Hello beautiful people of the email list,

All of us know what it means to be overwhelmed by circumstance, to be overcome by change, to undergo a sudden, dramatic, often unexpected transformation, and yet, most of us don’t have a framework for this process.

Sure, we can go to therapy, join a support group, or go the other way and crash out, drown out the grief or confusion with a bottle or a drug.

But then what?

What happens after we’ve talked, drunk, wept, danced away the pain? What do we do after “healing”? Does the experience just dissipate away into nothingness or does it just linger on, following us around like a shadow we learn to get used to.

Many of us get stuck in this state, not knowing how necessary the chaos and confusion actually is, how helpful, even vital, that leftover shadow stuff can be for our development. We never get to the creation phase because most likely—we don’t even know that there is such a thing as a “creation phase”. This was supposed to end with me being “healed”, right?

Enter: Alchemy.

Thousands of years of wisdom, science, and philosophy that come together to create a practical map for navigating the psycho-spiritual territory of becoming. The more you “know” alchemy, the more you know yourself, the more language you have to address yourself, the broader the limits of that self become.

The person I described above, for example, whose situation I’m sure many of us recognize, from an alchemical perspective, is stuck in perpetual oscillation between nigredo and albedo, the breakdown and the insights that facilitate healing. But what about integrating that healing? What about moving in that integration? What about sharing the wisdom that your hardships have helped ripen? What about who you’ve become as a result of integrating that hardship? And what you have to offer a world that is also in pain? These are the questions that become relevant in citrinitas and rubedo, the stages after albedo.

Whether you:

• Are processing overwhelming awareness of world events
• Are feeling called to teach, heal, or lead but needing deeper philosophy
• Have plateaued in traditional therapy but knowing there’s more
• Are recovering from spiritual experiences that left you feeling different
• Need a framework that honors the complexity of transformation.

Our current mental health models are (arguably) designed to help us through the healing process, but they aren’t optimized for moving beyond healing and into expansion, so if you haven’t already, I highly suggest you go through the Alchemy Gateway.

It’ll introduce you to the alchemical stages I mentioned above, help you assess what stage you’re in, and give you some practical tools to work with your stage and prepare for the next.

I’d also love to hear what stage resonated most with you, whether you found yourself in between stages, and what practices you were most drawn to try first.

Once you’ve gone through the Gateway, or if you already have and feel ready to go deeper with this work, remember that applications for the full Alchemy 101 program will only be open for one more week, and early applicants who are accepted get special enrollment benefits when registration opens in early September.

Thank you for reading and until next time, safe travels,

Elianne