What is emotional alchemy?

What is emotional alchemy?

A friend asked me this. It’s a big part of what I do.

Alchemy is turning one thing into another – lead into gold. Emotional alchemy is turning fear, frustration, anger into peacefulness and love.

How does this even work?

When we are stressed and experiencing shame, guilt, fear, etc, generally our sympathetic nervous system is firing on red alert. Sometimes known as the ‘fight or flight response,’ this means cortisol and adrenaline are firing around our bodies. This is a normal physiological response and should not create any long-term problems when it is short-term rather than chronic, and properly discharged.

If an animal is being chased by a predator and in fight or flight, when the chase is over (if they survive) they will lie down on the ground and shake. This discharges the energy of the stress response and the nervous system returns to a rest and digest state of relaxation.

When animals get into captivity they lose this innate instinct to discharge. Humans have lost this ability too. And we spend way longer in our stress response than is good for us.

When we don’t sink into our parasympathetic nervous system, we don’t have full access to our creativity, intuition or reflective capacities.

And we’re much more likely to reach for a glass of wine than we are to lie down and shake off our stress. Shaking, sounding, running, moving, yawning, burping and somatic (felt sense in the body) therapy all help to move the response through your body and return your nervous system to relaxation.

Over time if our nervous systems are not discharged then we become more emotionally reactive or physically sick.

Emotional alchemy is feeling the feelings and discharging the energy in the body by moving it through the system. This is experienced as a heightening of the emotional pain initially – held within the therapeutic relationship – followed by a deep sense of relief and peace as the emotion moves through. Fear into love. It feels a bit like this picture, of moving the clouds at the surface, to reveal the sun that’s been there all along.

There are techniques to bring up (trigger) stored emotions and this process over time clears you out to feel lighter, brighter, clearer, less reactive and more full of love. It removes your learned fear and puts you in touch with your authentic self and power.

We touch on it in the Soul Embodiment course in the group and we deep dive into it in a 1-1 setting with Spiral.

It’s the forefront of mental and physical health to do this. It’s cutting edge efficiency of personal development, therapy and transformation.

It’s a way of releasing unhealthy, fearful behaviours and a spiritual pathway home to soul.