The Second Half of the Mountain: A Guide to Personal Alchemy After Awakening

By McCall Erickson

What happens when you’ve done all you know how to do, the paved paths end, and you still feel like you’re missing something? The Second Half of the Mountain offers a practical and magical approach to recognizing and working with the deeper and often-confusing inner processes that happen after awakening. In this guidebook, McCall Erickson combines bits of personal story with the timeless building blocks of alchemy to outline the journey for the awakened traveler through the dark nights of the soul and beyond, not as “the way,” but as a guide to help you make your own way where it sometimes feels there is no way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504392303

McCall Erickson

Having fallen from the good graces of her religious upbringing and finding herself unable to walk any other existing paths that life had to offer, McCall Erickson learned to make her own way in a world that felt like it had no place for her. Her unique voice as a writer of words and songs exploring love, beauty, mystery, and deep process continues to inspire many to follow the pull of their own souls. She enjoys growing her own food, exploring new places, and spending entire afternoons staring at the sky. The Second Half of the Mountain is her first book. You can find her at mccallerickson.com or @mccallerickson on Instagram and Twitter.

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Copyright © 2017 McCall Erickson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The information, ideas, and suggestions in this book are not intended as a substitute for professional advice. Before following any suggestions contained in this book, you should consult your personal physician or mental health professional. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising as a consequence of your use or application of any information or suggestions in this book.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9229-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9230-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017918078

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/15/2018

For those brave enough to take the journeys they can’t not take.

Contents

Foreword

Preface: A Word on the Making of This Book

Acknowledgements

Part One: The Human Alchemy Lab

The Second Journey

Playing with Magic

Swallowing the Poison

Cycles within Cycles and the Multifaceted Human Being

The Difference between Soul and Spirit and Why It Matters

Pull of the Soul

Subtle Perceptions and Gross Stories

The Vertical Axis

The Forces at Play

Part Two: The Alchemical Stages and Procedures

Approaching the Stages and Procedures

Stage One: The Fire

Stage Two: The Flood

Stage Three: The Air

Stage Four: The Earth

Stage Five: The Dark Nights

Stage Six: Purifying the Stone

Stage Seven: Wielding the Stone

What Comes Next

Glossary of Terms

About the Author

Waking up can happen to anyone.

Staying awake is where shit gets real.

–McCall’s Journal, 2010

Foreword

IT DOESN’T TAKE A whole lot of noticing for anyone to see that the entire world is starting to crack open for the light to come in.

For the light workers I know, it started happening a few years ago. It was a time for many of us where everything we knew dissolved overnight. It was exhilarating & terrifying & baffling & with all that, the most difficult thing was that not one of us had any idea about what came next. Sure, we’ve awakened, I remember one person saying at a fire circle in Southern California, but what do we do with that?

Well, it turns out that awakening is a little more rigorous than that. It turns out it’s only the first step in a process of becoming the essential you that hums at your very core. While it’s kind of fun to play in the first light of awakening, there’s only so long you can do it before something bone deep & dark & more true calls to you & says Now, let us walk together so you can be the real thing I need you to be.

I met McCall at that point in my life. The point where there was still a me that wanted to be useful & known, maybe with a little less ego than I had at twenty-one, but still enough to remember there was a me. So, yeah, the very beginning of the real alchemy. She was my guide & love & antagonist & friend & she didn’t care one bit if I thought this whole thing should be a bit more manageable than it was. She laughed wildly, deep & full-throated & not once did she tell me what I wanted to hear. She only told me what was true.

I trusted her then because I didn’t know this new self enough to trust it yet. I had no idea how to navigate a world that constantly shifted out from under me everywhere - in the physical, in dreams, in the trance spaces where sound is light & the things you see are only felt. Until, without really knowing how or why, I found the thread of the path I’d been walking all along & she nodded, as if to say You’ve got it from here & off she went in another direction.

There is a quality to McCall that is almost indescribable: she is flame & love & dark passion & earth & she holds all of that at once without any contradiction. She is one of the few people I know who stands for Life itself in all of its manifestations. Not Life all squeaky clean & glowing at the edges, but Life with a really-no-kidding hunger for everything. It is Life at the far end of the alchemical journey & I would not trade what it takes to reach that for anything. I have McCall to thank for that.

I know a lot of light workers & call many of the most well-known of them friends. McCall’s book is one I’ll buy for myself & them & I will sit them down & say You. Must. Read. This. Beyond that, I’ll be recommending it wholeheartedly to the many people who follow my own work & who are just now seeing there is a next step beyond this time of coming awake. It’s perfectly poised as a guide for this next stage of our collective journey & I can’t think of a better person to be writing it.

with love, Brian Andreas

The internationally-known artist & writer behind StoryPeople.

Author of 15 books including his newest Bring Your Life Back to Life & the bestselling Story People

October 2017

Preface: A Word on the Making of This Book

I SAY MAKING INSTEAD of writing because it feels more like I made this book than wrote it. Although I got my undergrad degree in writing, I never set out with the intention to write this or any other book. I wanted to be a performing songwriter. To be fair, I’m an excellent songwriter in my own right, and I mention my passion for music in the living and making of this book because I first had different ideas for my life than writing about alchemy. Finding ourselves somewhere other than we thought we intended is exactly what happens through these magical processes.

In 2009, after a few years of experiencing a satisfying creative surge and pursuing music as a career path, I fell deeper into the dark nights of my own soul and spirit. I’d already fallen from my strict religious upbringing, so not only were my dark nights fraught with the grief of losing my ideas of God, I also had to face living with no music—the one thing I felt I could not live without.

During this time I began studying alchemy fervently with hints of being a person possessed by something otherworldly. My music friends regularly expressed their concern about their former comrade who disappeared off the stage and abandoned her dreams to go wait tables for a living and slink into nothinghood. I couldn’t explain to anyone let alone myself what was happening to me, and I felt it best to withdraw and not say much for fear of being seen as more of a crazy person than I already was. Without the context of alchemical cycles and phases to draw on, a move like this can look a lot like depression.

Something had grabbed deep hold of me that I couldn’t explain at the time, but now I see it as the Hermetic Network of alchemy, of which I’m intrinsically a part, lighting up for me and creating a mystical field of energy, space, and time for me to learn and understand the ancient principles and cycles of alchemy and how they related to the processes I was living but had no way of explaining. My study and initiation with this network of energies and spirit helped me piece together a pattern of alchemy I began noticing in many awakening and awakened people around me. This eventually led me to sharing and learning alchemy with others.

In the fall of 2013, I carefully selected a group of resonant and willing souls who wanted to learn about this modern day alchemy of the soul and spirit. I created a private online classroom where I wrote lessons in real time. It was an incredibly difficult and edifying experience. It was the first time I’d attempted to write about the alchemy that I had thus far only lived and mystically conversed with the ethers about. Each piece I wrote for the group required an immense amount of energy, time, thought, internal wrestling, and usually tears. It felt as though I was birthing the writings from my fullest self and the labor pains were very real. Midway through this class experience, the participants were asking me if they could have this material in book form. I sank into