On Paradox and the Alchemy of Arrival

“Don’t stop arriving. You’re almost there. You know the clearing is just ahead. I know because we are happening at the same time.” –Buddy Wakefield

One of the things that I’m famous for saying to clients repeatedly is, “The process is the solution.” If you’re anything like me and the majority of people I work with, you too, likely fall prey to the occasional delusion that there is that magic moment of deliverance. 

Maybe sometimes there is. But it’s fleeting.

If I had a nickel for every time a client said to me, “But I thought I was done with that,” I’d never have to work another day in my life. 

We tend to think of “arrival” as a fixed concept. But what if it’s also fluid? What if it’s something that “happens” and also something we do again and again?

Here’s a slightly uncomfortable secret: We’re never “done.”

The good news is that, because those pesky Usual Suspects will undoubtedly rear their heads every so often, we can take the pressure off of our Inner Exterminators. 

At the end of the day, it’s not about eradicating core wounds and chronic issues. It’s about changing our relationship to them. Remember that energy is neither created nor destroyed. There is no addition or subtraction; there is only transmutation. 

This is the concept behind Psychoalchemy.

So here we are at the Big Launch. There’s a brand new website and a blog and shiny social media pages. My uber-brilliant team at Neon Butterfly did a bang-up job. I couldn’t be more thrilled. 

One might say I’ve “arrived.” And, in a sense, I have. But, at the very same time, I am still arriving. 

I will always be still arriving.

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Inherent in Buddy Wakefield’s quote is a fundamental paradox; there is this notion of getting “there,” while at the same time there is a plea for concurrent and ongoing arrival. The two live side-by-side.

It’s easy to see the creation, the product, the “there” in the case of Psychoalchemy.com. What’s less apparent, perhaps, is the “still arriving” aspect; the ongoing inner alchemy. 

I live and work the process that I teach. And while it’s tempting to just display the shine and call it a day, it’s not the most honest portrayal. So I am going to take you behind the scenes. Or behind the “seens,” as it were.

This project, which included everything from creating a “Brand Story” to building the beautiful site you see before you today (and lots in between) was a nearly 8-month journey. 

But I was arriving even before we ever began. 

If you follow my writing at all, you might have read “The Things That Make Me.” In short, it’s a reckoning with personal power; with feminine leadership; with “showing up.” I wrote it after co-leading a Transformational Yoga & Coaching Retreat in Italy last year.

I have always had a paradoxical relationship with being seen. I both crave it and dread it simultaneously. The great psychologist D.W. Winnicott said, “Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” This is precisely the ambivalence I’m talking about.

A couple of years ago, during the time I was doing a transformative yoga training called Conquering Lion, I had a conversation with my teacher, Kelly Morris. A fellow writer, she had recently penned some brilliance and sent it to an old college writing professor. We were on the phone when she announced that she wanted to read me his response because I needed to hear it too. 

This line still rings in my ears: What strikes me is just how uncomfortable you are with your own remarkableness.

It was a significant moment. Something deep and true and fundamental got touched.

There is no gift more precious than being truly seen, even when what’s witnessed is the “unflattering” struggle. Reflecting someone accurately, in her own true image, is an exquisite offering of love. Yet we often resist it with a vengeance.

Those individuals who not only have the gift of penetrating sight, but also the generosity of skillful rendering are rare. Considering that my Conquering Lion training was a portal to connection with some phenomenally powerful people this way, it is fitting that I found Abby Allen of Neon Butterfly through the CLY network.

A big part of me absolutely dreaded the prospect of re-branding; I associated it with gimmicks and shticks. The visions of terror were relentless: aesthetic abominations in the form of hokey, cartoonish headshots super-imposed on busy, larger-than-life stock banners with violent pop-ups holding innocent perusers hostage for an email address. If this was "marketing," I was out.

I value authenticity far too much to abandon essence for formula. And so I was terrified of being “watered down” or made to look like a caricature. But the project was inevitable. My old website threatened to crash every time I updated it. It wasn’t mobile friendly. And I’d certainly evolved alongside the technology in six years' time.

And then there was that “being seen” thing. If I was going to create a brand and a website and get photos taken and write, well then, the point was visibility. Not in an attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing way, but in a way that sought to pay homage to the (uncomfortable) magnificence.

I don’t even know how to begin to talk about Abby and her work. At face value, I hired her and her team to build a platform, create a brand, and launch the media that would get the story out into the world. She certainly did that. But, in a way, that was the tiniest part.

Well, it was and it wasn’t.

