The Alchemy of Inner Work: A Guide for Turning Illness and Suffering Into True Health and Well-Being

Alchemical Healing Enhances Western Medicine

Through our work, we offer a redefinition of healing that brings the soul back into the conversation and links individual health to the vitality of the world soul—the surrounding community of human and nonhuman beings that make up our world. Alchemical Healing is not meant to be a replacement or even a complement to Western medicine, traditional psychotherapy, or the current symptomatic approach of modern Chinese medicine. Rather, it invites us to leap into a completely different conversation about health. It proposes a new set of values, attitudes, goals, and skills and offers a way to address the nonphysical forms of human distress, the psychic and spiritual imbalances, and disease that are at the root of so much of modern suffering and illness. As my doctor friend says, “What you do doesn’t complement Western medicine, it enhances it.”

The Subtle Body

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 in Eastern and Western cultures for at least the past 2,500 years.

In my years of experience, I 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.