Separate the Earth from Fire, the Subtle from the Gross, gently and with great Ingenuity.
It rises from Earth to Heaven and descends again to Earth, thereby combining within Itself the powers of both the Above and the Below.
—The Emerald Tablet (Precept Four)
I heard her sing many times before she showed up in my treatment room. I knew her voice before I knew her—hard to define, yet distinct and unforgettable. When I saw her perform at local gatherings, I was struck by the sweatshirt she wore with the hood pulled down to hide her eyes, her voice emerging from the dark moon circle under the cowl. Like a monk at compline, she sang from the night, without revealing her facial markers of individual identity.
Michaela's email arrived out of the blue, like a calling card from the forest. “I would love to make an appointment to work with you. I'm in a very stuck place psychologically and physically and I recognize that I need a routine of healing work. Others have told me how helpful you've been, and I have thought of you many times.”
I was honored but also surprised that I had entered her orb of awareness. I was cautious in my reply, sensing that she might flee back to the forest if I didn't stay deep in my listening, if I didn't pay close attention to the nearly inaudible cues.
She arrived exactly on time for the first session, a strikingly beautiful woman in her late twenties with a bit of adolescent wildness about her. Even though she had no hood pulled over her eyes, I couldn't quite get a read on her. Her face never settled down, but instead changed constantly as if there were several different possibilities in each moment of encounter. When she sat across from me, she looked away and seemed almost apologetic about being so punctual. “I show up when I want to but other times I disappear,” she told me. “No one knows where I am. I hide out.”
Her presenting issues: periods of deep depression and withdrawal, extreme sensitivity to people and their feelings, a lack of psychic boundary, anxiety about things under the surface, and terrible bouts of jealousy and anger.
She said,
I know I have a gift, but I don't know who I am, what I want to do with my life. I end up being how other people want me to be and then I rebel, get mad deep down, withdraw, and turn myself into an emotional knot. I know I can heal people with my voice. But I sabotage myself with bad habits and waste my time worrying and being taken over by jealousy. At times I completely lose it over stories that aren't even real that I make up about my boyfriend. Or, when I am in one of my depressed states, I turn into a hermit. I can't go out. I don't like myself. I hate the way I look. I don't want people to see me.
Our work began with conversation. What were her goals?
I want to be fully present, comfortable with people, part of a community. I want to stop wandering from place to place, living with my boyfriend or out of my car. I want to develop some routines that keep me on track and away from my bad habits. I want a sense of purpose, a way to find a way to take my music seriously, to use my gift.
In addition to talking, we worked with acupuncture, flower essences, essential oils, and meditation exercises. I listened intently not only to her words but also to the messages of her gestures and the intonations in her voice. She also started to pay attention to her dreams. She liked the treatments, especially the flower essences. She noticed that her moods were brighter and a bit more stable. She was getting out with friends, singing more.
I reflected back to her that despite her stated view of herself as someone who disappears, has no purpose, and can't follow through, I experienced her as being very committed to our work together, punctual, responsible about payment, remembering to take the remedies I made for her, and exploring my suggestions for work between sessions. Again, she gave me that rueful look, as if she were hesitant to admit her own curiosity, hunger, and determined strength, her deep desire to know herself, and her excitement about the possibility of bringing her full power to the world. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I can show up when I want to.”
A few months after we began working together, she was invited to sing at a Summer festival in the hills of northern New Hampshire. Through a long evening she would sing to the people gathered and her voice would carry them across midnight into the early morning. She was shy, uncertain about whether she was up to the task. But after some gentle coaxing and then some more emphatic demands from the festival organizers, she agreed.
I saw her the day before she left for the festival. “I'm ready,” she said. “I'm taking the remedies you gave me and I like them. I do feel afraid, afraid that I won't be able to do it. But I'm doing it anyway.” She turned and half-smiled as she left, looking back once before gliding out the door.