See here’s the thing: I struggle greatly with the material world. I am a visionary; when it comes to the practicalities of translation to form, I can get paralyzed. 

One of my favorite books is called On Becoming an Alchemist. In it there is a chapter called “Dissolution” in which the author talks about creative energy in its “volatile” (unmanifest) form and in its “fixed” (matter-like) form. The first time I read about the journey from “volatile” to “fixed,” all I could do was sob. To bring the energy of pure potential down into the world of form is to contend with a sort of death. The third dimensional world is imperfect. A vision can never be rendered in its inherent perfection once it becomes fixed. 

This is precisely why I prefer to allow my dreams, visions, and ideas to exist in their volatile form…which is to say, in the imaginal realm, where I can enjoy them devoid of a “warts-and-all” status. The problem, of course, is that books don’t get written. And pictures don’t get taken. And websites don’t get built. 

Not to mention the invisibility issue.

At every turn of this project, when Abby would come back to me with something concrete-- a logo, a site layout, a revised version of some copy-- I would feel my body tighten and clench. I almost didn’t want to look. After all, I was wired for disappointment; form was an inevitable letdown.

Here’s the thing that still astounds me: every single time she showed me something I was blown away. I expected to be relieved at best-- because what else could one hope for when there was simply no way to translate the impeccability of vision to the concrete realm? 

It seemed that Abby had managed the impossible.

Only it wasn’t impossible. Because she had done it. 

I've been very tempted to give her all the credit (and she sure deserves a heap!).

But then something hit me: the alchemical agent was, in part, my budding ability to recognize the remarkableness that Kelly and her professor were talking about. Sure, Abby had to render it. But I also had to see it. 

It was a co-created effort.

Abby honored the depth of my vision; she "got" my essence so profoundly that she was able to mirror back to me a version of myself that, at some level, was clearer and perhaps even more accurate than the murkier ideations floating around in volatile space.

How insidious the ways of resisting our own light can be.

A couple of nights before we finished a draft of the site, I was soaking in my bathtub listening to a dharma talk by Tara Brach. At one point Tara turned to a somatic exercise and the point of inquiry had to do with what we, in that living moment, were unwilling to feel in our bodies. Much to my own astonishment, the answer that came back wasn’t sadness, anger, fear, or disappointment. It was love. Pure, radiant, unfettered, painstaking love. Let’s face it: that kind of love is annihilating. Despite the platitudes that pervade social media textgrams and all of the “spiritual correctness,” love of the sort I’m talking about is far more exacting. There’s nothing breezy or romantic about it; it wreaks havoc on will and ego and all of the other inner upholders of status quo comfort.

Suffice it to say that this project has had me up against my own edge. Self love, especially, is both a harsh and tender mistress.

I almost never say that I'm proud of myself. (I'm not proud of that.) Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, after all. It most certainly gets a bad rap. But feeling good about who we are, what we've created, and the gifts that we have to share with the world is integral. I'm not talking about hubris. I'm talking about being in right relationship with our own radiance.

A couple times during our process, Abby mentioned how proud she was of herself; she'd held and rendered some aspect of the vision in such a true and honest way that she was almost giddy. She wasn't afraid to share with me that, after the first draft of the site went up, she awoke in the middle of the night, excited, marveling at how incredible it was. 

I'm going to steal a page from her book: it's not only okay-- it's vital-- to celebrate ourselves and our efforts. All of this-- the seeing, the being seen, the delicateness of vision, the clumsy unwieldiness of form, the rendering of remarkableness, the resistance, the ambivalence, the fear, the love, the truth of heart-- this is the work of the sacred journey.

I’m wildly proud of our co-creation.

Here we are, hovering in the sweet spot where the finishing and the embarking overlap. This moment is a finite pause in an infinite process.

We stand here together. There is always a collectivity to these things. It starts with showing up.

And we’ve shown up.

So, welcome. Thank you for arriving. 

Don’t stop. 

We're almost there. 

We're just getting started. 

The Things That Make Me

If you've talked to me at all in the last six weeks, I’ve probably insisted that you read Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things. (P.S. You should. P.P.S. It takes a lot to impress me, but when I get hooked on something, I don’t shut up. So humor me.) Anyway, I could sing the praises of this extraordinary gem of a book for innumerable reasons, but there is one, in particular, that compels me, perhaps above all others.

You see, it’s an “advice” book. Before she revealed herself as the phenom who wrote Wild, Cheryl Strayed was the author of the “Dear Sugar” column at The Rumpus where she “advised” readers on everything from how to become a writer to how to recover lost faith to how to live with (and love!) one’s Inner Perv.

