Alchemy begins before we enter the mine, the forge, or laboratory. It begins in the blue vault, the seas, in the mind's thinking in images, imagining ideationally, speculatively, in words that are both images and ideas, in words that turn things into flashing ideas and ideas into little things that crawl, the blue power of the word itself.
—James Hillman, A Blue Fire
You begin the work of alchemy by stepping into a laboratory—a protected place where you do intentional, conscious creative work. The laboratory might be a treatment room where you heal, a journal where you write, a studio where you paint, a garden where you cultivate vegetables, or a designated space where you meditate or read. It could be your kitchen, your bedroom, your body, or a tent in the wilderness. It could be a friendship, a group, a marriage, or an ongoing, therapeutic relationship.
The matter is the medium you are exploring. It can be pigment, soil, soup, anger, grief, love, your vision for the future, or the wounds of childhood still haunting your current life. It can be a dream. It is always connected to your soul.
The tools are the things you find in your hand and hold in your heart.
From an alchemical perspective, your laboratory is a sacred space where something new gestates and comes to life. It must have certain womb-like qualities, including protection, defined limits, seclusion, and the capacity to remain intact until a process is complete.
The laboratory can be any place in the world you inhabit. What distinguishes it from other ordinary places is the key you use to enter. Ideally, the whole of your life will become a living laboratory.
In this chapter, I share keys that have opened the door to my own laboratory again and again. I turn to these keys when I need to understand my physical symptoms, my emotional upsets, and my dreams. I rely on them when I face big decisions. Daily, these keys help me stay on track and aligned with what is best for me, from deciding whether to say yes or no to an invitation, to knowing what foods I need to eat to nourish my body, to adjusting my work schedule when I'm feeling pushed to my edges. I bring these keys with me every time I walk into the treatment room. I teach them to my patients who use them to make medical decisions—whether or not to take anti-depressants or to follow the doctor's recommendation of chemotherapy after surgery—as well as personal and professional life choices. These keys are the touchstones that can help you keep your focus and faith in the midst of the destabilizing uncertainties, moral challenges, and chaos of our changing world.
The foundational Emerald Tablet of European alchemy was carved on a block of liquid emerald that later crystallized to gemstone. As the story goes, it was discovered in a cave by Alexander the Great when he conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, but its actual origins remain unknown. The first precept or key of the Emerald Tablet sets the tone for all alchemical work: search relentlessly for truth.
From the start, alchemy has been about the discovery of the secret truth of life itself. Alchemists understood that the exploration begins right here in the present moment, in the place where your feet stand. Search from within. Trust your own knowing. Listen to your senses and your heart.
Alchemy is an independent and unconventional tradition that champions personal vision, experimentation, idiosyncratic practices, and unorthodox spirituality. Alchemists think for themselves. This truth explains why the secret art has always posed a threat to organized religion, authoritarian leadership, and fundamentalist attitudes whose validity and power depend on the acceptance of an enforced, one-size-fits all reality.
Begin by doubting everything you think you know. Sacrifice certainty. Get curious.
Leave behind your habitual way of being and enter the world as if it were a dream. Ask yourself: Why did this weed decide to grow beside my front door? Why are so many angry people crossing my path this week? What is it about this corner of the garden that makes me feel so happy?
Look at the world anew. See the sky as an ocean. Imagine trees with their branches as roots reaching down to the stars. Cherish your challenging friends as teachers and your troubles as possibilities for growth.
Ancient Taoist alchemists viewed nature as the “visible face of Tao.” The world you see reflects an unseen world that shimmers just beyond the veil of form. The configurations of the constellations in the infinite sky above are mirrored in the patterns of your daily life on Earth below.
From an alchemical perspective, Heaven and Earth, Above and Below, are equal partners in the dance of life. But when it came to distilling a drop of the One Thing—the agent of transformation—alchemists looked downward. Alchemy invites you to recognize that matter, including your body and all the organic forms of life on Earth, is not just inert “stuff” to be weighed and manipulated, analyzed and fixed, commodified and used, but holds energetic patterns and crystallized vibrations that express active, divine intelligence. The more you bring your soul's gaze to the material world, the more it will come alive to you. In alchemy, as in a dream, anything can be your teacher.