I wasn't at the festival, but what I heard from others and what I know was that her voice came out of the dark night and wove a spell over the whole gathering. The waning gibbous moon rose with her voice and traversed the sky as she sang. And somewhere in the middle of the moon's course, the coyotes arrived. At first, she was too much a part of her own sound to notice their presence. But then the harmonies began. Her notes disappeared into the night, then returned, deepened, layered, transformed by the fur-coated wily tricksters of the forest.
“Suddenly, I heard them. I knew they were there. All around me. They were singing with me. I joined with them. We became one song. I couldn't see their faces, but I felt them in the darkness. I forgot myself completely. I sang in a way I've never sung before.”
As I sat listening to her story, I saw her face coming into focus for the first time. Sensitive, elegant, alert to every nuance of sound. And next to her, behind her, I saw the animals watching, listening, cautious and brilliantly acute in their awareness, sniffing out safe and unsafe, tracking me closely.
“The coyotes,” I offered. “They are still with you.”
“Yes, I know, and I think they always will be,” she answered.
As we both admitted to seeing the unseeable, something shifted; not completely, not forever, but for that one moment, which was also an eternity. I knew we had moved to a new level in our work.
“The coyotes,” I asked, “What do you know about them?”
“They come and go. They are tricky. You have to be careful not to be fooled by them. They can lead you down the wrong path, like drinking or getting involved with the wrong people,” she answered. I knew she was telling me something important about herself.
“But what if you turn that around?” I asked. And I saw the coyotes around her perking up their ears, sniffing the air, alert to some intrigue. She gave me the familiar grin, as if she knew more than she would say. “What if instead of seeing their trickiness, their coming and going as a problem, you see it as a power they give you. They are survivors. They know what's safe and unsafe. They can sniff out danger as well as sustenance. They intuit when they need to go back into the forest to rest, to gather up their strength, to learn new songs. What if that was also something true about you?”
She took a long, deep breath. The coyotes lifted their heads and their noses twitched. I knew she knew, and they knew. I had seen her. And she, for a moment, had also seen herself. She looked at me and started to laugh. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “That's different.”
Then the coyotes stretched and yawned and relaxed lazily on the rug. She lay down on the treatment table, closed her eyes, and rested. I needled the acupuncture point called Palace of Weariness—the palace where the wild, the hunted, the lost, and wounded come to heal.
In our work together, Michaela and I had slipped through the gate of ordinary reality and entered a different domain of awareness. In this place, our habitual ways of organizing the world shifted. The distinctions we ordinarily make between inner and outer, self and other, human and nonhuman dissolved momentarily. We knew beyond the accepted boundaries of individual identity, beyond the limits of universally verifiable fact. We perceived things we could not perceive with our everyday senses alone. We gathered and wove together the threads of reality in a new way, allowing the gifts of intuition, imagination, and spirit to be part of the tapestry. In the words of the ancient Chinese healers, “We saw what cannot be seen with the ordinary eyes, heard what cannot be heard with the ordinary ears. . . knew what only the heart can know.” We touched what is sometimes called “the subtle body.” We entered the inner laboratory of alchemy and began a process of Alchemical Healing.
The concept of an invisible but palpable energy body that lives alongside our physical structure conflicts with the scientific view of the body as a mechanical, biochemical system. The mutable nature of this “other body,” its tendency to shy away from the light of the rational mind and the fact that it can't be weighed, measured, or pinned down makes it difficult to talk about in ordinary language. Yet, this other immaterial body has been a central concern of philosophers, healers, and spiritual seekers in Eastern and Western cultures for at least the past 2,500 years.
In my years of experience, I've found that there is no way to work effectively at a psycho-spiritual level with acupuncture points, flower essences, astrology, dreams, or any other alchemical modality without an understanding of this aspect of our being. Despite the challenges it presents to language and the rational mind, it has been essential for me to find a way to conceptualize, talk about, and consciously work with the subtle body. I believe that the recognition and recovery of the subtle body is a prerequisite if we are to move forward with the development of a new approach to healing.