The book’s queries cover vast terrain, and serve as testimony to the beauty and grit of human experience.

Strayed is a master of multi-dimensional listening. She hears what is above and below the actual questions; what is absent in light of what is present. She pays attention to negative space. But even that isn’t her gift par excellence.

Here’s what is: She gets in the mud with people. She lets us see her mess. Rather than dispensing expert advices from Up On High, she offers stories from her own life; ones that serve as corollaries to the precise lessons sought by her querents. And in that offering of fellowship, she turns the traditional Advice Column genre on its head.

There is no expert here; there is only an invitation to meet in the trenches of our shared human life. This is Story Medicine, wherein the roles of Witness and Confessor become, at times, indistinguishable.

In a word, Cheryl Strayed is humble. And to be humble when cast in the role of Deliberate Knower is an even more radical thing.

This is wildly refreshing as I’ve always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with my role as a leader-- as a teacher, as a therapist, as a healer, as someone in a professed position of power. As someone who is supposed to have the “answer.” There’s something about having some sort of supposed authority that has always felt a bit disingenuous at best and slightly grandiose at worst.

And so to guard against the possible obnoxiousness of actually believing that I know what’s best for anyone (the horror, the horror!), I become almost self-effacing. Only that doesn’t work either. Although I suppose I reason that it’s better than the self-inflated thinking that would have me believe that I’m somehow saving the world. And so I commit myself to it on days when I don’t know what else to do. (There are more of those days than you might imagine.)

There’s no potency at either pole. It’s either I’m up too high or I’m down too low. And the work gets done at the ground level (thanks for the reminder, Cheryl.). Neither position is truly humble, precisely because neither one is honest. They are equal opportunity afflictions.

As fate would have it, I was reading Tiny Beautiful Things on a flight to Italy, where I was going to be co-leading a Transformational Yoga and Coaching Retreat. And wielding my power in the balanced and honest way that I want to stymies me tenfold when I work with groups. (Which, of course, was what I was about to spend a week doing.)

One-on-one work (which is mostly how I fill my days) has always felt more organic and relational to me. And that comes fairly easily. But when I have an “audience,” this strange thing happens. I get “performance anxiety.” I contract. I don’t take up my space. And in that tightness, I rob myself and others of an effulgence that might just free us both.

Fittingly, in the kind of poetic way that these things go, the quality that I am by far most critical of in my teachers is always some version of the un-humble virus. (My favorite strain to protest is performativeness; that part of them that wants fandom rather than the essential nutrient of honest contact.) But any strain will do.

I often pride myself on being able to suss out the answer to this key question upfront when I consider a teacher: Is this person willing to let herself be moved by me and our process? If the answer is no, she is in violation of one of Jung’s incontrovertible truths about alchemy.

Ironically, my own lack of humility announces itself in the witch hunts that I have, at times, gone on in order to expose a few crossed wires. (Let it be known: I have made my fair share of messes here.)

It also announces itself in my refusal, at other times, to stand in what I know. To own it. To engage. (Recently, a teacher in the coaching program I’m currently enrolled in said to another student something along these lines: “When you know as much as you do and you hide, you look creepy and dangerous.” I feel like she might as well have been speaking directly to me. Goodness knows my quietness doesn’t usually fool people. And it unnerves the hell out of teachers when I sit in the back of a room.)

So given all of this, I’m more than a little bit mortified to admit that I struggle with letting the essence of who I am simply flow through me when people are looking.

But I do.

Last year, while in the midst of my Conquering Lion Yoga training, I had a conversation with one of my teachers (one who, incidentally, transmits a rare reverence and humility). Maria recognized the struggle in me; the fear of pushing out more unabashedly. Perhaps more importantly, though, she recognized the heart that wanted to push out.

One day she said to me, “Ashley, when we’re stuck in our self-consciousness, and we’re worried about doing it right, or how we look or don't look, we’re not being of service. Because then it’s all about us.” It was something that I’d heard before, put in a different way, and knew to be true. And yet in that moment I heard a truth underneath a truth that I hadn’t acknowledged fully: there was a selfishness, not to mention an arrogance, to my having to come across a certain way; of needing to present as The Woman Who Actually Has Her Shit Together.

The thing about being on a residential retreat is that, like it or not, you’re in community. For at least a little while. And as fast as you might want to run away when you’re in cahoots with some unflattering bullshit, it’s hard to completely hide. Much to my chagrin (or maybe not), others saw when I got cranky about shitty WiFi, found myself seasick on a boat coming home in the rain, fell prey briefly to my Obsession Du Jour, or cried at lunch when my co-leader unexpectedly penetrated me with a question about desire.

