Maps for the Great Journey: Alchemy Step Two

The promise of alchemy is that of turning base metal, and the basest aspects of self and society, into gold. While the forms are many—spiritual alchemy, psychological alchemy, artistic alchemy, social alchemy, practical alchemy, relational alchemy, and therapeutic alchemy—the process and the finish line are always the same. We are in it for the transformation. 

We began with fire, the kind that ravages and razes our lives. As the pandemic of COVID-19 runs wild through virtually every aspect of our personal and collective experiences, the whole world has a front-row seat. 

With viral fires burning from city to city, and as the death toll rises, the economy falters, and the exhaustion from it all sets in, we are naturally having moments of feeling out of our depths. Yet in alchemy, all is never lost. Each stage has its own purpose and promise. The inner gold at the end of this journey is real if we can just stick with it. 

But for now, we must enter the waters of dissolution, or rather, let them rise like a flood within us. 

Step Two: Dissolution

After the fire, the flood. As if adding insult to injury, the second stage of alchemy serves to further break us down. It works on both conscious alchemists, those who are willingly surrendering to the process, and unaware participants, those who fall victim to an inner journey they cannot or will not consciously participate in. 

In chemical alchemy, this water is literal. The base metal of lead has been reduced to ashes and is now dissolved by good old H2O. This most basic element of life is known to wear away just about anything, given enough time. However difficult, we want it to. 

For the great journey of inner alchemy, water is added to bring alive and surface the previously hidden, often suppressed, extremely murky aspects of our unconscious minds and selves. In what is often called the dark night of the soul, our proud, solidified ego—that “self” that is presented to the world as clean and crisp, contained and in charge—is no match for these waters. Even the toughest will break, at least behind closed doors.

And that is the point. Lead is not gold, no matter what kind of pretty bow you put on it. Fire has taken down the walls, the structures, and the scaffolding that was previously holding up our egoic selves. Now, water wears away all the bracing, all the pretense, all the posturing so that we have no choice but to get real with ourselves. 

Getting real is the first good thing.

As you might imagine, ash and water make for a sooty mess. In the alchemical texts, the picture you see is of the egoic king struggling not to drown in six inches of water. Or the king sweating himself out in a royal sauna, the steam rising from the roasting flames of unconsciousness below. 

As we survey the fiery damage in the wake of the COVID-19 virus, we cannot help but fall into grief. We know everything is not okay and that, however much we expect to find a new normal someday, the old normal is forever gone. Hopefully, this brings us to tears—the perfect homeopathy of water healing water. The alchemists of old highly recommended crying as a way to break down the crusty, crystalline blocks within us. Through our water-logged grief, our self-protective measures, once so firmly in place, dissolve. We are at the mercy of all that is unresolved in us, which is especially frightening if it’s the first time we are truly seeing it. For those who fear that the conscious self is but the tip of the iceberg (it is), the bulk of the hidden aspects can feel downright terrifying. 

Culturewide transformation is on the menu.

This is not only happening for us as individuals, or even for our workplaces, clients and other communities. It’s happening to the world. For the very first time, borders don’t matter. Some want them to, wishing to cut others off from us, but the virus has slipped past every artificial construct. State lines do not matter. Country lines do not matter. Contemporary, ever-connected life has seen to that.

As a culture, the masculine egoic “king” is succumbing to the feminine “queen” and all her moods and maladies. (Please note, I hesitate to even include this reference to the masculine and feminine due to the bad rap the archetypes have in culture right now—but in alchemy, it is what it is. The king falls in fire, the queen wallows in water, and both aspects are alive and well within us. We will need them both to rise as equals in later stages—another promise of alchemy. But I am getting ahead of myself.)

One of my favorite memes to come out of this has been this one: “It’s like mother nature sent us all to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.” It’s alchemically true. It is in our nature to transform, however much we have forgotten this truth or had our egos try to shove our way past it. But this thinking, this nature-driven time-out, is exactly what we needed to set things right. Society wasn’t working for anyone. The poor were suffering, the middle class squeezed, and the wealthy deeply unhappy, afraid to lose a game they were already winning (I have seen this time and time again in my work, whatever the illusion that those who have it all actually have it all). We were careening toward an unsustainable cliff, and the virus has brought us to a screeching halt, perhaps just in time. 