When you receive an acupuncture treatment, consult a trained astrologer, take flower essences, or attend a yoga class, you are touched and moved in a way that exists outside the parameters of what can be proven, measured, or analyzed. These modalities work on a part of you that is not purely physical. For example, a good yoga teacher will emphasize that the benefit of pigeon pose is not just the deep stretch it offers to the external rotators of your hip but also the opening it creates for you to stretch into a deeper knowing that you can let go and trust. The challenge of the asana invites you into a relationship with your own assumptions and resistances as well as your strengths. As you hold the pose, you learn to quiet your mind and listen more closely to the underlying stream of energy moving through you. While any yoga class will exercise your physical body in obvious ways, a really satisfying class will touch something that results in you leaving in a profoundly different mental/emotional state than when you went in.
Of course, this sense of well-being is reflected in measurable changes to your physical body, including shifts in heart rate, hormone levels, and brain wave patterns. But an alchemist would say that through the postures, the breathing practices, the visualizations, and the chanting, you went through a process of inner transformation. The yogi would say that you balanced your chakras and moved your prana. The acupuncturist would say that you cleared a blockage in your meridians and enlivened your qi. The Kabbalist would say that you aligned your ten energy spheres and made contact with your inner angels.
Who is right? How can these systems with their very different filters, maps, and technologies all refer to the same phenomenon? How can they all work? The unifying factor of all these systems is that they work at the level of the alchemical subtle body.
The word subtle comes from the Latin subtilis, which means “fine, thin, delicate, finely woven.” The prefix sub means “under” and the stem tilis, from tela means “web, net, warp of fabric.” The word refers to a delicate fabric of the finest thread. A related meaning refers to a person with the capacity for refinement of thought, insight, and perception. And less commonly but still relevant to this investigation, the term is also sometimes used to describe a person of sly, tricky, crafty, and artful character.
A related idea is found in the ancient Indian myth of Indra's net. This tale describes the universe as a magical net that the god Indra hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the center of the cosmos. Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels. The net is a metaphorical description of the Buddhist concept of interpenetration of all things, and symbolically describes how this interpenetration and mutual relatedness of parts is a primary truth of the cosmos.
These clues reveal that thread and the weaving of thread are universally recognized ways of describing this background matrix of life. Also implicit are qualities of uncertainty, craft, fineness of texture, and interconnectedness. These roots describe the subtle body as something that is woven. It is a finely textured tissue, nearly imperceptible to the ordinary senses, vaporous yet tensile, even tricky and deceptive at times in its presentation. In The Doctrine of the Subtle Body, the alchemist G. R. S. Mead writes:
It must, however, be always clearly understood that, for our philosophers, spirit . . . is the subtle body, an embodiment of a finer order of matter than that known to physical sense, and not soul proper. By body, moreover, is not meant developed and organized form, but rather “essence” or “plasm” that may be graded, or as it were woven into various textures. In itself unshaped, it is capable of receiving the impression or pattern of any organized form.
The grading, morphing tendency that Mead remarks on as well as its capacity to be impressed, patterned, and woven explains why the subtle body can change its presentation depending on culture, time, and the systems brought to bear on its perception.
In Chinese medicine, the subtle body is impressed with the pattern of the acupuncture meridians and points, the Five Elements and the Five Spirits. In Vedic yoga, it takes the shape of the energy centers and channels called the chakras and nadis; in the Kabbalistic tradition, it forms the sephirot of the Tree of Life. In astrology, the subtle body is shaped by the planetary movements against a backdrop of starry constellations. In Western archetypal psychology, it flows into the patterns of dreams, gods, and goddesses and other mythical symbols. Although these various alchemical systems have outer differences, they all recognize the presence of a pattern underlying the manifest world, a formless chaos of primal threads that is ordered to form psychically activated mystical shapes, designs, maps, and symbols, which ultimately make meaningful correspondences to human life. These varied expressions of subtle body are the foundation of all methodologies that support human psycho-spiritual development.