All you need to begin is a stone, a leaf, a handful of earth from beneath your feet, or an annoying symptom that won't go away.
Approach whatever comes to you as an aspect of your Self. Sit next to it like a friend. Notice its texture, its smell, its flavor, the sound it makes when you hold it in your hand. Remember that all life is connected.
Once you have integrated this “other” into your being, you will be able to carry its intelligence within you.
When the time is right, ask a question and wait . . . listen for what comes.
Alchemy is a process of refinement or upgrade organized around the belief that there is something eternal and divine that is an intrinsic part of who you are. This speck of divinity can be refined through art, skill, and practice. It responds to your attention and care, maturing toward the expression of immortal qualities such as wisdom, compassion, courage, serenity, and personal radiance.
Yet, the upgrades or “gold” of alchemy cannot be predicted or forced by the conscious ego, the mind, or will. The cracking of even the most well-crafted and consciously tended vessels is an ever-present possibility. Loss, failure, and death are all possible outcomes of the work. Your job is not to know but rather to trust the process. The work of the will is to faithfully keep bringing you back to the place where miracles can occur—back to your practice, back to the pause, back to the laboratory, back to the relationship, back to cultivating the garden of your life.
Author and environmentalist Derrick Jensen reminds us that we do not stand in front of a tree shouting, “Grow, damn you, grow!” Instead, he references the Greek word kairos—the time of destiny or moment of blossoming—to answer the question, “How long does change take?”
Kairos is not under our conscious control. It comes as a kind of grace. All you can do as a person committed to new possibilities for our planet is to keep creating the conditions for change and stay committed to the process. Return again and again to the practice at hand in order for the miracle to occur. In the words of poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi, “. . . painstaking work, then the swan spreads its wings.”
Pick one small action that you don't do regularly—drinking a cup of tea in silence while watching the sky, feeding sparrows, doing a sun salutation in the morning, writing a note to someone you love or a friend who is estranged, reading something beautiful in the morning. It can be anything.
Decide how long you will continue the practice (a day, one week, one month . . .).
Watch what happens as you work with the practice. Watch your resistance but do it anyway. Watch the tricks you play with yourself to get out of it. Watch the emotions that move through you. Watch your doubt that doing something this simple can make a difference.
And then watch what happens when you do stay with it. Record what you notice in a journal.
To listen beyond the words, to listen to the spaces between the words, to follow the arc of the emotion all the way to a person's soul . . . this listening is what allows you to recognize the poem, the dream, the riddle, the secret embedded in the story. This attention is what allows you to move beyond the limits of the physical body and enter the sacred space of spirit-level healing.
What distinguishes hearing, an involuntary neurological response to sound waves, from listening, which heals and transforms in an alchemical way?
Listening is a full-body experience that involves all your senses. It is a resonance that constellates between you and another person. It is an exchange of energy. Something comes to life that wasn't there before. I cannot count the number of times a patient has told me, “I feel better just from being heard so deeply. I don't even need needles.”
Deep listening is a treatment, a kind of needle that touches the soul. Listening doesn't just happen. It is a practice, a skill that must be developed, cultivated, and honed. Practice the next time someone is telling you something that is difficult to hear. Imagine your heart is an empty bowl of listening. Let words fall into you like drops of Summer rain.
In this moment, wherever you are as you read these words, stop and place the tips of your fingers in the slight depression just in front of your ears. In traditional Chinese medicine, this point is called Listening Palace.
Turn your attention to the sounds around you.
Out of this tapestry of sound, find one sound—a voice outside the window, a footfall on a stair, a honking horn, a bird on a branch, a cloud passing, a star falling in a galaxy far away—and offer this sound as a gift to your Heart.
Like the green chlorophyll of the plant kingdom, the human imagination is a converter of light into energy; however, while the chloroplast, the part of the plant that does the converting, transforms sunlight into glucose (chemical energy that fuels metabolic processes and the physical growth of the plant), the imagination transforms spiritual light into images—psychic energy that fuels the psycho-spiritual processes and the soul development of a human being.
In order to work with the light of your imagination, you must learn to work with images, as if seeing in a dream even when you are awake. This way of seeing is not scientific—objective, repeatable, and analytic, but rather alchemical—relational, interactive, and ever-changing. It takes practice. Be patient. What you see with your imaginal sight is determined only by the quality and necessity of the moment, by what is arising now in you and in the people around you.