When I think of this isolation, I think of Nelson Mandela, who endured 27 years behind bars and served only five as president of South Africa. But oh, the work he accomplished. Even if he had never heard of alchemy, he lived it. Others who would transform the world have seen much the same. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Laureate in 2004, had this to say: "I was grounded in the moral fiber of wanting to do the right thing. I was so sure that this was the right thing because it was so obvious and even those who were persecuting me knew, and I knew they knew… I was doing the right thing. But they didn’t want me to do it because it was inconveniencing them.” Today, the many inconvenient truths of society are showing. Those with eyes to see, those who will speak to the collective emperor having no clothes, will be a part of the transformation to come. But again, I get ahead of myself. We are still in dissolution. 

The alchemical intentions are good.

The point is that, as hard as dissolution is, it is also good. The relationship that was a gilded cage, the job that served as golden handcuffs, the systems of profits over people that we thought we just had to live with, the inability to find happiness regardless of how much you have in the bank… all of that is now called into question. We ponder, sitting in our rooms with oh so much time to think. And slowly, we come to realize, that even if the process is forced upon us, it feels good to be released from all that does not ring true to ourselves and souls and societies. The dross, the actual alchemical term for our impurities, is being released at last. It’s not pretty, but it’s kind of beautiful, too. At a minimum, the alchemical intentions are toward our own evolution. We can trust them in the long run, whatever the moment feels like.

If we have already accomplished much of this inner work, perhaps through years of therapy, an exploration of our spirituality, or previous rounds of crisis and loss, this current dissolution is no surprise. We recognize the pain as familiar. We remember the loss but also the Phoenix that has always risen in reward. If most of the murky bottom has been dredged up already, we might even find the forced respite of business as usual a godsend for ourselves, our families, and our creative processes. Something within us remembers to breathe.

And once our own work is done, then the work of the world becomes ours. Many will be lost in their own stews. We who are not will take up new leadership opportunities, even if we don’t have any official roles to perform. 

Self-isolation is the perfect alchemical laboratory.

In alchemical terms, isolating the self is actually profoundly perfect. Through isolation, many of our coping mechanisms—from mere distractions to full-blown addictions—may not be available. Likewise, if we actually acquire COVID-19, our defenses to the process are down. This is true with any illness that takes us out of the game. We have no personal power and thus no choice but to surrender. But we also find bizarre dreams (think Chris Cuomo's COVID-19 induced dream of his brother, Governor Andrew Cuomo, in a pink dancing outfit trying to wave his magic wand to make it all go away), sudden metaphorical or literal insights, and the profound inner relief that comes from a previously inaccessible authenticity. 

The watery effects are showing up in many ordinary ways, too. Most of my clients are admitting to working at half-speed, or less, even with no one in the house being ill. A sense of groggy, foggy, misty emotional malaise is setting in. Focus is near impossible despite more things to learn, to accomplish, to tick off the growing to-do list as our work life is drastically altered. At the same time, however, these same people are reporting that good relationships are getting better, families are growing closer and stronger, and reserves of resilience are being found to have substance. 

While I wish this process on no one, when it comes, at least we can know it is useful and that it has meaning and purpose. We have time to think, to get all up and into ourselves and finally find ourselves, hokey as that sounds in other, easier times. At last, we have learned to surrender our precious control. At last, we feel the relief of letting go of what we cannot control. At last, we find truths we have long looked for. 

A powerful surrender to dissolution sets us up for Step 3, Separation, which is better than it sounds. It’s the first step in which we can actually do something constructive. In the meantime, if you wish to see alchemy in action, watch virtually any episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix. These stories of the great chefs of our times all share the hard journey of fire and water, calcination and dissolution. They are a microcosm of the entire journey. The end result—genius cooking—is exactly the gold we seek. 

For those of us who lead...

As with the first stage of fire, water comes in waves across the world. It lands at different times for different people. And if there are waves of fire, there will surely be waves of water. Some people are on mandatory lockdown, others are still going to church. When the death toll rises, as it will, there will be new and additional fires of panic, economic terror, and unstable relationships getting worse.

There will be people acting badly, causing even more harm than the virus at times. There will be screams of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” that seem to go nowhere. There will be desperation as the cracks in the lives of our marginalized people widen. The already depressed will be more so. The already poor will be more so. 

