madman. Poet of the ages.

For as long as I can remember, I had two main questions in life: who am I and why am I here? These questions set me on my spiritual path and drove me to honest madness—the root of my depressions and anxieties, the crises of my existence. These questions lit my alchemical fire at a young age, burned my mental constructs for living, led me through the dark nights (years) of my soul and spirit, and caused me to distill myself (more years) down to nothing.

In short: I still can’t answer these questions definitively, but I no longer need to.

What happened? Looking back, it seems akin to someone becoming an overnight success. All of a sudden, they’re in the spotlight, but you don’t see the years leading up to their stardom where they bloodied their fingers playing guitar in their basement or garage to an audience of cement walls while honing their craft and passion. But I’m not claiming stardom. I’m claiming freedom. Freedom from the exhausting search of trying to figure out who I am and prove it to myself and the world. Freedom from hustling my virtue and making do on paltry crumbs of approval. Freedom from pinning my worth to anything but my sheer existence. Freedom from altering my alignment and creative flow for social media likes and algorithmic favor. Freedom from the spiritual grind. Freedom from whatever paired the words spiritual and grind together in the first place. Freedom from anything that keeps me from enjoying my being.

My freedom happened along the slowly and then all at once arc as I crossed an invisible threshold that took years of effort to arrive at. As I crossed this threshold, the search for my life’s meaning dissolved into itself, though I didn’t know that’s what was happening at the time. At the time, I was experiencing complete emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical burnout. It was an initiation of sorts. I became free by exhausting all my ideas of what it would mean to be free. And it wasn’t glamorous. It was brutal. Does it have to be? Perhaps not for everyone. But it was for me.

Down from the Mountain is a book about the raw journey that begins at the threshold where the search to answer our most burning questions dissolves. How do we dissolve the search? I don’t know. I don’t know how to skip the part about exhausting all the seeking and trying first. I don’t know how to skip the process of anything, really. I know how to live it, though. I’m good at process. And I know how to write about it. If you want to know about the alchemical processes that led me to this threshold where seeking dissolves, I outline that journey in my first book, The Second Half of the Mountain: A Guide to Personal Alchemy after Awakening. You can also find a summary of those alchemical stages in the Appendix at the back of this book. What comes after that climb, you’ll find in the pages before you.

If, in the pages before you, I use an alchemical term or word you’re unfamiliar with, you can find my elaborations in the Glossary, also at the back of this book.

A Word on the Words 

Although I can only speak from my direct experience, I also use the words we and you, which is tricky business because I don’t know you personally. I use we and you because this isn’t strictly a book about me. It’s also a book about us, the collective. I’m not speaking for the collective but writing for it from my place within it. What I’m trying to say is this: I know I’m not the only one. I’ve interacted and walked with enough brave and paradigm-shifting humans along the way to know I’m not the only one to undergo this pattern of alchemy. While I’m the only one who can live it the way I’ve lived it, I’m not the only one living the larger pattern that is unfolding through our collective consciousness.

Furthermore, this book isn’t a memoir or a how-to. I see it as a personal report of a soul mission I’ve been on as part of our collective evolution. It’s not only about me, though I speak from my direct experience and use personal examples to illustrate a pattern I see playing out in more lives than just my own. More important to me than the details of how it plays out in any individual life is what is playing out through many differing lives and stories. I’m good at observing, seeing patterns, making connections, and synthesizing that information into succinct and potent remedy-like summaries—my offering to you.

So, I don’t mean to alienate you by using the words we or you for something that doesn’t feel like it reflects or includes your personal experience. I can’t know your personal experience unless you tell me. Whether or not there’s something in my writing that reflects and clarifies your own journey is not a leap for me to make.

My job (and pleasure) is to bring this book to the world and let it go where it goes, let it do what it does. My business is in the writing of it, not what happens when you or anyone reads it, though I am delighted when I hear stories of how that part unfolds.

And so we begin, at the threshold where endings and beginnings collide. Where you and I and we collide. Where the personal and the collective intertwine. Where poets like Leonard Cohen speak truth from the Great Beyond. From the past and the here and the beyond. All times in one. In the glow of those who’ve gone before and the dawn of those to come. We begin, we seek, we dissolve.

Part One

Crossing Over

Sometimes you can’t take it with you.

You have to let go of everything and trust that what’s real

will be there to meet you on the other side.

–M

1

Accepting Defeat

The purpose of life is to be defeated

by greater and greater things.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Nothing has ever mattered more to me than hearing the whispers of my own heart and heeding them. That’s hard to do in a noisy world, but I’m committed. Living life according to someone else’s constructs and expectations has always felt unbearable to me. But if there’s anything I’ve gathered from this whole follow your heart business, it’s that doing so hardly ever leads where you think it should, nor does life always seem to care about rewarding you properly for all your hard work and courage.

This was never more obvious to me than when I was at the end of my second half of the mountain journey—all of that dark-night and distillation alchemy after awakening that was supposedly going to lead me to my core and clue me in on my most meaningful life purpose, maybe even result in some of that best life stuff the spiritual internet is always going on about. Instead, I was exhausted, raw, and confused about what the point of it all was. 

If I had distilled myself down to essence and acquired the Philosopher’s Stone within, why couldn’t I make magic already? Why couldn’t I finally do the things I felt I was born to do? Why didn’t things feel better? Why did the lower vertical descents into darkness continue with a death grip vengeance? I felt more dissatisfied about the outcome of all this inner work than ever. If sacrificing everything for the sake of following my heart meant not being able to feel fulfilled and have the things I wanted in life, then what was the point? How was any of this worth it?

Seriously, what is the point already?! 

Any niggling notions I had about what it would mean to reach the end of my mountain journey and acquire the Philosopher’s Stone were being pried from my psyche. I had no clue what it meant anymore. 

Out of sheer necessity, I was opening to a state of raw beingness unlike any I’d experienced before. My resistance was worn away. The will for anything other than just being and breathing had been beaten out of me. All I could do was exist. And some days, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to do that.

I was sick of the words alchemy and journey and healing and purpose and soul. I didn’t want to hear myself say or think about them ever again. I just wanted to sleep, maybe for a million years. And after that, just breathe. Be. Exist. Not reach or try for anything I thought should be happening. Not hustle for my worth. Not explain a damn thing to anyone including myself. And then maybe, maybe see what actually wanted to be born through me, if anything at all.

I had given every bit of energy, time, and money to create the life I thought would bring me the most meaning, to heal, and to follow my dreams. But those dreams weren’t following me back. I’d only ever endeavored to be true to my soul, but doing so always ended up being about something other than what I first thought, like I was being tricked into some deeper, harder, more mystical healing work under the guise of following my heart. Following my heart started becoming synonymous with falling, failing, and becoming weirder, rarer, and more placeless in this world. Being who I was and also being a part of some successful work or partnership in this world felt less and less possible. The more I uncovered