As it becomes increasingly crucial for people to discern what is “really” going on in the world beyond the superficial and contradictory information from mainstream news sources, to know who and what is life-affirming, and what we need to avoid or confront, this kind of seeing becomes an alchemist's indispensable tool. The following practice will help you to open your inner eyes and bring you back to what ancient alchemists called, the “magick of twilight.”
Begin by dimming the lights in a room or do this practice at twilight or dawn in a peaceful place.
Find something you want to look at—a tree, a pond, a mountain, a crystal, or even a photo of a person to whom you feel close.
Bring your awareness down into your body. Notice your breath and invite any extraneous thoughts and tensions to drain away.
Notice any tension around your eyes. Squeeze them tightly together and then release them, softening the muscles. Allow your eyes to sink back into the sockets, to rest easily in the hollow of the orbital bones.
Rather than seeing with your eyes, see through them. Invite the outer world to come into you rather than going out to get it.
Do not focus directly on your object. Instead, let your vision wander over, around, and through it. Feel the sensation of the light as it enlivens your optic nerves and settles gently on the folds of your imagination.
Now close your eyes and “see” the object with your inner eyes, the eyes of your imagination. You may see a halo of light begin to form around your object or another image form nearby. You may see a face take shape in the bark of the tree or an entire landscape in the clouds.
If you continue to practice this meditation, taking images from nature into your being and exploring them with your inner sight, you will gradually sharpen the eyes of your imagination and begin to see with your heart what cannot be seen with your ordinary eyes.
A river of experience flows through you as you make your way to work, pick up your child from school, stop at the grocery store, or rush to your couple's therapy session. In any given moment of the day, you have a hunch, a feeling, a rush of emotion, but you're too busy to notice. You can't quite hear the messages of your body. You don't know what the hunch, the feeling, the rush of emotion needs. The divine whispers through you, but you don't yet speak its language.
The phone rings and, like a frightened cat, your spine stiffens. You wake in the morning with a heaviness in your chest. Your partner leaves the house and your breath catches; there is something you meant to say, but what?
Alchemists recognize that these mutterings and murmurings of our bodies matter. Our neuromuscular reactions need to be treated with care and regarded as friendly messengers even when they make us uncomfortable. The ripples of qi that surface as the life force moves through us offer direct insight into the needs and desires of our souls.
Inner Sensing is a practice that combines Zen mindfulness and qi gong inner visioning with Eugene Gendlin's Focusing practice. I use Inner Sensing daily. Whether you have a specific issue, problem, or question that you want to work with, or you simply want to get in touch with the wisdom of your body without a specific goal, this practice will help you get closer to your own truth and discover information you need to get closer to your Tao. With practice, Inner Sensing gets easier and you'll learn to hear your body's messages more efficiently, perhaps even in the space of a pause.
Begin by reversing the light! Drop your awareness down and in. You can close your eyes or leave them open. Bring awareness to your body and say hello.
Beginning at the top of your head, travel downward, using your imaginal sight to view each part of your body as your awareness drops down from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Bring an attitude of kindness to any fidgety, painful, or upset feelings you encounter along the way.
Once you've journeyed through your body, invite any tensions, worries, or concerns that you don't need to drop away. If some things want to stick around, make room for them too.
Now, invite your awareness to gather in the area between your pelvis and your chin and feel into what is going on there.
Bring your attention back to this area if it wanders. Rest in this spacious awareness without “doing” for a few moments. The core is home base, a place you can always come back to.
If you have identified an issue that you want to work with, bring it into your awareness. Notice what happens in your core. What tightens? What loosens? How is your breathing? If nothing forms, notice what “nothing” feels like.
If you do not have a specific issue, ask yourself, “How am I doing in there right now?” and notice what comes.
You will become aware of a vague bodily sensation that comes in response to your awareness and interest. The vague sensation is somewhere in between physical and emotional, like the feeling you get in your body when you've forgotten something even though you don't know precisely what you left behind. This bodily sensation is what Eugene Gendlin named the “Body Felt Sense.”
The Body Felt Sense doesn't need to make sense to your rational mind. Give it room to be surprising or odd, pleasurable, unfamiliar, confusing.