We are not ready for this as a society—the awareness of life’s underbelly previously shoved down by our favorite latte—and so our leaders will be called upon in powerful ways. 

But here is the kicker: We are all leaders now. Everyone who stays home. Everyone who shops later in the month to give those with food stamps a chance to stock up. Everyone who claps at 7 pm or hangs a rainbow in a window. Everyone who cobbles together a mask to send to the front lines—these are leaders, through and through. Moms and dads lead their families, teachers lead their students, kids lead their friends. Even babies make us laugh, and that is no small offering. 

Yet for those who lead as part of their jobs, there are more and less conscious ways through our personal and collective responsibilities. Because we are going through our own dissolution while leading others in theirs, things get very tricky. 

Let's be clear from the start: Command and control does not work in dissolution. Creativity is hard to come by, at least with any consistency. Culture is threatened, and no one can know where it is going from the current vantage point and set of realities. Teams both come together and fall apart. Everyone is doing their best, but with new ways of operating along with an unclear end goal, it is impossible to measure what should be expected. Pay cuts, firings, freezes, and all the many hundreds of daily decisions, will lead either into or out of a greater quagmire. For now, we simply don’t know. That not knowing is the nature of dissolution. Like the drowning, you can fight or you can surrender and float your way through. 

Helping others float instead of fight makes the leader’s work all the more demanding. The right note sings, the wrong note sours. While every situation is unique, I offer a few common threads that have arisen from conversations with leaders I am speaking to. 

Create structure but don’t expect order. 

You can put structures in place to create a new normal, even a temporary one, but order is a feeling that may or may not follow the structure. Order is currently disordered on every level. So create the structure, but accept that you are not in control of the feelings of order that do or do not follow. This is both for yourself and those you lead. In dissolution, you must allow the experience of order to find its way over time—and know it may take a long time. You can be responsible for creating a structure and you can influence the tone that creates a feeling of order, but the actual sense of order is out of your control. So for your own sanity and that of others, let go of that urge toward over-responsibility. 

If you need it, they need it. 

If you are getting too much screen time, so are those you lead. If you need to turn off the video cam and walk around the room while on a conference call, so does everyone. Others may not be in a position to make that call, so if you are, make it. If you need to take an afternoon off to decompress, offer it to those you lead as well. You will be seen as in tune and compassionate, not losing control of the ship. You may think you can’t take such “radical” actions, or that this is not the way it’s done, and fear you will only further upset the apple cart. But this is what makes the true leader rise—using power and position to do what is needed. You’ll know what that is if you simply tune in to what you need and make it okay to get those needs met. 

These are not the weeks to consider in your yearly evaluations.

It goes without saying, I hope, but no one will be in their best form as dissolution takes place. Some will rise to the occasion, especially if they have done their inner work prior to now. Others will seem as if drowning in shallow water. Let those you lead know you’ll be looking for the best of them to show up as much as possible, but that it is a given no one will be doing that perfectly. This has a very Taoist effect in that when you relax fear, more good work actually gets done. As a leader, you set this tone. 

Dissolve on your own time and get support for that process.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of leadership is leading when you, yourself, are falling apart. Or in this case, dissolving your own stuff as it arises from your own inner pandora’s box. But that is your job. You get the job done and work out your own stuff on your own time. It’s hard, but that is why you are a leader. That said, you do also have to do your own work. You can’t lead well otherwise. If you have help, turn to those who support you and don't be afraid to do so a little more than is usually needed. If you don’t, there are a thousand coaches, mentors, and other support people out there. Find someone now and allow yourself to lean on them. They were made for these times, and they trained to be here for you in times of great challenge and even crisis. 

To all of us:

I will remind us all, even as the murky waters of dissolution rise, that this is important work. It’s crazy, it takes our collective breath away, and it seems at times that all is lost. It is not. Let me repeat this: It is not. This is alchemy at its toughest and finest, and transformational gold is where we are headed. Stay tuned for our next edition—Maps of The Great Journey: Alchemy, Step Three. Because when dissolution gives way to separation (it sounds bad but is actually good), we will finally have something we can accomplish. That, in and of itself, is a relief. 

I'm Robin Rice, a senior advisor in conscious leadership for individuals and organizations. I lead, mentor and teach at the intersection of work, personal relationships, and social impact. I invite you to connect with me here on LinkedIn or through my website at RobinRice.com.

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