It’s a tricky thing, this being with; this being in communion while also holding the rails. I don’t really know how to do it. There are few, if any, good models. I have a lot of teachers who are doing the best they can with what they have but who are still at the mercy of the heartbreaking phenomenon that I witness again and again: they’ve built and nurtured these beautiful communities but they remain constantly at the periphery of their own creations. They’re “within” by virtue of association, but they’re “without” because, somehow, they won’t come down fully into them. They’re too busy “holding space” and/or taking care of everyone else’s needs to let themselves get worked.

It’s been an inconspicuous hiding place for too long now.

And I’ve been guilty too.

There is this yoga teacher I take class with often. I have a deep fondness for her. Many times, after class, I’ll be talking and laughing with friends who show up to practice. And she will be there, tucked behind the harmonium, entertaining the usual “thank you for class” gratitudes until the chit chat fades and she walks out past us on the street corner as we’re still gathered. Sometimes I notice this slight sadness behind her sweet smile and wave goodbye and I feel the sting of a nameless gap that I fear is attributable, at some level, to a sort of hierarchical notion of “roles.”

We learn to stay in our places.

I’m going to say something that’s charged. So here it is: I think that sometimes “boundaries” are simply failures of humility disguised as “evolved relating.” Do not misunderstand; there are “good” boundaries (if we want to get into the qualifiers), like refusing to enable an addict or a Narcissist, or saying no to colluding with a co-dependent family member. And then there are the I’d-rather-you-not-see-me, pride-as-unevolved-vulnerability “boundaries.” I have experienced the latter on many an occasion over the years; they’re rife in the therapy community (remember, we descended from the ranks of Freud and the “blank slate” mentality), the yoga community (hello, guru culture), and even some creative communities I’ve been involved in that prized accolades over authenticity. And dare I say, even in my two most recent trainings focusing on the feminine (which is to say a less hierarchical, less top-down way of relating), it has still been wonky at times.

One of my current teachers tells the story of being traumatized by a trauma lecture. To her way of thinking, there is an egregious arrogance to this expert-on-high who swoops down into the gnarly abyss to “save” these God-forsaken victims. “I know what I’m doing,” it presumes. “And you don’t.” From the perspective of the feminine, it’s a deeply flawed system. Because true fellowship happens when we dare to get in the trenches with each other and admit that sometimes we don’t actually know. Instead, our addiction to competency has it be that we dwell in the higher ranks rather than on the ground.

So I learned something about the feminine that week in Italy. I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing on some level. But here is what I do know: I learned what I did not by the brute force of my will, but because I was too tired to be “on” in that laborious, performative way that we learn we have to be. I simply didn’t have the energy to curate my Face Display so as to look only like my “highest” self.

Nor did I have the energy to keeping pulling the proverbial covers up over my head (which takes just as much effort, mind you).

Sometimes my best yoga practices happen when I’m tired, for this simple reason: I don’t have the luxury of willfulness (which takes a shit ton of energy) to muscle into the postures. And in that fatigue, surrender comes with a different kind of ease. The body gets to take over in its less-than-charming involuntary state, and another intelligence reigns.

It’s a marvelous thing, really.

A month before the retreat I stood up in a room full of 150 of my peers at a coaching intensive to, presumably, ask a question of my teacher. The mere idea terrified me. My usual MO is to play it cool in the backseat…at least for a while. But, by withholding, I was creating a force field that was becoming unbearable. And so I made a promise to someone that I would do this. It wasn’t so much about the particulars of the inquiry as it was about the gesture. And it wasn’t so much about a promise to her as it was about a promise to myself.

“Don’t worry if you don’t have anything to ask,” this woman told me. “Nicole will know what the question is when you stand up.”

So there I was, messy, without a coherent query, teary and shaking. I’m not sure I even know, fully, what happened. I remember her saying this: “The first thing I want you to do is to take your space.”

And then the floodgates opened. After that, she asked me what I wanted. And in a torrent of emotion, I unleashed a passionate litany of longings from teaching to leading to writing to sex to love. And somehow Italy came up. She focused in on it with laser precision. It felt important.

She asked me to embody the upcoming trip.

“What does it look like? Feel like? Smell like? Taste like?"

The answers flowed out, unfettered by the usual shackles of self-consciousness.

“You have a ton of desire,” she said, smiling.

Yes. It’s true. It’s always been true.

“Allow yourself to have it.”

Lately the theme for me has been how I’ve kept myself from what I’ve wanted most. But in order to not do that, I was going to have to admit my hunger. And “need” wasn’t my style.

