Tag Archives: inner alchemy

What do you do when there are parts of your inner-self that seem to be somehow divided or separated and are yearning for re-integration with the whole of you?

Our lives are journeys of a divine soul in a human body, come to Earth for the purpose of learning and growing as a human being. This is a complex journey and there is so much involved.

We come into the world with our own particular karma, which from a Buddhist understanding includes the karma of past generations. Karma is created through thoughts, words and actions and is part of the life cycle of conception, birth, becoming and death.

The journey of life is a journey into your self, and in the process, sometimes parts of you can get lost or buried.

Particularly in childhood, if we go through experiences where the emotions involved are overwhelming, then what can happen is that we bury those feelings inside of us somewhere, only to have them arise again at some moment in the future.

The process of inner alchemy is a process of slowly retrieving all of the lost parts of yourself so that you can integrate them into the person you are today.

Alchemist: An imperfect being who instinctively uses her pain to create something exquisite.

How to you Alchemise the Lost and Abandoned parts of yourself ?

It is a process that involves re-connecting with all of these hidden parts of yourself that are dormant within you. And, like the answer to most how-to questions: the method is to journey within.

1. Connect Within.

Through meditation, you can go slowly make friends with all of the hidden and repressed parts of yourself that are cowering in there somewhere. The presence of your loving attention helps these parts to show themselves to you.

In my case, I was bullied at school, both in primary school and in high school. That young girl who experienced such pain at being subject to unkind behaviour of other children developed some deep emotional scars. And what my soul experienced was that it was unsafe to trust people, because their love could so easily turn on you.

2. Make Contact with your Inner Child

The process here is to go into meditation and make contact with the young girl that I was then. This is a mystical process of going inside until you reach that inner child. You then make friends with her by speaking with her beautifully and compassionately, until she trusts you and is able to open up and share how she feels. From this point, you need to listen.

3. Ask that child or the younger version of yourself what she needs in order to feel safe right now?

It might be enough that you are just there, in meditation, with her, or she may have a message for you relating to something in your current life, such as – I am not comfortable that you are doing X or Y. Then you can have a conversation and work out what would make her feel better.

4. Give thanks

Give thanks to this inner child for sharing the time with you, and let them know that you are with them, they are a part of you now, and that you are looking after them.

5. Integration.

Go back into meditation an recognize how this past experience in your childhood or later has helped you become the person that you are today. All hardships suffered, whether at the hands of others or self-imposed, are parts of your journey and through them you have learned and grown and become more a compassionate and more tolerant version of yourself.

This process reverses the pattern of self-abandonment that we may have developed in early childhood, to deal with emotions or experiences that were just too difficult for us to handle. If we didn’t have an adult who could guide us lovingly through whatever we were experiencing, then we learned to turn away from the feeling, which is in essence, turning away from ourselves.

6. Alchemizing Pain and Separation into Love and Acceptance

When we go back in time to re-connect with the child within, we can actually experience the feelings that she or he was too afraid to feel at the time, and in doing this we accept and take in those feelings, and integrate them into ourselves. And in this way we have reversed the self-abandonment program, alchemising pain and separation into love, acceptance and wholeness.