Alchemy

As part of my transpersonal coaching, I worked with archetypes using Caroline Myss’s Sacred Contracts framework. According to Jung, archetypes are essential symbolic imagery that forms the basis of human experience. They can be accessed through introspective techniques, engaging with the collective unconscious to reveal their essence. Sacred Contracts uses principles of Jung’s psychology to create an intuitive space where we choose twelve archetypes that “call to the soul”, which align with our astral energies and energetic body and show us core elements of our personality that need to be unravelled to manifest our true nature. My most vital archetypal connection through the experience was the Alchemist, which became the impulse that took me to the MSc and to explore Jungian principles in more detail.

When you enter this site, the first thing you see is Jung’s definition of the alchemy of individuation, a continuous process of psychological transformation that happens through balancing the tension between opposite but complementary energies that form our psyche.    Individuation is a symbolic dance of masculine and feminine, mother and father, gods and goddesses, yin and yang. I find the concept inspiring and meaningful, beyond the gender connotation and our cultural obsession to choose between one or the other. The alchemy of individuation does not happen in the body or the mind but in a more abstract level of consciousness that engages the imagination to create meaning from experience. A rich inner life contributes to physical and emotional well-being. Still, those who have one typically forget about it to attend to the practical demands of life or are constantly criticised for paying attention to such “delusions”. But if we look at the evolution of human consciousness through the ages, the world itself seems to be going through a process of individuation.

Our understanding of existence emerged from the archetypes of Mother and Birth, the great uterus that brought the world into being, evolving into the archetype of the Earth Goddess, a liminal creative centre with many faces that created as much as destroyed and bestowed her power to archetypal warriors and kings. Then came the Sun God archetype, a humanised manifestation of the liminal creative centre who organised and decided the fate of the created. The Sun God eventually took over, and with the rise of monotheistic belief systems, the liminal goddess was demonised or forgotten altogether. Repressing that creative centre has pushed it to the shadows, where it has grown angry, scary and destructive, impairing our natural disposition to relate to and evolve with the world3. It seems that the time has come to confront the shadows and reconnect with our liminality, to nurture a sensation of peaceful completeness amid the chaos of change and to reengage ore natural drive to belong and positively participate as a fully integrated part of the greater whole.

References

1. Myss, C. (2010) Sacred Contracts. Awakening your Divine Potential. Transworld Digital.

2. Jung, C. G. (1953). Collected works. Vol. 12. Psychology and alchemy. Pantheon Books.

3. Woodman, M., & Dickson, E., (1996). The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. Shambala.