Which is to say: I was above it.

Only I wasn’t.

I went off to Italy tired, hungry, and full of longing. These are not the ingredients that we would typically vote for in a leader. And yet they were the raw materials I was working with.

Luckily, I’m an something of an alchemist. Which means I know a thing or two about that transmuting lead into gold stuff. Or, I’m learning anyway. And the crucible of our container, which I was able to live inside of by some force of magic, was hot enough to burn off a good bit of the residue that week.

There was a moment, on the final night of the retreat, where I was facilitating a game called Hot Seats. It’s a game about seeing and being seen. Participants get to take turns sitting on the Hot Seat, and players get to ask them questions, on any topic, at any level of intensity they choose. It's what we called an "infinite game," in that it has no knowable beginning or ending; rather, it is played simply for the sake of continuing play. Kind of like life.

After everyone had gone, one of the women, Carol, asked me to go up.

Without paying any heed to the fact that I was leading, or that that wasn’t my “role,” or that this was the first time that anyone on that veranda had played before, I got out of my chair. And like a good pinch-hitter, Tanya, my co-leader, took over.

Cheryl Strayed’s words echoed in my consciousness as I took my seat: “The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.”

I loved these people. That deeper love was the reward I received for getting out of my own way. For getting humble. And this was an opportunity to stand closer inside the circle together. For us to feel each other. For them to see a little bit more of what made me.

Carol asked the first question: “What did you learn, as a leader, being with us this week?”

I told her some version of this story.

I told her it didn't have an ending.

You see, that's the thing about infinite games; they continue to make us. For as long as we let them.

Are You In It For The Cure?

We are at a critical juncture. I don’t mean for that to sound scary; it actually has the potential to be very exciting. But, as one of my dearest mentors has been saying, this is going to be a month of Choice Points. How it all goes down is really up to you.
 
This past week the following Anthony DeMello quote made its way into my field of awareness: "Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don't believe them. Don't believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. ‘Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.’ This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That's all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful."
 
I’m in the business of curing, although sometimes I get folks who are more interested in relief. Let me be clear about something: we’re getting to an evolutionary point where there is essentially no such thing as “relief” anymore. As a planet we simply cannot afford it. The Universe has upped the ante and is asking us to do the same. If we’re not in it for the “cure,” we’re going to have a rough ride from here on out.
 
Here’s the deal, as raw and real as I can put it: If you’ve been in troubleshooting mode, guarding against what’s swimming underneath those pesky symptoms, the jig is up. It’s time to do the hardest work of your life.
 
But don’t take my word for it. Consider your world right now. More than likely, you are being confronted with some kind of major trial or transition. It might or might not be an outer crucible; either way, there is a deep internal recalibration going on in the collective. This inner shift will eventually have some kind of impact within the outer world. For example, a realignment of values might lead to a change of job, relationship, or purpose.
 
Everyone’s “test” will look a little different. Perhaps you are making a career change. Or leaving a relationship. Or getting ready to start a family. Or perhaps you’re in the midst of a deeply disorienting spiritual awakening and you have no idea, yet, what the implications of that will be in your life. Or maybe you’ve hit a wall with a partner or family member and are being asked to reconfigure the relationship along completely different lines. No matter. The crucial thing is that you’re fully in whatever it is, facing it head on, and inviting everything – the good, the bad, and the ugly – to the table.
 
Easier said than done, that bringing-it-all-to-the-table stuff. When we’re up against our most seemingly intractable issues, resistance will come to the fore, sometimes with a vengeance. It’s human nature to run like hell when we meet our edge. We will find every excuse in the book to not do the work. We don’t have time. We need to save money. We don’t think anyone or anything can help. And the list goes on.
 
If there’s one thing that is of vital importance right now, it’s this: don’t let yourself off the hook (you definitely want to beat the Universe to this!). Be ruthlessly honest about where you’re running. Pause. Take a breath. Allow the resistance to be there. And then find a way to kindly dig in in spite of it.
 
Conscious work is not “easy breezy.” While sometimes it can feel that way for a while, especially when the process is still new and exciting, there comes a point where our core wounds and deepest issues demand attention. This is usually the point where the work “loses its luster” and we fail to be as enamored as we once were. But this is actually a sign that we’re touching down in the deep. If you’re someone who has bolted at this juncture, I invite (and compassionately challenge) you to get back on track.
 
The major Choice Point lies in essentially this question: Will you continue to seek “relief” (if that’s what’s been motivating you to this point) or will you step up to the work of curing?