In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we continue the alchemical thread from the previous transmission and turn to a single idea: that nearly every illness carries within it a seed of alchemical gold, if we can learn to relate to it in the âright wayâ.
Prima materia means the âfirst matterâ, the raw and often despised starting point of any alchemical work.
The old alchemists wrote of it as something cheap, freely available, held in contempt, easily discarded, and gone unnoticed. And that, it turns out, is exactly how most of us relate to our own dis-ease: the aches & pains, the shutdowns, the loss of desire and the places where we stop wanting to engage with life.
We explore why chemistry and alchemy are not the same.
Chemistry divorces the one doing the work from the material, while alchemy always includes the person. When you heat the matter, you heat yourself. When you dissolve it, you dissolve yourself. Because of that sympathetic link, working with illness becomes a way of working with the whole being, and âthe war on diseaseâ gives way to a relationship with it.
I also move through the classical phases as they show up in the lived experience of illness.
The nigredo, âthe blackeningââŚis when a diagnosis lands like the Tower card and everything you knew is turned to ash.
The albedo, the long washing, which becomes the actual regimen of practice, diet, movement, and inner work applied over and over on a consistent basis.
And the rubedo, the reddening, where the work coagulates into a new form, a gold that may be health, or may be an entirely different way of inhabiting your body and your life.
Along the way I share my own story directly, the heart trouble that arrived in my late twenties out of a stressful stretch living at a wolf sanctuary in New Mexico, and how relating to the heart not as a mechanical pump but as the emperor of the organs, the orchestrator of the body, became one of the great catalysts of my life.
I also offer a way of working across the three levels of xing, qi, and shen: body, energy, and spirit, so that whatever you are facing can be met at every layer of the self.
There is no guarantee that every illness becomes gold, and to be really, really clearâŚit is not a claim that sickness is your fault. It is an invitation to set fault aside and take up response-ability, the ability to respond, and to let disease become a starting point rather than a sentence.
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