Weaving happens on a loom where there is an overlapping of horizontal and vertical threads. This overlap of warp and weft where two opposites meet and join is necessary in order to form a durable, unified fabric. From this association, I have come to see that the subtle body is formed by a process of weaving—a linking together of two polarities—matter and spirit, yin and yang, self and other. The subtle body brings opposites together in new ways, it unifies parts that have been separated.
Using a different metaphor, I liken the web of the subtle body to the energized electro-magnetic field that forms between the opposing north and south poles of a magnet. However, unlike the field that is created by moving electrically charged particles, the field of the subtle body pulses with psychic energy expressed as awareness or consciousness. The subtle body vibrates with vital, animating breaths of life rather than a measurable physical force. While the electro-magnetic force field powers electrical and mechanical systems, the field of the subtle body powers the life force that gets you out of bed in the morning. It is a psychic rather than a physical phenomenon, so the subtle body is qualitative rather than quantitative. Western science cannot measure subtle-body effects; it exists outside and beyond the evaluating obsession of the current dominant worldview. For this reason, Western medicine and science have for the most part ignored or actively denied this expression of human experience.
Despite the fact that it cannot be quantified, the subtle body has qualities, effects, and initiating tendencies that affect us at unconscious levels and can even be consciously perceived when we use our senses in a heightened way. For example, when I first met Benjamin at a Body Sacred retreat, something invisible but very real came to life in the field between us. This “something” was tricky, elusive, and powerful. It drew us together and then kept bringing us back into connection even when we tried to separate. Over the years, this “something” has directed our life in many unexpected ways. These kinds of psychic field events happen all the time. You meet a new person and immediately feel a strong click or an equally palpable aversion. It can't be measured but you know it's real. You pick up these bits of information even if you can't precisely see where they are coming from. For example, you walk into a house where someone recently died and you're filled with an inexplicable heaviness. Or you walk through an old growth forest and feel a rain of blessing, some kind of love opening your heart.
For modern Westerners, our inability to capture or analyze the substance that makes up the subtle body means we must take a leap of faith when we attempt to relate to this quality of experience. You must embrace a kind of knowing that is beyond reason or external verification. You must find a way to trust the subtle body's trickiness, its mutability, its crafty uncertainty. Alchemists call it “Mercurius,” quicksilver, that wizened face peeking out from the bark of an old tree, the scent of the moon at midnight, clouds quilting the western mountains, honey pouring from green leaves, the living world caught for just a moment and then gone.
As an alchemist, you will consciously develop this way of perceiving the world while maintaining your capacity for critical thinking and careful observation. You will open to a part of your being that has been largely dormant, to some degree even atrophied. You will revive and re-invigorate a psychic muscle every person is born with and rediscover your innate ability to discern the outer world not only with your ordinary senses but also through a subtler form of awareness that I call “the imaginal.”
No one can tell you if the images you see are real. As an alchemist you determine the value as well as the validity of your subtle body's experience. This experience can be uncomfortable living as we do in a culture that insists on external benchmarks as affirmation for what is valid. Michaela's and my recognition of her coyote companions shifted her life in a profoundly meaningful way. Likewise, your emotional, psychological, and spiritual responses are your guide. Pay attention to your inner vitality, your self-understanding, your growth, and the changes in your outer relationships. This is the work. This is the laboratory.
Often when I teach about the subtle body, people ask if it is the same as the soul. It is not. The subtle body is the finely textured cloth we weave with our awareness, caring, craft, intention, and perhaps, most importantly, our imagination to give the soul a skin that can be seen and touched. Developing our skill as a weaver and the special kind of sight we need to see the threads is the work of alchemy. The many alchemical maps and technologies that have evolved through time create a wardrobe; garments we drape over the infinite that allow us to make contact with the soul within the confines of a physical reality.
