Embodied Alchemy: Finding a Place of Safety

The root intention of Queer Clinic is to offer embodied alchemy to the queer community, through a range of voices and teachings and techniques. This post is an attempt to find a grounded way to explain what this means to us and why it’s so important.   

Energy work, whether called alchemy or any other name, is deeply powerful and profoundly simple. At its most simple, it’s feeling your emotions and allowing them to change; letting yourself unfreeze, activate, relax, open, exhale, whatever comes next. It’s becoming present with the sensations asking for your awareness, without judgement, and listening so they can flow and you can experience something new. When we’re in the flow state, we are creative and connected and more at one with life.

Most of us have experienced repeating negative emotions at some point and we may feel like we’re ‘really feeling’ those emotions all the time. But if we find ourselves in a repeated state of stagnant depression, or chronic anxiety, the truth is we’re subconsciously pushing away feeling rather than surrendering to it and letting it go.  This is understandable because it is scary to feel negative feelings, especially if we don’t trust our bodies and minds to not overwhelm us or our environment to support us. Society encourages us to not feel, to instead subdue and distract ourselves, or engage in reactionary outrage or blaming behaviour.

Unfortunately, however, reacting to or putting off listening to our pain only prolongs our suffering, by turning it into an identity that we both activate and resist. The feeling of “ugh” around depression, is the pushing it away. It’s saying “this is a bad feeling so I’m going to try and push through it and pretend it’s not got a grip on me, even though it tries to stop me living.” When we respond to stress or overwhelm by working harder and trying to do more, we are resisting listening to the message of the emotion by trying to take action so the emotion will go away. Most of us will have experienced that this approach doesn’t ever really work, apart from occasional brief flashes of relief before the next wave of overwhelm comes.

We can’t ‘beat’ depression, or any emotion, by treating them like they’re obstacles to overcome. When we make anything, including emotions, our enemy, we create resistance and it will push back. Think of something completely neutral like a wall: if you push against it, lash out against it, you will feel resistance and hurt yourself. This is Newton’s third law of Motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

So rather than struggle against or try to overcome a painful emotion, the process of embodied alchemy teaches us how to listen and engage with our feelings. This is not being self-indulgent or using our feelings as a reason to go into stories — although these can be necessary steps along the way, especially if we’ve not been used to showing ourselves compassion. Instead, it’s about becoming centred and feeling our emotions from a neutral place of awareness. It’s ‘embodied’ because we engage the wisdom of the body and the language of symbolism rather than the mind to access those deeper places within us and give them a space to communicate with us. Different teachers will teach different ways of doing this, with different language, but it is the same root process.

We have decided collectively that pain is bad, depression is bad, anger is bad. And it might feel like “of course they’re bad, they hurt us” — but what actually hurts the most is the resistance, the pushing away, the struggle and the suffering. When we open to the possibility that allowing an emotion to be fully felt is not going to kill or overwhelm us, we can experience that emotion in a wholly different way. When there’s nothing in your head saying “this is bad”, we can explore the emotion, feel how it’s actually trying to protect us from something, experience the beauty of it. This can be as subtle a sensation as a yawn, a sigh, a shiver or sense of some part of you relaxing. It can also be a really beautiful and incredible experience; it might bring up surges of tears or physical sensations, but it feels alive with momentum rather than a stagnant battle. Often, after experiencing a shift, our thoughts will be change along with the bodily state.

Engaging with embodied alchemy is particularly important for the queer community because we are a community that holds a lot of trauma, internalised judgement and disconnect from our bodies, often resulting in chronic pain conditions. LGBTQIA+ people also experience less access to the wellness industry that is sharing self-healing practices and techniques largely to cis, white, straight, middle class women. It is essential that queer and marginalised people have access to inclusive, empowering practices that enable us to connect with our bodies and feel and trust our innate inner wisdom.

Trauma doesn’t have a miracle cure; healing from personal and generational trauma is a long process that needs to be respected and treated as gently as possible. There can be many subconscious layers of protection to getting to a place of allowing our body’s sensations, and each layer must be witnessed and then shed so we can go deeper. To be able to do this, we need to be able to stay present with the emotion, without getting lost in the stories of our mind, or without getting caught in trauma loops — and this is where space holders and community come in. While we cannot take away each other’s trauma, and our feelings are only ever our own to feel and respond to, we can make the healing process easier and more supportive through our own education and healing journeys.

Our intention at Queer Clinic is to gather teachers, facilitators and community who bring their hearts to hold the space for themselves and others to fully be with their emotions; to create a place of safety in which change can occur. The more of us that can do this, the more we can create an emotional and energetic field for each other to broaden our perspective, arrive into presence, release the subconscious grip and allow energy to transform. Through this, pain becomes a doorway that we can walk through to transformation and empowerment.