Ask what the feeling needs or wants you to know. Without rushing, directing, interrupting, or demanding, deeply listen to your body.
When you get what it is your body wants you to know, you will feel a physical shift, a sense of movement, release and relaxation, emotion or a change in your breathing.
Close the process by writing the information you receive down in your journal. If there is an action step you need to take, do it promptly. Don't put it off. This will keep your process alive and moving.
When you practice Inner Sensing, you move between your everyday three-dimensional experience and the multidimensional nonlinear experience of the dream time. In traditional cultures, this movement was a recognized part of all sacred ritual and the end of the ritual was marked by some kind of acknowledgment or gift giving. Appreciate your body by taking a deep breath or gently touching a part of you that needs energy, healing, or warmth. Stretch. Ring a bell. Be grateful.
In alchemy, every transformation begins with lead—a seemingly immovable, inert, opaque block of darkness, an impasse or chaos. Without this lead, there is no opus, no work, no potential for anything new to come to life.
In Alchemical Healing, transformation begins with a kind of lead, prima materia, which means “first matter.” It refers to the presenting symptom that begins the work of healing. The prima materia is the problem that finally gets your attention. It is the cipher, the unanswerable question, the intractable pattern. It is the thing that confounds you, stops you in your tracks, engages, enrages, enthralls, or frightens you. It is the bad habit you can't stop, the pain that has no identifiable cause, the recurring dream you do not understand, the deadened relationship you cannot leave, the relentless hope, the unrequited passion, the stuck place that will not shift.
Sometimes, the prima materia is a conglomeration of personal and ancestral stories and shadowy feelings we have buried—the angry, depressed, grieving, introverted parts of ourselves we don't want to feel or look at. One patient described it as “a loneliness that follows me everywhere I go.” Another said she felt that the despair of her holocaust-surviving father kept her from her own joy.
The alchemical paradox is that these neglected, rejected parts are our most important allies, the angels who have kept our souls safe until we are able to heal; they are guides to the Self. The prima materia is the raw material of change.
Take a look at your life and consider what you would most like to get rid of. Here is where you will find it—in the headaches, bed bugs, burned toast, births, deaths, failed projects, family fights, love affairs, lost gambles, mismatched socks, stubborn symptoms, and annoying habits that plague your life. Right here. Right now.
Use Inner Sensing to get in touch with your body.
Move your awareness from the top of your head all the way down to your feet. If you can't feel your feet, try wiggling each of your toes separately.
Don't try to change anything. Everything is okay as it is. Just check in to see how things are doing down there in the darkness.
Once you have said hello to your body, bring your attention to the area about two inches below your belly button, what Taoist alchemists called the dantian, the cinnabar field, the alchemical cauldron of your body. You can place your hands there to help you focus on it. Take a breath down to this part of you. In alchemy, this lower cauldron of the belly is considered one of the main places where renewal and transformation occurs.
Now ask yourself, “What is between me and feeling all okay about my life?” Be honest.
Don't rush the answer but let it come up from your body. At first you might just feel the prima materia as a hazy wordless feeling in your gut. Don't worry, just wait for a few moments and then see if you can find a word or phrase that gets at what you are feeling there and imagine you could move it over to the side of you.
Repeat the question “What is between me and feeling all okay about my life?” and move over the next thing you find.
Keep going with this process until you feel you have nothing left to move.
Take a look at all those parts and pieces of your life that are sitting there right next to you. See which one bothers you most and invite it to the table.
Now sit back and say hello to the most cherished guest at the banquet of your life!
Congratulations! You found your prima materia, the lead you are going to turn into gold. Here is the basis of your inner work. Whether it is big or small, something that has bothered you for a long time, or something that appeared just a moment ago, it's what is present for you now. The problem or symptom is the door you walk through to become who you are fully meant to be. Even if it feels bad or boring or dumb, from an alchemical perspective, this prima materia is a precious treasure in disguise.
As you move through the following chapters, bring the concepts, practices, and tools to bear on your lead. Have patience. Bring courage. In this way, you will make modern-day alchemy a practical part of your life. In this way, you will also master skills and tools that will allow you to help others. In this way, you will join alchemists throughout time and begin the great work of healing and transforming our world.