In earlier times, shamans, alchemists, and the indigenous people of all cultures lived in close relationship with this elusive, immaterial other. They tended to the web of connection on a daily basis through song, story, ritual, and prayer. So once again, I turn back to ancient times, to the indigenous roots of our language as well as the ancient symbols, stories, and myths to find more clues about the subtle body and the soul.
The English word soul comes from the early Celts who were fisherfolk and farmers. Soul is related to their word sele, which means sea. For these people, who woke in the dim glow of first morning to row their boats into the mist in search of salmon, mackerel, smelt, and eels, the soul is a shadow that rises up from the deep waters. It gives life but also takes life away. Drowning in sele's unfathomable depths was an ever-present fear for the Celts but equally present was the possibility of pulling up treasures—shimmering pearls, spiraling nautilus shells, golden coins—amidst the wriggling silver chaos of fish pulled from their nets.
One of the soul's most potent images is found in the story of the Selkie, told by the Celts, Scots, Icelanders, Siberians, and all the way across the Bering Strait by the native people of the American Northwest. The Selkie is a magical seal who comes up from the ocean depths, removes her outer pelt (her seal/soul skin), and turns into a shimmering milky skinned woman who dances in the moonlight on warm Summer nights. One evening, a fisherman comes upon her dancing on a rock rising up from the water. He is dazzled by her beauty and vows to make her his bride. Night after Summer night, he rows out to watch as she removes her pelt, dances, then puts her skin back on and returns to her home in the sea.
One night, he manages to steal her water skin while she is dancing. Without her seal skin, she is trapped in human form and cannot return to her true home. She reluctantly leaves the sea to live on land, becomes the fisherman's wife, and bears his half-seal, half-human child. She comes to love her husband and her son, but gradually, after years on land, her unprotected flesh becomes dry, her nails crack, her glorious hair falls out strand by strand, and her glittering, liquid dark eyes become so dim she can no longer see the moonlight.
Year after year, she waits patiently for her husband to return her skin and set her free, but he loves her too much and cannot bear to lose her. After seven long years on shore, she goes off in search of her skin. Beneath a stone at the edge of the ocean cliffs, she finds it where her husband hid it all those years ago. She dresses herself and swims away in the night, back to her home in the sea.
But before she swims away, she sings out to her son,
I leave but I am always with you. Only touch what I have touched, my knife, my stone carvings, the sticks I rubbed together to make our fires and you will feel me near. Listen carefully to the sounds of the sea and I will whisper my secrets in your ear. Remember me and I will always remember you and you will know my magic.
Her son becomes a carver of stone, a famous storyteller, and healer, and people come from far and wide to learn the secrets of the soul from him.
This story has helped me understand my own experience. What I have learned is that if I try to catch the soul, illuminate it, and keep it too long on land, it will become dry and brittle. It will lose its healing magic. But if I go to the edge of the sea, my night vision activated, be still and wait, the soul will rise up from the depths and come to meet me.
Imagination is an intrinsic part of our humanity and our bridge to the land of the soul. It gives us the ability to form inner images of things that are not present to our ordinary senses. The imagination has been problematic for Western philosophers since Aristotle likened it to fantasy and declared that, unlike the intellect, it is one of our faculties that “is not always correct.” Western philosophy, religion, and science have followed in Aristotle's footsteps and remained suspicious of the imagination.
In contrast, ancient alchemists aligned with artists and mystics to view the imagination as sacred, serving as a connecting link between the human and divine worlds. They believed that through our capacity to meditate, dream, and imagine, we access enlivening forces and formative powers that are not apparent to our rational minds and conscious awareness. This inborn capacity to perceive the spiritual domain and transcend the limitations of our ordinary senses allows us to communicate with divine realms, perceive the subtle body, and begin to bring to life our entelechy, the fulfillment of our spiritual potential.
