Alchemy of Being: When Presence is the Medicine
Most people come to therapy for solutions, fixes, or strategies to get better. And while I believe that skills are a part of healing, the deeper work often begins and continues in presence and awareness.
Alchemy of Being Therapy is grounded in the belief that therapy is less about fixing what is broken and more about being with what is. That what may seem broken may actually be the solution when we get present with it. As we learn to stay with ourselves, in body, mind, and heart, with a sense of what is actually here, something begins to shift. What was once overwhelming or fragmented can begin to soften, integrate, and reweave itself into the fabric of your life.
Presence and awareness together create the ground upon which healing not only begins, but sustains. Awareness helps us notice what has been hidden or forgotten, while presence offers a stable container for it to be held, felt, and alchemized.
Beyond Fixing: Meeting What Is
Wanting relief from symptoms and suffering such as anxiety, depression, stress, trauma, and grief is human. Of course, we wish to feel better, to heal what hurts us. Therapy can and does enable that. But what often creates more suffering is the deeper assumptions that we are broken because of these symptoms, that we must change in order to be enough, and that something is wrong with us as we are. These beliefs have the potential to make therapy another place where we have to perform or measure up.
In an embodied, relational, transpersonal approach, this is different. The invitation is to turn toward your experience with curiosity and care, not to reject parts of yourself or try to make who you are perfect.
When we meet ourselves with presence and awareness, something eases. We may find that the symptoms shift when we meet them. They shift because we haven’t pushed them away, but we’ve changed the way we relate to them. Healing, then is not so much fixing, but a claiming of the wholeness that was there all along
Presence and Awareness as Medicine
Presence is the center of this work, and awareness is the partner. By slowing down enough to observe sensations in the body, feelings emerging, and thoughts passing through, we can start to recover what has been neglected or exiled.
Presence is not rushed in my practice. Healing isn’t forced. Your system is honored. Trauma-informed care is honoring the wisdom of your system and respecting its timing. Some layers will ask to move slowly, and others open more quickly. Both rhythms are invited. Healing occurs in the timing that feels right for your being.
Whether through somatic therapy, mindfulness practices, Gestalt exploration, transpersonal awareness, or psychedelic-assisted therapy, presence and awareness become the medicine.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy offers another doorway. In expanded states of consciousness, awareness can extend to deeper layers of experience, memory, and potential. But it is attuned presence that makes these openings safe, meaningful, and transformative. Without respect for your system’s pacing, even profound insights cannot land. With it, whatever emerges can be gently integrated.
Therapy as Alchemy
The word alchemy means transformation, the integrating of states that transmutes one into another. In therapy, this does not mean magically erasing pain or conflict. It means discovering how pain can become compassion, how longing can open into clarity, and how fragmentation resolves to wholeness. This is what I call the alchemy of being. It is not so much a matter of doing more or fixing yourself and more about being deeply with yourself in a way that allows what has been hidden to come home.
An Invitation
If you are drawn to therapy that is more than a quick fix, if you are curious about how presence, awareness, embodiment, and deep listening can lastingly transform your experience, I welcome you to explore this work.
Therapy here is an unfolding, a living process of being with what is, honoring the wisdom of your system, and discovering who you already are beneath it all.
