Alchemizing Pain Into Passion

What if every “bad” thing that happened “to you” was an opportunity to spin straw into gold?

What if your greatest challenges were actually catalysts to your greatest growth?

Falling chronically ill at the age of 21 paved the way for the work I do today. Initially I was angry, resentful, and drowning in self-pity and victimhood. I couldn’t understand why this was “happening to me.”

Illness diminished my vitality and libido, and I embarked on the path of sexual healing through the lenses of Tantra and Taoism.

This journey led me to the whole of Tantra and Taoism, beyond the realms of sexuality, and I discovered through the lens of non-duality that chronic illness was not here to ruin my life, but rather to immerse me more fully in it.

It was the awakening to the greatest passion and purpose I had ever known; it was an initiation into the work I am here to do.

This path taught me how to alchemize the hardship life offers me into rich, fertile ground for new growth and expansion.

I came to the realization that I could either continue gaining low grade energy from victimhood and sympathy, or I could choose to alchemize it into healing and empowerment, but I couldn’t have both.

I needed to stop giving energy to the “poor me” story (and to be clear, this is different than repressing emotion or denying the experience!) and carve a new path where I could be at choice as to how I wanted to respond to this challenge, rather than be entirely at the effect of it.

I needed to stop giving energy to what I *didn’t* want, and instead focus my energy towards the life I wanted to create, working with the parameters of illness as a teacher, and its limitations to inspire creative pathways forward.

This process didn’t make my illness go away, but it transformed the way I run my energy, awakened me to the opportunity that is laced within each obstacle, and taught me how to alchemize lead into gold.

It’s within the darkness of the chrysalis that metamorphosis occurs.

The art of transmutation is what allowed me to blossom.