Taoist alchemists regarded the imagination as the domain of the hun or cloud soul, the yang spirit whose job is to bring the messages of the celestial bodies—the sun, moon, and stars—down to Earth. The sixteenth-century European alchemist Martin Ruland the Younger spoke of the imagination in his Lexicon of Alchemy as “[t]he star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.” C. G. Jung points out that Ruland's definition firmly connects the imagination to the divine in us, what Paracelsus called the alchemical astrum, or sacred essence of life. This special kind of heavenly luminosity opens us to our star map and our destiny. Jung took this one step further to describe the imagination as a “[c]oncentrated extract of the life force, both physical and psychic.”
The word imagination, which comes from the Latin imaginatio, refers to the real and literal human power to craft images and create symbols. Writes Jung,
Imaginatio is the active evocation of inner images . . . an authentic feat of thought or ideation, which does not spin aimless and groundless fantasies “into the blue”—does not, that is to say, just play with its objects, but tries to grasp the inner facts and portray them in images true to their nature. This activity is an opus, a work.
In fact, it is the work of alchemy and it is directly linked to the weaving of the subtle body and the clothing of the soul.
Imagination contains the root word magus. Through magus, imagination joins the word group correlating to “make, machine, and might” and from there back to the ancient Indo-European root mag(h), which is also related to the word magic. The magician or magi is one who makes, creates, crafts, and in particular, makes a thing into something new. The magician works with matter and sleight of hand, transforms and recreates the world through the clever, tricky, and skillful use of the imagination.
Essential to magic and to imaginative processes are the qualities of ingenuity, uncertainty, daring, elegance, and most importantly, creativity. Magic asks that you suspend disbelief and discover the determination to see the world differently. These are also important characteristics of alchemy and Alchemical Healing, for without imagination it is impossible to see the subtle body or to truly touch the soul.
Several weeks after the coyotes arrived, Michaela did not show up for her appointment. I waited fifteen minutes, twenty, half an hour, and then gave up. She had never been even five minutes late.
I began to worry. Voices started in my head. I was on the wrong track. I'd frightened her off, missed important cues. She'd flown away, back to the forest. Disappeared again under her dark cowl, into her depressed withdrawn despair. The voices escalated. “Who do you think you are? You're kidding yourself that the other world matters, that it's a space that can heal. Nothing has changed as a result of your meeting with the coyotes.”
“How dare you trust in this world that has no existence,” a particularly denigrating voice snarled at me.
I left the office and went for a walk in the woods. I sat by a pond and watched the sunlight and water play with the images of trees and stones. I felt the pond's presence as a sweet forgiveness. When I returned to my office, there was a phone message from Michaela followed by an email:
Dear Lorie,
I had the wildest morning, which led to missing your appointment—and frantically trying to find a way to call to let you know, which I am so sorry didn't happen until too late! I am really sorry for missing the appointment and I do plan on paying for that. I don't take the appointments lightly and I would love to schedule another appointment with you. Meanwhile, I'm noticing an amazing shift in how I'm showing up to my life . . . there's so much work to do but I'm just incredibly amazed at how gently yet strongly you have helped me begin this work.
Michaela
And so, we will continue, Michaela and I, and a small pack of wild coyotes and who knows who else will show up along the way. The journey will not be brief or easy and the path will often be unclear. Depression, anxiety, and uncertainty of purpose are not “cured” in a few sessions. Identity, meaning, relationship, and intention all take time to crystallize. Michaela will have other bouts of depression and withdrawal. But we turned a corner. Michaela's soul came out from under her cloak of darkness and, for just a moment, let me see her face.
After all, you'll find there is a crafty, tricky quality to the soul and to the world of the subtle body. In this world, images appear and disappear. Things are not always what they seem. Quite suddenly, the parameters of time and space dissolve into their background matrix of infinity. Where you thought you caught a glimpse of a lifting veil, darkness returns. Despite its mercurial tendency, its ephemeral and shifting nature, its urge to hide and seek and play tricks with your mind, the soul ultimately wants to be seen, related to, cared for, and loved. This is the secret. This witnessing is what welcomes spirit back to matter and transforms lead into gold.